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Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Oprah Speaks
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
She turned a nation onto reading. She encouraged women to get out of bad relationships and walk off the weight. She is teaching families how to climb out of consumer debt. Can she save public education? Well, of course not, but the first of her mostly effective two-part series was heavy on hyperbole, so why shouldn’t I be too?
What follows is a synopsis of Tuesday’s slickly produced, well-paced show. Part two airs Wednesday at 4 p.m. on WSB/Channel 2.
The show opens with an interview with Bill and Melinda Gates, strategically placed in a school library. They get the theme rolling. Crisis. Crisis. Crisis. “You ask the students what they are learning, and they are literally learning nothing,” Melinda says. “It’s not just inner city schools. It’s all schools.” Statistics: Half of all minorities drop out. A third of all students drop out. More than 40 percent of kids who make it to college have to do remedial work. Crisis. Crisis. Crisis. Oprah wonders: Why aren’t people in the streets, fighting for the kids? Says Melinda: The kids are falling through the cracks and nobody knows it.
(Oprah has a wide-eyed bewildered look throughout the show, like she in absolute awe of what her producers have uncovered, even though everything in her program has been widely reported…)
She tells the audience the U.S. used to be ranked first in academics and now ranks 24th in math. A math teacher sitting nearby says: “It’s getting lower and lower every year.” Crisis. Crisis. Crisis.
The next segment is compelling. Some kids from a Chicago public school visit a suburban school and see what they are missing out on. An olympic-size pool. A lavish gym. “Do you guys not have a cardio room?” a suburban student asks her urban peer. Uh, no. Their school looks as though it should be condemned by the health department. In a class called “instrumental music,” kids have no instruments, so they tap out the beat on their desks. A Chicago student sits in on a suburban math class and says it’s like it’s a foreign language. She can’t follow any of it. She observes that she’ll probably be toast when she gets to college. Back at Harpo, a mother of a student at the Chicago school weeps, and who can blame her?
Next, thank God for South Carolina. A graphic shows Georgia is next-to-last in graduation rates, with S.C. coming in last. A journalist (Lisa Ling?) goes to a high school of white students in Anywhere, U.S.A. (I think she said Indiana.) One in three students drops out, even though the community is middle class. The school offers high level courses and has excellent facilities, but kids don’t take advantage, the principal laments. Crisis. Crisis. Crisis. One kid says his classmates drop out because there are lots of factory jobs and a dropout can make $500 a week. But the dropouts featured in the segment are trapped in low-wage jobs. By the time the segment airs one of the dropouts has earned a GED and joined the Marines.
The next segment: Anderson Cooper finds irony in the fact that schools near the White House are run-down.
A woman from a think take notes that children in urban schools are victims of low expectations. Oprah couldn’t agree more. Oprah notes that schools were made for the 1950s, but kids need to be prepared for life in 2006, for a global economy. Crisis. Crisis. Crisis.
Some American students are asked to name the first five American presidents, and they cannot do it. A teenager from China rattles them off no problem. Crisis. Crisis. Crisis. Oprah notes that she LOVES teachers. She knows there are good ones out there. But she says there are enormous problems. She talks about how lucky she was to have gotten a good education. She was born in Mississippi in 1954. “I never had to go to a segregated school,” she said. “I think how different my life would have been if I had been in a segregated school in Mississippi.” (Personal note: I was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1969. The schools were segregated then. I am shocked that Oprah went to an integrated school and got a good education in my home state, where white parents flocked to private schools after Brown.)
P.S. A post reminds me of a segment I neglected to mention. The valedictorian of a rural high school goes to college and is stunned by how far behind she is. She can’t operate lab equipment. She can’t keep up in class. She is getting remedial help, but she is a year behind and her spirit is obviously broken. She cries, saying she feels stupid.
In conclusion, Oprah says she wanted this show to be a wake-up call. Was it?
Are You TiVoing Oprah Today?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In the newsroom, we’re already getting responses to Oprah’s two-day series on public education…and the first installment hasn’t even aired yet!
Are you Tivoing? If not, fear not. I’ll post a full report after I view it. (It airs on Channel 2 at 4 p.m.)
Love her or hate her, Oprah wields tremendous influence. Her report will be heavy on Bill Gates’ ideas for improving high schools - the man has spent millions on this pet cause. Anderson Cooper is also involved, though I’m not sure why. The project is also in conjunction with Time Magazine, which has a cover story on everyone’s fave topic, dropouts.
My Dayton Daily News counterpart Scott Elliot says he’s “always wary when anyone starts arguing that American education is a complete disaster.” I’m inclined to agree. Public education is much too complicated and nuanced to be all good or all bad - and to be covered in two hours of television - isn’t it?
Commenting is open late tonight, so please let me know what you think if you get a chance to catch the episode…
Some questions to get things started: Will Oprah do for education what she did for books? What good points did the program make? What bad ones? Overall on a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate it?
The CRCT: It’s Crunk Time
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A press release that came to the newsroom sent us Googling for the definition of “crunk.” Seems a crunk party lock-in was in order for a school prepping for the CRCT, which many schools will administer next week. The definition of crunk? According to urbandictionary.com, it’s shorthand for the words crazy and drunk. It can also refer to a specific type of hip-hop and has some other connotations, such as slang for “cranked up.”
So we got a little laugh. Obviously, this school is trying to make CRCT prep fun for its students. Who has time to split hairs over urban slang when there are state tests to be passed?
A colleague told me about a school where everyone, including the janitors, is tutoring this week. Signs and banners hang from walls in schools all over. I have a pencil a teacher gave me a while back. It reads: “I promise to do my best, on the CRCT test.”
Teachers, are you ready? Parents, are you worried? Are your kids stressed out? Any other creative approaches to prepping for the Big Test?
