URBAN ED REVIEW: ALL THE CHILDREN LEFT BEHIND.

Dek: Wade Wofford’s Urban Ed turns the American education crisis into an intimate portrait of children navigating poverty, race, family, adolescence, and institutional failure in Springfield, Massachusetts.

By: Akinwande Jordan

Kayla Staley, Dalen Davis, Keaton McLachlan and Ace M Small star in Urban Ed. ] Photo credit: [Photographer/Studio name].

Before the Bush Administration enacted the NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND act into US federal law, American cinema has long treated the classroom as a secular theatre of redemption. The beleaguered teacher enters the lives of the troubled pupils who gradually yield, and education becomes the invigorating salvation. Wade Wofford’s Urban Ed begins in that familiar territory, with the more interesting impulse of moving the teacher away from the centre and allowing the children, their families and their institutions to determine the drama.

Set in Springfield, Massachusetts, the film begins at Woodrow Wilson Charter School, a small 6–12 school whose students have, by systemic design, attained the fragile familiarity of a community. Then Wilson closes in the middle of the academic year, and its students are absorbed into a huge neighbouring high school already buckling under its own population and an administrative doublespeak for displacement. 

Aryana is the character who gives the film its pulse. She is a sophomore who has become the practical parent in her household while her mother works two jobs. She looks after her younger siblings, tries to maintain the grades necessary for a job at a local salon, and conducts an adolescent romance under the watchful suspicion of D’Avante's mother. She is already living several lives, and none of them belongs entirely to her. Around her, the film gathers a vivid ensemble: D’Avante negotiating masculine expectation and maternal discipline; Olivia attempting to turn grief into artistic ambition; Beans trying to remain academically engaged while sleeping in a car; Hawa, a Swahili-speaking African refugee, discovering the limits of an educational system whose language of assistance was built around someone else's needs.

The ensemble is where Urban Ed extracts its richest possibility. These characters inhabit overlapping systems of obligation, inheritance and aspiration within a system on the brink of collapse. Their lives contain poverty, violence and institutional neglect alongside friendship, erotic attachment, artistic ambition, humour and intellectual curiosity. The film's four-season structure;four days drawn from a single academic year, could give these pressures an elegant rhythm. The seasons change as intended ; the children accumulate experience advertently or otherwise; the institutions remain largely indifferent to the distinction. Everything remains as it were, unbowed to the whims of our idealism. 

There is an echo here of The Wire's great insight: American institutions and their optical illusions become most legible through the ordinary lives of the people compelled to navigate them. Urban Ed applies that sensibility to the school, where the weight of policy is more daunting and bureaucracy becomes more human. 

      SCENE OF A FIGHT BREAKING OUT COMP-TECH HIGH. 

Its political intelligence resides in this proximity to lived experience. Charter schools, public education, racism and educational bureaucracy are enormous abstractions until they are translated into the life of a particular child. A mother works two jobs. A boy sleeps in a car. A refugee cannot access the language support she requires. A student loses the school around which she has organised her adolescence. 

The project has a more difficult gripe in its own vocabulary or the lexicon of neo-segregation. “Urban,” “inner city” and “ghetto” are words deployed casually. But on paper, they are done so to cordon off black folks and further divide the chasm of class and pedagogy between white and black students. Urban Ed might not overtly state that but it is embedded in the subtext that these schools and places need not be spoken about like a country in exile. 

This is where the film finds its dramatic nexus. The school provides the immediate mise-en-scene, while the education debate supplies the grander political and social context in which these characters transpire. Adolescence remains the film’s principal dramatic concern: the friendships, romances, ambitions, family tensions and uncertainties of young people trying to establish some sense of personal identity while navigating institutions that exert considerable influence over their lives. Urban Ed is most persuasive when it allows those institutional pressures to emerge through the ordinary experiences of its characters. A school closure affects Aryana’s sense of stability; her responsibilities at home complicate her education; D’Avante’s relationship with his mother shapes his understanding of masculinity and belonging; Hawa’s difficulties with the school’s language resources alter her experience of being an immigrant and a student. The larger questions about race, poverty and educational policy consequently acquire their significance through the lives of the people experiencing them. The film has the opportunity to build a substantial social drama from this non-linear intersection, with its young characters retaining the contradictions, desires and idiosyncrasies that make them more than representatives of an argument or fodder for America's failures. 

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