Crenshaw trailer from Lena Jackson on Vimeo.

 

This season we can all be thankful for artists courageous enough to speak the truth about school reform. This October, at Public Education Nation, I was honored to screen together trailers for a number of powerful documentaries about the effects of market-based top-down decision making on public education. None pack a bigger punch than Lena Jackson’s “Crenshaw”, which takes us on a tour of the devastation of school reconstitution. I recently asked Lena to comment on her work. Find out more about her film here.

I grew up in Washington, DC. I studied international relations (focused on Latin America) at Georgetown University, but was always interested in both education and film. I tutored in after-school programs and taught summer school throughout my four years of college. I moved to Los Angeles after several years of living abroad and teaching/making short films. It was in LA that I really felt driven to start making films about the public education system.

I made the film (“Crenshaw”) while I was in graduate school at UC-Santa Cruz. I entered my master’s program (it was in documentary film) thinking I’d do a film about LAUSD, as I had just moved to Santa Cruz from LA. In November 2012, a friend told me that both Dorsey and Crenshaw High Schools (the two remaining traditional high schools in South Los Angeles) were both being reconstituted. I was shocked to find out that this seemed to only be happening in South LA–the most marginalized area of Los Angeles, which has also been the home to LA’s Black population for half a century. Dorsey ended up winning their reconstitution battle, so I ended up focusing on just Crenshaw. My first point of contact was Alex Caputo-Pearl, who is now the head of UTLA–LA’s teacher union. Alex introduced me to teachers–Meredith Smith and Cathy Garcia, as well as several parents, like Nidia Sotelo and Angelita Parker. After several months of attending meetings, visiting people in their homes, and going to the school, I began filming. It took a long time for people to get comfortable with me–an outsider with a camera. You read all the time about school closures and “reforms” for failing schools, but you rarely get a sense of what that feels like for the people in the school.

Getting into the school was the most challenging part as a filmmaker. Very early on, the school’s administration made it clear that they weren’t supportive of my project. Towards the end of the school year, it became almost dangerous for teachers to be associated with me. That was a huge challenge. I wanted to be an advocate for them and instead I became a threat. That weighed on me heavily and forced me to think about what I was doing and who I was doing it for.

As I explained to the LA School Report, the film may appear to be slanted because I give a voice to the teachers, students, and parents instead of to the administrators, district officials, etc. This happened for two reasons. First, I wanted to have the story told by the people who were actually living it and deeply effected by such a harsh decision. Often that voice is left out of the narrative, especially in mainstream media. Second, the school’s principal, Remon Corley, and the District 1 LAUSD School Board member, Margueritte LaMotte (who supported reconstitution) never returned my phone calls or emails. I tried to get in touch both Corley and LaMotte for nearly six months without any response.

I keep in touch with a few students who went to Crenshaw during the 1st year after reconstitution. From their perspective it was a total mess. Substitute teachers, oversized classrooms, scheduling conflicts, uniform and tardy sweeps, chronic administrative dysfunction. Two young women who are now in college, were most frustrated by the lack of college counseling. Upon entering their senior year, they had no teachers to give them college recommendations and no counseling on when to take the SAT or which colleges to apply to. From the people I’ve talked with, nothing changed for the positive.

It’s hard to measure impact (of the film). In October, I screened the film to nearly two-thousand people in LA and San Francisco. One week, we screened the film in four high schools where nearly a thousand students saw it and learned about what happened to Crenshaw. That was a powerful experience. We were able to foster dialogues with students who may have the same sorts of things happen to them and prepare them for the kind of actions they’d need to take. We screened the film at several universities. In fact, the day we screened the film at Stanford’s Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, John Deasy resigned as superintendent. It was an eerie coincidence. Obviously the film or even Crenshaw’s reconstitution and subsequent battle against the district is not the only reason Deasy resigned, but it has certainly become a symbol for people’s overall frustration with him.

I think I’ll always make films about schools. I love teachers, I love working with kids and I’m dedicated to telling their stories. I’m working on a few projects right now, all dealing with either schools or young people.

Screenings of Crenshaw can be easily arranged. I’ll be traveling to the east coast for a few weeks in the Spring of 2015. If people want to show it, I’d love to bring the film to their communities!

Advice to aspiring filmmakers: grant-writing, grant-writing, grant-writing.

Author

Vincent Precht

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