Abbott Elementary and the Rise of School-aganda
I was sitting on the couch with my partner trying to decompress after an unusually long day. To unwind, we decided to watch Abbott Elementary. As a sociologist of education, I knew it was on brand, but I couldn’t help being drawn into the world of Abbott. I’ve spent a lot of time researching educational inequalities within schooling, and the show’s premise was both intriguing and novel.
Abbott Elementary is a feel-good mockumentary created by actress Quinta Brunson who also plays second grade teacher Janine Teagues in the show. Inspired by her mother’s career as a public-school teacher in Philadelphia, Brunson wanted to reflect the experiences of teachers in the city public school system. The mockumentary style show focuses on the experiences of predominantly BIPOC teachers, staff, administrators, and students in a fictional public elementary school in Philadelphia.
But while I watched, I found myself irritated and couldn’t immediately identify the cause. I knew I was irritated about the one-dimensional portrayal of gritty public schools. I grew frustrated seeing the unequivocally tough yet kind, tenacious, compassionate, and caring teachers that would always go the extra mile for their students and families. It just seemed too idealistic and detached from the reality of public schooling. After venting my frustrations to my partner, he casually remarked, “ Well…this show IS school-a-ganda. What do you expect?”
“School-aganda.” This seemingly simple portmanteau managed to capture all my tensions and contradictions with Brunson’s show. The show focuses on promoting public school support and sentiment. And to do that, the reality of public schooling had to be told with brevity. Simply put, the show’s depiction of public schools and their teachers simply doesn’t reflect the reality.
In many ways, the show’s depictions of public schools in cities with predominantly BIPOC students and residents contradicted both my research findings and my own lived experience as an economically dispossessed mixed-race student in the New York City public school system. While I had teachers who were caring, compassionate, and attentive, they were mostly white. And they weren’t all unequivocally compassionate or kind. From elementary school to high school, I can recall numerous instances of teachers engaging in public shaming, slamming desks with their fists, and telling students they wouldn’t amount to anything. In one instance, I remember a teacher telling the students in the class they would only teach the students who were there to learn.
While Abbott Elementary illustrates the adverse impact of fiscal disparities between and within schools, there are some gaping (and systemic) plot holes that need to be addressed. While the show never really mentions racial inequalities or dynamics within and between schools, funding disparities between schools are racialized. Teacher-student relationships are as well.
To better understand this dynamic, it helps to know who the teachers and students are in these public-school systems in East Coast cities. While representation of teachers of color is increasing in cities like New York City, it remains hard to retain them. Schools can function as sites of racial hostility and anti-blackness, and this, along with other factors such as underpayment, collective devaluation of the profession, and disrespect from administrators, likely makes it difficult to keep BIPOC teachers in the profession. More often than not, the teacher at the front of a public-school classroom in Philadelphia and other East Coast cities is white while their students are not. The Inquirer reports that two-thirds of public school teachers are white while three-fourths of the student population are of color.
And the relationships between white teachers and BIPOC students remain troubled. Sociologist Brittany Fox-Williams explores how racialized (mis)trust structures teacher-student relations in schools. Conversely, my own research on parental engagement in NYC schools reveals that teachers and parents often have different expectations of the home-school relationship, and that those expectations are informed by race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Abbott Elementary both distorts and flattens the reality of public schooling and the relationships within them by looking at them through rose-colored glasses. In the show, most of the teachers (and the principal) are Black, except for the white savior token teacher, Mr. Hill.
Perhaps some of these distortions lie in the show’s format. The mockumentary style is often comedic, and researchers like Tamás Csönge suggest that there is a dangerous ambiguity inherent in the mockumentary format which relies on two primary rhetorical frames. Csonge argues that mockumentaries:
always utilize some style or variant of the documentary genre evoking a factual discourse, but—to a differing degree—also undermining, suspending, or putting it between quotation marks (evoking a fictional discourse).
By using mockumentary as vehicle for its storytelling, Abbott Elementary risks obscuring racial inequalities within schools with a monolithic narrative that suggests while things are tough, teachers, students, and administrators are doing the best they can in a system (and district) that’s stacked against them.
And yes, this is often true. In some ways, perhaps Abbott Elementary is imaginative and reflects an educational landscape that we want to see where students of color are taught by educators of color and are affirmed, loved, and cared for in safe spaces of learning.
But by also suggesting that city schools have majority BIPOC teachers and administrators nurturing majority BIPOC students when the reality suggests otherwise is misleading revisionism. Suggesting that funding inequities are not situated within a historical and contemporary context of racialized neoliberalism functions to erase the core characterization of educational inequalities in city schools and the relationships within them. The show suggests teachers, students, and administrators fight together against the big, bad, system to persevere another day. And while this is a chapter in the story, it’s not the only one. Sometimes, the school and its white teachers and administrators themselves are the big, bad, system and they’re stacked against their BIPOC students and families.
Something to keep in mind, the documentary focuses only on four teachers, and in-universe these are the teachers who opted into the documentary. The rest of the teachers and their classes are rarely shown. It’s a workplace comedy as much as it is a school comedy, so naturally the plot revolves around the characters changing and growing together. If you recall, Gregory was very disconnected as a teacher until Janine rubbed off on her.
Posted by: Juniper | December 26, 2024 at 08:34 PM
Does it effectively highlight the realities of teaching in under-resourced schools and inspire viewers to become more involved in educational issues?
Posted by: Drift Hunters | January 21, 2025 at 02:16 AM