180 Days: A Year Inside An American High School

(Rochester, New York) – 180 Days: A Year Inside An American High School, a two-part series airing Monday, March 25 and Tuesday, March 26 at 9 p.m. on WXXI-TV/HD (DT 21.1/cable 1011 and 11), is an intimate portrait of life for the first graduating class of Washington Metropolitan High School (DC Met), a public school in Washington, D.C, where only seven percent of students are deemed “proficient” in math and only 19 percent in reading. The program is part of American Graduate: Let’s Make it Happen, a public media initiative supported by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), that helps communities nationwide understand and implement solutions to address the high school dropout crisis. American Graduate programming on WXXI is supported locally in part by Hillside Work-Scholarship Connection.

Produced by the National Black Programming Consortium (NBPC), 180 Days chronicles the lives of teachers, students, administrators and parents struggling to keep their students on track to graduation at DC Met. The inner-city school embodies the complex challenges of adapting to the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” school reform initiative, in which school funding and personnel decisions are based in large part on the results of high-stakes standardized tests.

At the center of 180 Days is a charismatic and outspoken young principal, Tanishia Williams Minor, who is in her second year as head of the school. Despite low test scores and  numerous other issues, Principal Minor remains optimistic that her students can succeed despite the personal and academic obstacles they face and the scrutiny that she and the school are under from the administration at DC Public Schools. Her optimism that the students can succeed seems indefatigable, but even she admits, “I believe we can move mountains, but the students have to be here for us to do it.”

Students featured in this film include soft-spoken but wise-beyond-years Raven Coston, a 17-year-old who was displaced from New Orleans with her family by Hurricane Katrina and is now trying to get through school while raising a baby, maintaining a relationship with the baby’s father and working part-time; Raven Quattlebaum, an 18-year-old senior who grew up in the foster care system and who used to spend her days robbing and assaulting people, but is determined to turn her life around and go to college; Rufus McDowney, a bright and charasmatic16-year-old sophomore who has been in and out of the juvenile justice system since the age of 13; Tiara Parker, an aspirational 18-year-old senior who has good grades but may not be able to afford college; and Delaunte Bennett, an 18-year-old sophomore who has been kicked out of numerous schools for getting into fights and now lags two school years behind other kids his age, in large part because he misses so many of his classes.

Like many other high-poverty schools, truancy, or chronic absenteeism, is an issue that plagues DC Met and is a leading indicator for dropping out. In 2011, nearly 50 percent of students from DC Met could be classified as truant. Throughout 180 Days, faculty members scour roll call reports to see who’s showing up for homeroom and who’s not, and drive through the streets of the nation’s capital evangelizing kids, parents and sometimes grandparents about the importance of their high school diplomas. In one powerful scene, the basketball coach reminds his team that if they do not show up for school, they cannot stay on the team — to which one of the players responds by walking out of the gym as cameras roll.

Framed by complex and layered national and local politics, 180 Days is a uniquely intimate journey through a year in the lives of students, teachers and school leaders in one Washington, DC, public high school. The real lives at the center of 180 Days, most especially those of the five students whose stories take the viewer from the day one to day 180, give PBS viewers rare insight beyond statistics, test scores and policies into the human price that is paid when schools “fail.”

Caption: Student Raven in cap and gown
Credit: Will McKinley