urban poverty and education enlightened by HBO's the Wire

Can 'The Wire' Tell Us How to Reach the Unreachable?

A former inner city teacher reflects on a devil's
bargain.
by Lisa Morehouse

11/12/2007
Watching fourth-season episodes of the acclaimed HBO
television series
The Wire, I immediately recognized the students who
were the show's
focus -- the personality- filled teenagers who can
derail a class with
one outburst, who can make great strides for weeks,
then backtrack in
an instant, whose chaotic lives (the little we know
about them) can
make academic problems seem minuscule.

The Wire centers on West Baltimore's "corner kids."
Defined by the
show in contrast with "stoop kids," who grow up in the
ghetto but are
still under their families' watch, corner kids make up
a small
minority of young people, those abandoned by their
families and
committed to and wrecked by the laws of the street.
They're either
unable to function in schools as they exist in much of
inner city
America, or they're savvy enough to know that the
system doesn't serve
them. The Wireasks, "What do we do with these kids?"

And it answers that question with an experiment: In
the show, the most
disruptive corner kids are separated from the rest of
the student body
into their own classroom.

It's not as if this division is a stretch. The most
troubled kids in
schools are often isolated from others, by official
mandate or not.
Research documents the disturbing number of African
American boys
nationwide who are shuffled into special education
classes despite the
lack of evidence that they have learning disabilities.
And many times,
the most defiant students just get kicked out of class
and school.

Even educators committed to the achievement of
students living in
poverty see the pull of a formal separation between
students. Jeffrey
Robinson, principal of Baltimore Talent Development
High School, says,
"I think most principals and most teachers would agree
that if they
could get rid of one to two kids in every class, they
could increase
achievement by a whole lot."

When Carla Finkelstein taught high school in West
Baltimore, her
teaching team had some scheduling autonomy. Each year,
the team
debated creating what they called a "knucklehead
class" but couldn't
philosophically agree on the purpose. Would it be, she
asks, "to get
at the root of what's really going on with those kids,
or to ditto
them to death," keeping them busy with worksheets
while creating calm
learning environments for their other students?

The Wire experiments with what Finklestein calls a
public health
response to corner kids. In the show, a small number
of students are
pulled from general classes and put together with
multiple adults,
including mental health professionals, who work at the
causes of these
students' disruptive behavior and their disengagement
from school.

Finklestein, who now helps run a public charter school
in Baltimore,
says that by playing out this classroom experiment
over a whole
season, the show asks the questions "What would it
look like if it
were done well? and "What social consequences would it
have?" without
providing pat answers. "I think that was a smart piece
for them to put
in the show, because that's a tremendous tension,"
Finklestein says. A
minority of kids come to school with such intractable
issues, she
adds, that "you can't solve the problem just by giving
the kid a tutor
or giving them access to a computer."

Whether teachers agree with The Wire's experiment or
not, the story
line is crushingly on point: After the adults reach
some level of
understanding of the corner kids' real values and
fears, the program
is terminated because of the pressures of standardized
testing.

Lisa Morehouse taught secondary English for twelve
years in San
Francisco and rural Georgia. She is now a public-radio
journalist and
an education consultant.