There have been a lot of unrealistic portrayals of educators in the movies and on TV, along with a few that have been spot on.

Today’s post kicks off a series where classroom teachers give their personal reviews of how Hollywood has depicted their profession.

You might also be interested in The Best Places To Learn About (And View Video Clips Of) Teachers In The Movies.

‘Teacher Hero’ Movies

Ron Berger has nearly 50 years of experience in education, 28 of them as a public school teacher. He is the author of a collection of books on education and has been instrumental in developing EL Education’s foundational practices:

During the opening credits of the Hollywood film “Lean On Me,” the “true” story of tough, baseball bat-wielding high school principal Joe Clark (portrayed by Morgan Freeman, who won an NAACP award for his performance), the following things take place in the school on a typical morning as the day gets underway:

• Fights explode among crowds of yelling, pushing student gangs as they roam through trashed, graffiti-tagged hallways, smoking cigarettes.
• Students and teachers are physically beaten and sexually assaulted in violent incidents (one teacher is wheeled away on a hospital gurney in apparent critical condition).
• Drugs and guns are sold by students in the halls and the lunchroom.

The montage ends with a student stuffed into a locker by a gang, which is then padlocked, and he screams for help as the opening credits roll to a close and homeroom is about to begin.

All of the students featured in this frightening, lawless world are students of color. The public high school I attended, just nine miles from the Paterson, N.J., high school that is the setting for “Lean on Me,” was an integrated school with about half of the students identifying as students of color. The percentage of white students would have been higher had many white families in my town not put their children into private and religous schools because they feared Black, Latino, and Latina students would be like the student actors in this opening scene.

There is a Hollywood genre of “teacher hero” films that most educators know well. They are inspiring “true stories,” with great emotional and academic victories and teary endings. But the truth is stretched in ways that can undermine public education as much as uplift it. Students in these films—students of color, sometimes mixed with low-income white students—are shockingly rude, often violent, and frequently lack even the most basic academic skills. Then, an idealistic teacher arrives and is typically ridiculed by the other teachers for believing in the potential of her students, suggesting to viewers that most teachers have long ago stopped caring. At first, she is humiliated as a failure and plans to quit, but then she gets tough on the kids and transforms them into academic stars—single-handedly.

Michelle Pfeiffer is a teacher hero when she has to curb the violence of her students in “Dangerous Minds.” Hillary Swank is a teacher hero in “Freedom Writers,” where the film opens with her student Eva being shot at and then beaten by a rival gang as the school day begins. More recently, Jared Harris is a teacher hero in “Brave the Dark” as he stands against his fellow teachers, school administrators, and even the legal system to support one troubled student.

My teaching friends and I often debate whether these films do more harm or good. On the positive side, they present teachers as heroes, and in our society, that is a wonderful and well-deserved change. Perhaps students will want to pursue teaching as a career after watching them. On the negative side, they reinforce pernicious stereotypes that so many of us in the world carry about low-income students and students of color. They reinforce the myth that the answer to education is not a positive and safe school culture, a team of dedicated teachers and staff working together, supportive leadership, great lessons, curriculum, and learning conditions, but rather a single superhero teacher arriving to save the day on her own by getting tough.

The best-known of these films may be “Stand and Deliver,” the “true story” of calculus teacher Jaime Escalante. Researcher David Yeager, in his terrific new book 10 to 25, The Science of Motivating Young People (pp. 16,17), explains that Escalante’s remarkable success in transforming low-income Latino and Latina students into mathematics stars was real. Except that he did not achieve this success on his own during one year, as the Hollywood version suggests, nor through his tough-guy stance (in the film, Edward James Olmos, portraying Escalante, whispers to a defiant student played by Lou Diamond Phillips, who will not answer a math question, “I’ll break your neck like a toothpick”).

Escalante was a true hero and a brilliant teacher. In real life, he was also surrounded by a team of gifted and dedicated Latino teachers and a supportive school leader who, together, built a four-year program of mathematical learning that shepherded students to this unusual success. The film “Stand and Deliver” helps elevate teachers and mathematics, which is a great thing. It would be even more powerful and useful if the culture of mathematical success that Escalante created with his teammates was portrayed more realistically in the film: It could be a model for all of us.

Most school movies are not teacher hero movies. In most Hollywood movies about kids, public schools are just background settings for coming-of-age stories, romances, emotional dramas, musicals, and adolescent comedies. Student culture, social norms, and fashions have evolved a good deal over the last 60 years, and these days, student relationships often include more diversity of racial backgrounds, sexual orientations, and gender identities, which is a good thing.

However, the academic environment of school, as Hollywood presents it, has hardly changed at all during my lifetime. Teachers and classes are almost always dull, rigid, and irrelevant. Academic learning is typically presented as pointless, with social and athletic events the only meaningful part of schooling. Students who avoid or subvert the academic work of school are typically presented as clever and wise for doing so.

I have enjoyed many of these films. My daughter watched the John Hughes’ movies (e.g., “Sixteen Candles,” “Pretty in Pink,” “Breakfast Club,” “Some Kind of Wonderful”) again and again, and we had important discussions about the relationship issues they raised. I think it’s fine to poke fun at how many aspects of school—especially for teenagers—seem ridiculous, because it’s often true. It’s also fine for schools to be a backdrop for relationship dramas and comedies without always being realistic. But I remain discouraged about what is always missing.

I spend many days working with schools, mostly filled with students of color from low-income families, where students are inspired and inspiring—academically and as human beings. They are deep and reflective thinkers and speakers, leading regular presentations of learning to their families and community members, creating complex and beautiful academic work, serving in community-based internships and service projects, and they meet every day in small groups in Crew (advisory) meetings where they have honest, deep conversations about their social, emotional, and academic health—where they support each other and push each other to be better people. These schools are so different and so much better than the schools I attended in my youth and the schools in every Hollywood movie. I wish more educators and families could see them and the model they represent.

Is it too much to ask someone in Hollywood to create a film in which students are academic stars, not because they have a hero for a teacher but because they are in a school culture that inspires and supports them to become great? To be leaders of their own learning? Anyone? Anyone?

‘Mean Girls’

Known as the Lady Gaga of math education, Vanessa Vakharia is the author of Math Therapy: 5 Steps to Help Your Students Overcome Math Trauma and Build a Better Relationship With Math, host of the Math Therapy podcast, and founder of The Math Guru, a tutoring studio that’s changing the face of math education:

Let’s talk “Mean Girls.” The scene where Cady ditches the Mathletes because it’s “not cool” is all too real. It perfectly captures how early students—especially girls—are made to feel like being good at math makes them less likable. That social stigma still exists today, and it’s TWENTY years later!

On the realistic side, I absolutely love “Abbott Elementary.” The character dynamics are spot-on—especially Janine’s idealism contrasted with Barbara and Melissa’s seasoned practicality. There’s a scene where Janine tries to fix a classroom item with duct tape, and Barbara dryly says, “We don’t have the budget to do it right and we don’t have time to do it wrong.” That’s teaching in a nutshell.

The show doesn’t sugarcoat anything. It shows the systemic barriers, the burnout, and the real joy that can still exist in the mess. It’s not about magical transformation—it’s about doing the best you can with what you’ve got.

And finally, I know this isn’t about teaching, but a HISTORICALLY ICONIC moment happened when Taylor Swift announced that she LIKES MATH on Travis Kelce’s podcast. After decades of math getting nothing but bad PR, this is a HUGE deal and will for sure influence how so many kids—especially girls—view math moving forward. Math has officially entered its reputation era!!!

‘Boy Meets World’

Kiera Beddes is a digital teaching and learning specialist with the Jordan school district in Utah. Kiera is a Utah Teacher Fellow alumna, continues to work with the Utah Teacher Fellows leadership team, and serves as the president of the Utah Coalition for Education Technology board:

In the middle of March 2020, a pandemic was starting to engulf the world. Schools in Utah were dismissed for at first two weeks and then for the rest of the school year, as officials tried to figure out how to handle a crazy situation. We quickly shifted to online learning. Almost all of my sections were 12th grade students, and it broke my heart to see them miss the traditional end-of-school events. Their last school dance. Their last high school sporting event. Their last yearbook signing. All of that was either canceled, or postponed, or a strangely stilted socially-distanced affair.

I remember sitting in my classroom, alone, at the end of the year to pack up my classroom. I looked at the rows of empty desks, papers in the turn-in boxes, an out-of-date calendar on the wall. Literally a room in stasis because I really thought we would be back. We all did. Looking at that empty classroom and ruminating about my 2020 seniors, I thought of the final scene from the 90’s sitcom “Boy Meets World.”

In this scene, the main characters Corey, Topanga, Shawn, and Eric reconvene in their old schoolroom with their beloved teacher Mr. Feeny. He does what all teachers wish they could do, which is to give them some memorable final pieces of advice. They get to say their final goodbyes and badger the older gentleman to “Tell us that you love us.” (He refuses, as all teachers do, because we don’t play favorites.) When they leave the room, Mr. Feeny, alone in an empty classroom, quietly says “I love you all. … Class dismissed.”

This is one of the most realistic portrayals of classroom teaching because of how it demonstrates the impact of a great teacher, the notion that we all deserve closure, and the fact that yes, we do love our students (even when they are annoying).

Teaching students is an incredible occupation. You get to be a part of students’ lives in a way that (for good or ill) can stick with them for a long time. I think of my own teachers, like Mr. Hopkins, who taught me to find my voice in argumentative writing, and Miss Merrill, who showed me the beauty in poetry and the world around me.

This scene from “Boy Meets World” shows the impact that Mr. Feeney had on each of his students. One by one, they were able to say what he meant to them. As teachers, we don’t always get to see the impact we have on our students. When I started teaching myself, I wrote a thank card to Mr. Hopkins and Miss Merrill. Their impact was incredible.

Every year, I watched seniors graduate, usually with the chance to say goodbye and send them off. But in 2020, I missed that closure, both for them and for myself. Each school year is like a story. You start by getting to know the characters, find out how they interact with one another, and go through the highs and lows of high school. However, all stories deserve some sort of closure. The pandemic robbed us of that, and I’ll always feel the loss.

I always tear up a little when I watch this scene, seeing Mr. Feeney all alone in his classroom, telling the empty room that he loved his students. Teaching is a profoundly human endeavor. We depend on the interaction between students and teachers as the vehicle for learning. While technology gives students access to more information than ever, nothing can replace the relationships and care at the heart of real teaching. We learn and grow with one another over the course of a school year.

While I may not remember every lesson, I do remember those teachers who saw me as an individual. Even though “Boy Meets World” is a coming-of-age TV comedy, it’s one of my favorite depictions of classroom teaching because of its heart. Every year in our classrooms, it’s another opportunity for a fresh story. Make it a good one! Class dismissed.

‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’

Alicia Burnette Whitley is a veteran English teacher and Ph.D. candidate at North Carolina State University whose research focuses on teacher education and critical media literacies:

“Buffy the Vampire Slayer” was, perhaps, my favorite show as a teen. This was largely due to the deft use of the supernatural as a metaphor of navigating adolescence being akin to battling the forces of literal Hell.

For example, Buffy’s first boyfriend is an older guy who seemed really sweet but inexplicably turns into a demon after they sleep together. In another episode, one of the teachers is a literal predator—in the form of a praying mantis—preying on a teen boy. In yet another episode, one of Buffy’s friends falls in with a pack of popular kids, and his entire personality changes—of course, it’s because he’s possessed by the spirit of a hyena at the time, but the metaphor holds up.

What’s more, the entire series is predicated on the notion that “parents just don’t understand” what it means to have to stay out late and fight the forces of evil. In one scene, when Buffy finally tells her mom about her exploits, Buffy’s mom asks her if she ever just tried “not being the slayer,” echoing the all to real coming-out experiences of many queer teens.

And while I continue to appreciate this aspect of the show, as a teacher, the depiction of school has to be the one that makes me roll my eyes the most. There is a hearty dose of unrealism. The school’s librarian, for example, has the time and the funds to curate an expensive collection of occult tomes.

While there is an episode that addresses parental satanic panic—in this case, the parents were being egged on by a couple of demons that thrive on humans persecuting each other—for the most part, teachers and administrators are free to do whatever they like without community involvement. No one questions the inordinate amount of time the librarian spends with a handful of 16-year-olds. In fact, he never seems to deal with having classes come in for research or providing any useful service to the rest of the school.

In fact, while the show often provides comical and complex depictions of teen life, it has no interest in interrogating school itself. Nearly every scene of students in class depicts a teacher standing at the front of a silent room of about … nine to 12 students. Students pay attention until the bell and almost always have the requisite materials. Unless, of course, they are some sort of “bad kid.”

Of course, one could argue that this school is centered on The Hellmouth—so we should allow some leeway for things at the school to be a bit “weird.” However, the idea that students could easily hang out in the hallways between classes to chat about the “extreme dead guy” stuffed in Aura’s locker and that this finding would pose no interruption to the school day requires a lot of suspension of disbelief.

Thanks to Ron, Vanessa, Kiera, and Alicia for contributing their thoughts.

Responses today answered this question:

What do you think have been either the most realistic or most unrealistic portrayals of classroom teaching on television or in the movies?

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org. When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on X at @Larryferlazzo or on Bluesky at @larryferlazzo.bsky.social

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