People in educational policy and practice often obsess over the accuracy of pop culture depictions of school life. But they aren’t, even if they try. For example, how plausible is it that “Prez,” the hot-headed and impulsive junior cop on the gritty HBO drama series The Wire, accidentally kills a fellow cop during a botched undercover operation and still gets hired and found retribution as a compassionate cop ? and dedicated teacher at a Baltimore public school?
Worse still, when the pet reformers and policies of the education reformers are impaled by the entertainment industrial complex, we react as if the abolition carried the weight of an executive order. When John Oliver made an anti-charter school revelation on the HBO series Last Week Tonight, it was as if he weren’t a comedian but the reincarnation of Edward R. Murrow himself, who portrayed Joe McCarthy in See It Now “ known to have denounced. When I asked a prominent education reformer why she saw a comedy show as an existential threat to her work, she replied sternly, “This is where people get their news from!” Well, people are fools.
This brings us to the latest pop culture artifact to inspire Sturm und Drang on the political implications of its setting, characters, story arc and political outlook. Abbott Elementary is a television sitcom directed by Quinta Brunson, who also stars as teacher Janine Teagues. The show, which premiered on ABC in December 2021, centers on the everyday lives of teachers and staff at a fictional Philadelphia public school. The film was widely acclaimed for its witty portrayal of life in an urban school, drawing millions of viewers and winning three Emmy Awards.
The show is set at Abbott Elementary School, which is located in a working-class neighborhood of Philadelphia and is characterized by the usual litany of traits associated in the public imagination with struggling inner-city schools: lack of funding, outdated equipment, and an overworked and underpaid staff . Despite these obstacles, the teachers and staff (of course) strive to improve the lives of their students.
Brunson herself is well aware of the limitations of her creations and seems almost ashamed of the attention she is receiving among educators. “I know it sounds bad, but a lot of people are like, ‘Wow, you did that to show how underrated teachers are, to change the world,'” she said at a television industry panel last year. “Not really. I really just wanted to do a good workplace comedy.”
So did Abbott Elementary get the details right?
No of course not! am I mumbling? It is not an inner-city school ethnography; It’s a network sitcom, damn it! Are you serious?! When the script calls for teachers to talk to each other, which they do all the time, they don’t think twice about leaving their classrooms unsupervised. Although they complain that they don’t have time to prepare classes, they spend a great deal of time hanging out in the faculty lounge and chatting in the hallway. The main characters teach different grade levels, from kindergarten to high school, but somehow they all seem to have the same lunch break. On staff development days, the room is full of extras, indicating the school has a large faculty. But when a charter school pulls away some third graders, Abbott’s second grader is forced to teach both grades in a single classroom. Children at Abbott Elementary School are little more than dressed and rarely speak (yes, right). In my 5th grade classroom in the Bronx, I had students ages 12 and 13, but some of Abbott’s seniors look old enough to drive.
Brunson (center) with Abbott co-stars Tyler James Williams, Janelle James, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Lisa Ann Walter and Chris Perfetti aims for an entertaining workplace comedy.
The show’s notion of a “disruptive student” is a child shouting off-topic references to a TV show in class while his classmates listen with rapt attention to the teacher’s science lesson (on TV, teachers are still the “wise guys.” .”) stage”, not the “leader by the way”). It’s the sort of mild misconduct that requires, at best, “planned ignoring” and probably wouldn’t even deserve a teacher’s attention in a real classroom, let alone serve as the subject of action. The child is sent to the headmistress’s office, a vain, selfish, and ineffective figure who commands little respect from her staff. When she sends the child back to class with a toy, the rest of the class erupts. Is this his punishment? Now they too want to be sent to the principal’s office.
OK, so this part is realistic. Done.
A major storyline in Abbott Elementary season 2 revolves around a charter school opening nearby. This, of course, kickstarted the commentary and made for an inevitable round of light entertainment for important political messages. The New Yorker devoted several pages in a March issue to a discussion of how Brunson’s “superb sitcom became a blatant polemic against the privatization of a public good.”
We must? Really? Well, if we take our political clues from a network sitcom and fact-check the script, let the record show that charter schools are public schools, not private schools; They don’t handpick high-performing kids, and they can’t throw them out because they’re struggling in school. The Abbott crew mistakenly receive a box of textbooks destined for Addington, the shiny new nearby charter school run by Legendary Charter Schools. As they deliver the books to spy on the burgeoning school, they encounter a former Abbott teacher who was fired for kicking a student. “I don’t do that anymore. Anger management,” the charter school teacher chirps happily, then adds in a conspiratorial stage whisper, “At a charter school, there’s a lot less control in the hiring process. So it was pretty sweet.”
Abbott Elementary occasionally drops the hint that even traditional public education is less than a purely civic good. When Brunson’s serious and lovable main character, Janine, wants to paint her classroom to match Addington’s look and feel, the principal stops her because it would be against the rules of the “Philadelphia Department of Education, Animal Shelters, etc.” Traffic.” A veteran teacher asks a young colleague to write down a timetable he created to ensure the school’s new curriculum is taught. “Year after year, as a teacher, you’re asking for the impossible,” she tells him, “and ours only solution is to show up every day and do our best.” It’s meant to be advice for moms, but it might as well lead to low expectations. On Reddit, real-life teachers have voiced their disapproval of the sins the show Against the Science of Reading: The Three Clues teaching method exposed on Emily Hanford’s “Sold a Story” podcast lives on at Abbott Elementary.
The most unrealistic touch of all is Abbott himself. If the neighborhood public schools were filled with the fun, personable, and engaging teachers from Abbott Elementary, there would be no charter schools. Addington is full of new books, French classes, a new computer lab and more – unlike Abbott, which is (you know how that sentence will end) “underfunded” and not mismanaged. However, if supporters of the charter seek retribution for the sins committed against their sector by Abbott Elementary, they can start and end with the Philadelphia public school system, where in 2021 only a third of students in grades 3 through 8 met reading standards. 22 school year. And that was robust compared to math, where only 17 percent were able. According to data released by the district in May, three out of four Philly schools achieved between zero and 33 percent of their academic goals for the school year, which is no laughing matter.
Abbott Elementary plays with the conventional notions of people outside of the Edusphere and draws on many of the standard classroom myths and sermons for a laugh. The city forecasts prison population based on reading performance. Barbara, a wise veteran, tells her young and earnest peers, “Your students can either fear you or respect you.” Sending a child into the principal’s office makes a young white teacher, an awkward and clueless newcomer, feel the wise one Viewers will recognize as a Teach For America color type, such as “the Mayor of White Guiltsylvania”.
But don’t blame Brunson and co. for the lack of sophistication. They are actors, writers and comedians, not educated politicians. They have created a light but thoroughly amusing workplace comedy whose main flaws lie not in the depiction of an urban elementary school, but in the irritating quirks that television viewers have come to associate with other workplace comedies, such as The Office, on which it is based : the ‘ Mockumentary style with quick pans and zooms and characters breaking the fourth wall and throwing knowing looks at the camera to land weak jokes that even the writers seem to know deserve more smirks than belly laughs.
As a child, I watched an incredible amount of television. “Columbo” and “The Streets of San Francisco” made detective work seem fascinating. And every Saturday night, emergency! made working as a paramedic seem like one exciting adventure after another. “Welcome back, Kotter” didn’t make me want to be a teacher, though. The “sweathogs” in the special needs classroom of this sitcom reminded me a little too much of the tough kids who used to taunt and bully me in the metal shop. The point is, many of us get our ideas about different jobs from TV shows—and most of those impressions are far from realistic.
But television is for entertainment, not education. And do you know, as always, that when we in education argue about whether a television show is truthful or not, accurate or mythologizing, it’s a telltale sign of motivated thinking: “Abbott Elementary reminds me so much of the teachers I teach know!” (Read: Pay us more). “It’s not like that at all!” (Read: Opening More Charter Schools). It’s just a TV show. If every county-operated school in Philadelphia was like Abbott Elementary, you wouldn’t put your child on a charter. Or teach in one.
Robert Pondiscio is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of How the Other Half Learns (Avery, 2019).
