Young career-switcher Roland “Prez” Pryzbylewski shuffles papers nervously in an empty classroom. It's the first day of school on season four of the HBO television series The Wire.
For the next hour, we'll watch Prez as he stumbles through his first week as a teacher—desperately unprepared to handle the challenges of his chaotic middle school classroom in inner-city Baltimore, where the series is set.
For series writers and cocreators Ed Burns and David Simon, the street stories told on The Wire—nominally a police drama—start with the realities of big city classrooms. Subway and bus shelter ads for the series claim “No Corner Left Behind” and feature four young men lounging on a stoop. The signs broadcast the writers' view of the state of struggling urban public school systems.
“We didn't put a lot of thought into what people want and selling this to the masses. It was just a story we had to tell,” said Simon of the season-long focus on education. Simon and Burns spoke at a September presentation in Washington, D.C., that was sponsored by the Speakers Bureau for Campus Progress of the Center for American Progress.
That story is especially compelling because of the street cred Ed Burns brings to the script.
From the Beat to the Blackboard
After 20 years of working homicide and drug gangs, Burns left the Baltimore City Police Department to take his turn in the city's classrooms. He taught social studies for seven years, first at Hamilton Middle School and then at City College High School.
Although his memories of the time are overwhelmingly negative, Burns did experience some success at Hamilton, breaking classes into smaller learning groups and catering instruction to specific needs. Kids were qualifying for magnet schools and hustling out of the despair of their former situations. It was hard but good. But then the program lost funding and folded, and Burns made a break for City College High. When the principal abandoned that school, Burns left teaching and began writing professionally.
With Simon, a formerBaltimore Sunreporter, he cowroteThe Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, a book that subsequently spun off into a TV miniseries. In The Wire, Burns and Simon weave their tale through the seamy back alleys of neighborhood drug wars and downtown political corruption and eventually—necessarily for Burns—back to where it all begins: back to school.
Rehearsal for the Streets
“Middle school is a testing ground for the street,” Burns told All Things Considered on National Public Radio (NPR) in September, 2006. It's “when choices are made.” From his experience in the classroom, Burns learned that many choices are already made for kids by the time they reach high school. “By high school,” he said, “these guys have already checked out. You can't say they're at risk because they're not even there.” Their grim prospects play out in Baltimore's low 38.5 percent high school graduation rate.
Burns and Simon shoot this season's story through the eyes of four middle school boys. It's a kind of retrospective on the men they've shown in previous seasons who, largely abandoned by society, populate the plot as thugs, junkies, and dealers. Their choices, said Burns, were more about what was available—and what doors hadn't already closed for them—when they were kids.
The Wire offers a searing and admittedly bleak vision. “The school system runs on the assumption that kids come to school prepared to learn. But if that assumption is wrong, then the kids are screwed,” said Burns. Institutional education, Burns told the Baltimore City Paper, refuses to acknowledge the context of a child's life in his or her education. This sort of “institutional neglect” fosters policies and practices that “withhold generations from success” (McCabe, 2006). On NPR, he added, “Kids will be educated; the question is where or how.”
In the City Paper interview, Burns identified what he calls “stoop kids” and “corner kids.” Stoop kids live in the hood but don't stray far from their parents' gaze. Corner kids have been completely abandoned—emotionally or literally—by their families. The “chasm between stoop kids and corner kids is so great, it's impossible to address both groups' needs in the same classroom,” he said.
Opportunities Beyond the Corner
At Hamilton, Burns and his colleagues were able address these different needs through specialized groupings. Burns thinks there's a larger, more radical change needed to improve life in the inner city. “We can't keep doing the same thing,” he said. “It's like I used to tell my 7th graders. We can't get up every day and just keep banging our heads into the wall.”
For Burns, improving inner-city schools and healing society in general requires changing what he calls our driving philosophies. “We need to consider mutualism and the disenfranchised,” he said. “Consider what works in the counties—supporting kids and their families.”
Burns doubts that The Wire, provocative as it is, has much chance to effect a philosophical sea change. “I've never seen a story powerful enough to get people to move against their own self-interest,” he said.
But Simon was quick to add, “People need to understand that the health of society is their main self-interest.”
To help kids stymied by the social problems of the inner city, Burns said on NPR, “The trick is to keep all the doors open. If we can begin to understand that, then maybe we've done something.”
The Peabody Award-winning drama has been renewed for a fifth season, meaning 125 local jobs and at least $17.5 million dollars flowing into the Baltimore economy. So far, Burns and Simon claim they've encountered little criticism, outside the mayor's office, of their portrayal of Baltimore communities.
Respond to This Article
According to its creators, this season of The Wire addresses American ideas about equal opportunity and takes a closer look at parts of the city that are systematically left behind. Do you think their assessment of the inner city education situation is fair or just another excuse to trash city schools?