Let the Little Light Shine

I just watched *Let the Little Light Shine* this afternoon on PBS. It's a powerful documentary that does a great job of wining you over to the cause of minority parents who are trying to save a top-performing grade school on Chicago's South Side from being melded into a larger, more racially and especially economically mixed school to the north of it that has a long history of failure. But if you can separate yourself from the often powerful emotions portrayed - you really need to watch this movie at least twice to unpack everything at issue here - you see that the movie also raises some important questions that it does not answer, largely because of its very direct format.

Summarized briefly: this movie deals with the Chicago Public School Board's 2018 effort to convert a largely Black South Side grade school, NTA Academy, which had excellent academic results based, in part, on extensive community involvement, into a high school. This conversion was requested by residents in the next neighborhood north, around S. Clark and W. 18th St., an area that was undergoing gentrification. They wanted to have a *good* high school in the area to send their children to. The teachers, parents, and students at NTA whom we see are almost all Black, and we are told that it serves a mostly underprivileged population, so the NTA-area residents are not *gentry*. The parents and teachers at NTA want to keep it just as it is, a high-performing grade school serving its own immediate neighborhood. Some of them see this as a struggle of racism, even a return to Jim Crow. That seems to be the angle the producer-director-cinematographer-editor Kevin Shaw decided to pursue.

One white parent from the next neighborhood north, the lawyer John Jacoby - I'll call him the white guy in the green shirt - raises some central issues that are never examined or discussed further, however. That was where I had a problem, which is linked to the director's choice of format for this documentary.

There is no narrator. We are presented with a succession of cuts from interviews with people involved, a few nature shots, and some live-action footage of rallies, school board meetings, etc. Though there was obviously an interviewer who asked the interviewees questions, we never see them. (I gather it was the Shaw himself, because he's listed as the only cinematographer.) More to the point, the interviewees are never asked follow-up questions, nor are we provided with narratorial background on what they say. That, for me, was unfortunate, because as with the case of the white guy in the green shirt, we need clarification on some of the things he said.

First, he explained that when he moved into what I'll call Clark and W. 18th, the population was 95% Black, but that subsequently many of those Blacks moved out. Why? Where did they go? Then, more importantly, he says that he does not see the NTA issue as racist because "a majority of the people in (Clark and W. 18th) are still Black." The interviewer needed to ask more about that, not just to the white guy in the green shirt, but to those in the NTA neighborhood who claimed that the CBE's efforts to convert the grade school were racist. We come away with the impression that that kids who would be using NTA as a high school, were the Board to convert it, would be mostly white. Would that in fact have been the case?

For many Americans, *gentrification* means chasing poor - and therefore often minority - people out of old rundown neighborhoods with interesting architecture so that yuppies can renovate the properties into expensive mixtures of old and new. Because yuppies in most American cities are mostly non-Black, we therefore also imagine gentrification as chasing out non-Asian minorities to provide room for Asian-inclusive whites.

Chicago is not most American cities, though. It has a large and vibrant Black middle class. The few people we meet from *Clark and W. 18th* are white - basically the guy in the green shirt and a real estate agent, Tina Finkelstein, both outsiders to South Side Chicago (and both probably Jewish, which would introduce another not-examined element here) - but are they representative of the people from *Clark and W. 18th* who want NTA to be converted into a high school? I don't know. Shaw could have used a narrator to clear that up for us. Is it just the new upscale white minority in *Clark and W. 18th* trying to break up NTA's success so their kids don't have to go to an expensive private high school, or are there Black yuppies, also outsiders, involved as well? What is the black/white dynamic at South Loop Elementary, where those yuppies' kids now go to school - even if in separate, *gifted* classes - with the children of the Blacks who have not yet moved/been forced out? These are all things we need to know in order to understand what is really going on here. It seems as if it might be more than just white disrespect for Blacks.

The parents of the children in NTA Academy would have known all these important facts, because South Loop isn't that far north of where they live.

There is mention of some *underutilized* school space in the Chicago system. Did NTA Academy have empty classrooms? Evidently, because one person points out it has 840 students and could house just over 1000. If so, could some sort of compromise plan have been worked out that kept grades 1-8 at NTA but added at least some high school years?

We learn, very briefly, that the CSB had proposed building an addition to South Loop Elementary to accommodate those 840 NTA students. If South Loop was already overcrowded, how would an addition have been adequate for 840 more students? If there was money for an addition to South Loop, why couldn't that have been for grades 9-12? We never learn anything about the proposals made, or whether alternate proposals were shut out.

The white guy in the green shirt explains that he and others - we assume affluent others - were promised certain things, like "gifted classes" for their kids, by a white guy whose name I don't remember to get them to move into the South Loop area. What was going on there? It sounds like recent efforts by a certain superpower to claim territory in an adjacent country by moving in some of its own citizens. Stalin did that in the Baltic republics after he conquered them. Why isn't this examined?

As you can see, there are a lot of questions that should have been asked here, a lot of information we need to know to understand what was going on. The parents of the NTA students would have known at least some of the answers, so they should have been shared with us.

At one point we see one of the NTA employee activists leading a rally of students and parents. She says that she is "all in her emotions." That speaks for perhaps too much of this movie. We have a lot of scenes of students, parents, and teachers crying and hugging each other. Yes, I understand that these were emotional times for them. But for us, the viewers, whom director Shaw so very clearly wants to win over to their side, at least some of us would have appreciated more facts as well.

It was, after all, facts and not emotions that convinced the judge to rule in NTA's favor. He dismissed the activist Elizabeth Greer's argument that procedure had not been followed (why?), but found in favor of lawyer Candace Moore's argument that moving the NTA kids into an expanded South Loop Elementary would have been unfavorable to them, a minority group. Because the movie has presented us with almost no information about what was going on at South Loop Elementary, we have no idea why he reached that verdict.

Top-performing public schools in our nation's big cities have become so rare that it is hard not to just say *these folk are doing something very right. The test scores prove it. Leave them be, and let them go on doing what they are doing so well.* Having spent a professional lifetime teaching, I'm convinced that we are far from being able to quantify what will produce academic success, and therefore that if we find it, we shouldn't tamper with it. Model it elsewhere, yes. But no tamper with it.

I have every sympathy for the students and especially the parents at NTA Academy. They worked hard as a community to create something wonderful for their children, so they had every right to be angry at the thought of its being taken away from them. But I wonder if racism was not too easy a label with which to dismiss the folk in the next neighborhood north, especially if that neighborhood is, indeed, still majority Black. It sounds as if there may have been classism, *urban homesteading* taken to inhuman extremes, and other issues as well. The former principal at NTA, Amy Roma, says at one moment that some *Clark and W. 18th* parents leading the drive to take over NTA spoke of themselves as pioneers. Did they see the current occupants as savages? Were these self-proclaimed pioneers all white?

Kevin Shaw appears to have been a virtually one-man-band putting this film together, filming it, editing it, and them promoting it. What he accomplished is often remarkable, and I take my hat off to him. But can we ask even more of him? Could we have a "making of* sequel that answers all these questions?