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Alexander Russo's recent blog posting about the French film that received the Palme d'Or at Cannes last week caught my attention. The Class (Entre les Murs), which depicts a year in a junior high school that serves one of Paris's poorest neighborhoods, won nearly unanimous praise at Cannes--which is no mean feat.  Here's hoping that the film crosses the pond soon and finds a large American audience.

The American public education community should find The Class particularly interesting. For one, the struggles of teachers and students in the film's troubled Parisian school will likely strike a chord with observers of poor urban schools in the United States. The school's mostly poor, racially diverse student body is on the wrong side of the socially- and economically-determined achievement gaps that plague the French education system. The school also exposes the long-standing social and economic inequities laid bare by the riots--primarily by unemployed and disaffected immigrant youth--that rocked France in 2005.

Yet the film is most compelling (according to reviews) for its celebration of urban students' intelligence and wit. Director Laurent Cantet characterizes this respect for students as a major virtue of the teacher memoir on which he based the film: "For once, a [teacher] was not writing...to get back at adolescents presented as savages or idiots." This respect is evident in his casting decisions. Rather than hiring stars or auditioning thousands of adolescents for the major roles, he selected his young cast from one racially-diverse, low-income school in Paris’s down-and-out 20th Arrondisement. He even asked his teen-aged actors to help him develop their on-screen characters. The results are, by all accounts, breathtaking.

Cantet deserves high praise for recognizing, developing and celebrating talents so often overlooked and squandered. In France as in the United States, urban youth are too often branded as violent, disengaged and academically deficient. They have few opportunities to cultivate and demonstrate their inherent gifts.

Reviews of The Class suggest that the film avoids the pitfalls of so many American movies that portray heroic, isolated teachers who, against all odds, turn their students' lives around. I hope the reviewers are right. While often uplifting, the teacher-as-hero-or-martyr storyline can distract us from the need to reform entire systems and provide all teachers the preparation, support and conditions they require to succeed. (Chris Lehmann has offered related observations here.) In The Class, the role of the teacher is played not by a larger-than-life actor but rather by the author of the teacher memoir that provides the film’s source material. The teacher makes mistakes, and the film does not culminate in any final redemption, we’re told. Rather, the film presents the school as a microcosm of French society with all its class, ethnic and economic divisions--while evoking profound admiration for the intelligence and accomplishments of teachers and students alike.

I generally don’t like American remakes of French movies, but I would welcome a thoughtful American version of The Class--set in a real urban high school; starring real high school students; and featuring actual high school teachers. It would be refreshing to see urban students celebrated in their own right, and not just as foils for for a big-name actor. The time is also ripe for a film that portrays schools as reflections of the society they serve. Such a film could (I hope) spark public conversations about our shared responsibility--as educators, parents, community members, opinion leaders, policymakers--to fix what ails them.