Lissette Herrera explores Hollywood myths about urban high schools

The movie usually goes something like this: A dangerous-looking high school is full of socially maladjusted students. Teachers are ineffectual. Chaos reigns. Then one day a new teacher arrives on the scene packing a powerful personality and new ways of doing things. Sure there are bumps along the way, but eventually the teacher wins the hearts and minds of the students, fellow teachers, and the entire community. Attitudes improve. Test scores rise. Gang members evolve into scholars. It’s a new day.

As a graduate of Plainfield High School in an Abbott (special needs) school district,  Lissette Herrera has long known that the real world does not match the musings of Hollywood. As a Douglass College senior, Herrera has created an opportunity to formally study how movies portray urban high schools and is ready to dissect a Hollywood theme that turns up in movies again and again: white teacher as hero in urban classroom.

In White Educators in the Media, a panel presentation at the Aresty Undergraduate Research Symposium, Herrera examines how this media-constructed identity has shaped the discourse of urban education and white teachers' interactions with students, administration, families, and communities.

“In many communities, white people and people of color don’t interact except maybe at work. When people don’t interact, they tend to base their biases on what they see in the media,” said Herrera, who will graduate this May with a double major in sociology and Spanish linguistics, and a minor in criminology.

For her research, Herrera studied four movies about life in urban high schools. In each, a white teacher rescues the school – in a way that almost parallels old westerns in which a character arrives on a white horse to save the day. The movies she studied were Dangerous Minds, Michelle Pfeiffer as the teacher; Music of the Heart, Meryl Streep as the teacher;  The Ron Clark Story, Matthew Perry as the teacher; and Freedom Writers, Hilary Swank as the teacher.

“In my own experience, it doesn’t matter what race the teacher is,” Herrera said. “There are good and bad teachers of all races and cultures.”

Herrera developed her study with the help of two advisors from the Graduate School of Education, assistant professors Mary Curran and Nora Hyland. The team worked up a list of 22 parameters on which to analyze the films, based on various sociological theories.

Curran said Herrera pushes herself to do things that even some graduate students don’t do. “Lissette is a dedicated, passionate student. I've been impressed with how she's worked to find learning opportunities through the Aresty program and other opportunities on campus in order to make her Rutgers experience as enriching as possible,” she said. “She's a great example of someone who's worked to take her education beyond the classroom.”

Herrera’s education has already found a way back to her old school. The first in her family to attend college, she tutors in Plainfield once a week through Rutgers’ Paul Robeson Cultural Center American Reads Tutoring Program. She also volunteers with the Rutgers Upward Bound program, which offers high school students a taste of college life. “I was inspired to go to college through Upward Bound,” she said “The group helped reinforce my mother’s advocacy about getting an education.”