If you saw the film “Waiting for Superman,” you may recall that one of the model charter schools featured in the film was a boarding school in D.C. called SEED. Unmentioned was that the annual tuition was $35,000. The school appeared idyllic, and one of the students was eager to gain admission and realize his dreams.
Now SEED has a problem. A 12-year-old student hung herself, and news reports say she was bullied.
Terrible things happen at all kinds of schools, as we have seen recently. I am not singling out SEED because it is a charter, but because it was promoted as a cure-all, a model school.
”Stormiyah’s death prompted backlash from dozens of parents who have come forward to FOX 5, reporting issues of widespread bullying and lack of supervision at SEED. They claim the complaints are not properly being dealt with by school administrators.
“In response, SEED has held multiple parent meetings to address concerns. The latest one held Tuesday was called “SEED Safety and You….”
”The Office of Human Rights is charged with investigating formal complaints made against D.C. schools.
“Why do all these things have to happen for them to have a meeting for safety?” asked Renee Hamilton, the aunt of a SEED student. “That should have been implemented Day 1. And it should have been stayed on top of Day 1.”
“Parents told FOX 5 the school has also promised more supervision. But one parent said she has seen no change since the tragedy.
“Kids running wild, no supervision,” added Tiarra Coleman, the mother of a SEED student. “There should be a parent, a teacher, someone at every door. There is not. Nothing has changed since that tragedy January 23rd.”
“Coleman’s son was asked not to return to school after SEED administrators said he confessed to vandalism. Coleman told FOX 5 her son was coerced to take blame for other students who’ve been bullying and threatening him for months.
“Those boys are still at the school to this day,” she said.
“Coleman has since been trying to pull her son out of SEED, but said she can’t get the school to release his records so she can move him.”
No School is perfect. Humility is best.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Horrible to see and can happen anywhere.
I’ve never seen “Waiting for Superman” and don’t really care to. Is the implication that privates/charters are the Superman we’ve been waiting for or that public schools are helpless and waiting for the imaginary hero to arrive that will never come? Or both? (Or neither?)
Very sorry the community is going through this.
Waiting for Superman presents charters as THE answer to the academic problems of poor black and Hispanic and white kids.
Thank you, Diane. I like to be informed, but I think I’ll continue to pass on “Waiting for Superman.” Reformers have such inflated opinions of themselves.
Perhaps this sad incident underscores the need for young children to remain in the care of their parents rather than sending them to a boarding school. The British upper class has a tradition of shipping off their children as young as age six. Many writers including Kipling have described the horrors of the experience. Children are trained to have a “stiff upper lip” while they endure a “Lord of the Flies” brutality about which the administration has no knowledge. Young children need the caring support of those that love them.
Is SEED a boarding school? I am asking as I don’t know. But I will agree with your statement regardless. Young children need the support of their parents. I am also wondering if this over zealous push for rigor diesn’t also play a role. We push our kids beyond their natural developmental growth and call them delayed or learning disabled because they can’t or don’t meet our arbitrary standards. Then we place them in classrooms of 27-30 students where they get very little personal support and demand that they police themselves while the teacher tries to conduct interventions for those falling behind. Our more developed kids are forced to fend for themselves. No wonder they pick on other students. The only way to get needed attention is to become a queasy wheel.
Squeaky wheel
SEED is a boarding school in DC.
SEED is a boarding CHARTER school in DC and in Baltimore City, the SEED school is a public boarding school. There is no cost for the families to enroll their children and I believe that there is some kind of lottery or certain qualifications in order for a child to be chosen for the program. I believe all of the children selected are need based and are at risk of not completing school.
The teacher who sent me the story said that SEED is a very stressful environment in which to teach.
I, too, am a retired teacher. I, too, think that schools ought to be only a part of a child’s education. Schools help, since they provide (or should) an exposure to loving surrogate parents with at least a bit of expertise in psychology and another area or two of learning. Schools also provide to the student a controlled exercise in living as a group.
None of the benefits a school can provide to a youngster are being supported in American schools, today. Now, in a mechanical, cubical, industrial setting, kids are trained to fit into a machine, not a society. In our warped country, parents no longer are allowed to raise their children. Most parents are forced to concentrate on scrounging about to simply provide food and shelter.
My Mom was a ‘homemaker’, now an extinct animal. Schools are now supposed to be surrogate parents. Most parents don’t have 20 kids, and those that do generally don’t do a very good job of parenting. Kids, today, are being taught to be a cog from a very early age. They are not being raised as a natural human (or mammal, or bird), but are being chewed up by a system that extracts ‘products’ without concern for the harm to the child or society it causes.
Oddly, even the beneficiaries of the current system (the very wealthy ‘owners’) have bought their own baloney and (as you say) have likewise shipped off their own kids. How inhuman can you get? How perverse can a society get? Where does it lead?
I agree, and in a high school the number of students a teacher is responsible for is well over a hundred. With budgets slashed to the bone, schools are expected to do more with less, and we have reached a point of diminished return. It is surprising that so many public school teachers continue to an admirable job under extreme duress.
Hi Daedalus
I am sadden to read and to feel what you wrote. Tears are rolling down from finding the answer for your last three questions. May
The kryptonite of Waiting For Superman’s false claims that charters solve all problems in education is the greed and secrecy these autocratic corporate charter schools demand.
Power in the hands of one CEO or a few wealthy shareholders ends up leading to corruption. This happens in community-based, democratic public schools too but the transparency makes it harder to continue to get away with it, and the fact that voters can vote out the corrupt and replace them with new, possibly better and more honest, representatives brings about change we will seldom if never see in a greed based, for-profit charter school where the public has no voice.
There is just TOO MUCH VIOLENCE everywhere … in this country. It’s become the norm and affecting our young as well as adults. I am concerned re: this country of corporate and political greed and lies.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/oct/02/america-mass-shootings-gun-violence
I know a handful of female physicians with school-age children and they are most concerned about that screen, esp. in the schools their children attend. They know how insidious that screen is and how too much screen time and what is on that screen affect their children’s development in more than one way.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/124/5/1495
Again, this country is built on death and destruction, plain and simple. “Good guy Americans” go around the world bombing and destroying other countries, all to the wild cheering of the vast majority of the citizens of this country. We are a violent culture, a death and destruction culture. Americans refuse to see that reality.
“No School is perfect. Humility is best.“
Words to remember in our era of nonstop hype and crises.
Ms. Ravitch wrote:
“If you saw the film “Waiting for Superman,” you may recall that one of the model charter schools featured in the film was a boarding school in D.C. called SEED. Unmentioned was that the annual tuition was $35,000.”
From SEED DC:
https://www.seedschooldc.org/admissions
“Thank you for your interest in The SEED School of Washington, D.C.–the nation’s first, public, college-preparatory, tuition-free boarding school.
Our mission is to provide an outstanding, intensive educational program that prepares children, both academically and socially, for success in college and beyond. Our five-day boarding program requires that enrolled students arrive on Sunday evenings for check-in and on Friday afternoons, check out for the weekend, at the conclusion of the academic day. Boarding requirements are consistent with exceptions of holidays and other school closings.”
The $35,000 tuition is paid by DC Public Schools. A former teacher informed me that SEED has a bullying problem.
Boarding schools were often the choice for families where there were no schools. Especially in the rural south after the Civil War, the wrecked economy meant that there might not be a school in walking distance. The town where I grew up had been an economic response to the presence of a very good school. People moved to the town so their kids could go to that school. It was sort of a boardi school, because the students boarded with families in the town. Later, they built dormitories and became primarily a boarding school. There are very good reasons why boarding schools are good places, but no place is a utopia. Without guidance, boarding schools are the best places to develop a bullying problem. Moreover, a good five percent of the students in a boarding school are there because their parents are wealthy enough to get rid of them.
I used to teach a boarding school. One day before Christmas, a student with whom I have worked a great deal got a letter at the end of class. She tore it up into pieces and stormed out crying. I pieced it back together, worrying that she might do something foolish. Her stepmother had figured out a way to send her somewhere else during Christmas. Her father, whom she loved dearly although I do not know why, would not be a part of Christmas for her that year.
The suggestion that public boarding schools are a panecea for societal problems is laughable. Waiting for superman indeed. Ridiculous.
I saw “Waiting for Superman” a few years ago and left the theater literally shaking with anger. It was an outrageous distortion of public schooling that conveniently didn’t mention the $35,000/year cost per pupil. No teachers were interviewed in the movie. It was propaganda, plain and simple. No school is immune from the tragedy that took place there, but it stands out because the movie promoted this school as the answer to all public school ills. Dollar for dollar, on a level playing field, private and charter schools cannot compete with public schools in terms of success for all students.
Brad,
I had the same reaction. “Superman” was fiction.
Waiting for Superman wasn’t fiction.
Waiting for Superman was pure propaganda based on lies and designed to mislead and manipulate. As propaganda, Waiting for Superman was no different than the lies that Hitler churned out to demonize the Jews to justify slaughtering them by the millions in concentration camps, and what Mao did to fuel his horrid and insane cultural revolution that also caused the deaths of millions.
@Lloyd Lofthouse
True propaganda does not lie. It simply withholds the information that contradicts the propaganda. Actually, propaganda is not something ominous, it is simply another word for advertising. Just like non-stick pans are actually work (true propaganda), they just did not tell you that they kill you (withholding of un-favorable info).
Waiting for Superman was both propaganda for charters as miracle cures and packed with lies in its misuse of data to make it seem that US education was failing everywhere —and charters were the only hope. Curiously, the narrator slipped in a fast reference to the earliest CREDO study, which said that only 1 in 5 charters outperformed public schools. Why junk the whole school system and replace it with one whose success rate was only 20%? But nothing more was said on that subject. Just praise for charters.
Modern kids are too weak psychologically. Putting a teacher or a guardian at every corner will turn shool into prison, which most of them already are.
John Doe,
Yeah, modern kids are too weak to take a bullet in the chest and laugh it off. Back in my day, kids used to take two or three bullets in the face and walk away.
Interesting how some of my messages appear after being “moderated” for a day or two, and other do not appear at all. Anyway, this particular blog entry is about a suicide by hanging, not about killing from a firearm. So yes, kids do need to be more resilient and have stiffer upper lip.
Guns or no guns, putting a counselor or a teacher or a guard at every corner simply will turn a school into a prison. Most American schools already feel like prisons, with fences, armed guard or even regular police officers. The whole system is flawed: the freedom to own military weapons, the feeble attempts to protect from maniacs by putting up more fences, and the whole idea of middle schools collecting from elementary, and high schools collecting from middle, where having several thousand adolescents on a single campus is considered normal, and then there is a 100 to 1 share of students to teachers, and then police is brought in to control the brewing high schoolers. If high schools were smaller, there would be fewer students in them, and thus controlling them would be a simpler task without turning school into prison.