Best Urban Schools On TV

~ Laura

We're watching the Wire, Season 4 on DVD right now. This season the action turns to a middle school in West Baltimore. This is the best depiction of urban schools that I've ever seen on film. None of the Stand and Deliver nonsense. It's the real thing.

Published by Laura

6 thoughts on “Best Urban Schools On TV”

  1. We stopped at Corner Boys for some reason and never proceeded. Not because we didn’t love it, either.
    I’m dying to finish the show. But my husband and I chose movie watching over tv-show-on-DVD watching over break:
    Slumdog Millionaire, Milk, and Man on Wire: A
    Frost/Nixon: B
    Talk To Me: C
    Benjamin Button: Watched the first two hours and would rather be hung upside down by my toenails than watch another minute.

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  2. Just at the end of season two of the Wire. I have been looking forward to the “school” season! At our rate (2-3 a night after the girl is asleep), we’ll be there soon.

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  3. What would be interesting would be a more realistic take on the real Stand and Deliver story, talking about how long the process actually took, and Escalante’s dealings with the school administration the need for a supportive, academically-oriented principal. I was just looking at the Wikipedia entry for Jaime Escalante, and it’s a really sad story. At least according to Wikipedia, even after Escalante quit, there was another teacher named Angelo Villaviencio who briefly successfully continued the program, but it sounds like the administration wanted it to die. That’s one of the issues that the movie obscures, that Escalante was not an army of one.

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  4. Burns, one of the writers from the Wire, taught in Baltimore for at least a few years. This was after 20 years as a cop! (Wow.) So he definitely knows of which he speaks.

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  5. We are also watching Season 4 right now (three episodes in). It is powerful stuff. I was raised by two parents who were teachers — but in an extremely rural environment.
    I keep seeing my mother in the teacher who comes in and helps Prez settle his class down – my mother never laid a hand on me, but I always knew she could take me apart whenever she chose. Needless to say, I toed the line.

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  6. My kids go to a Baltimore city school, so that season broke my heart almost every episode. We joke here that if you can watch the Wire, all five seasons, and still want to live here, then you are really here in Baltimore for good.

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