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The 74th Emmy Awards were an immediate award season disaster the moment the show began. There were almost too many embarrassing moments to count.
But the number of the night was the seven nominations and three Emmy Awards for ABC’s breakout hit “Abbott Elementary.”
OUTSTANDING CASTING FOR A COMEDY SERIES
As everyone knows by now, the titular school showcases memorable characters that are funny enough to keep the audience laughing and realistic enough to garner empathy. This is not a mistake. The show wants to make the best out of a terrible situation without making the real world issues the butt of the joke.
AE takes everything to heart. It’s no mistake that the cast features non-white actors primarily in a school with an underrepresented student body. Amazingly, “Abbott Elementary” finds laughter in the challenge of teaching in underfunded schools.
However, what isn’t the slight bit funny is how underfunding our schools is undercutting any opportunity the current Gen Alpha and next Gen Beta have to save the world.
According to a recent study by The Century Foundation U.S. schools are underfunded by nearly $150 billion every year. While the residents of their districts fund public schools, they often reflect societal issues beyond the school’s control.
School budgets are moral documents, revealing not only how much society values education as a public good, but also how we value the children of different communities. Children living in extreme deprivation constantly lose the most.
About four in 10 students attend schools in districts with poverty rates of upwards of 75 percent. This perpetuates the structural poverty that keeps families trapped in poor communities with impoverished schools.
OUTSTANDING WRITING FOR A COMEDY SERIES
Underfunding education doesn’t just leave the most vulnerable children ill prepared for the world, it makes the world a crueler and more divided place to grow up in.
While a wave of protests, teacher strikes and student walkouts has exposed the outrageous inequality plaguing public education, the budget numbers reveal how unfair funding programs dictate what our children are worth, depending on where they live, the color of their skin, and their families’ wealth.
The worst-funded states also tend to neglect the basic educational interventions that could close the gaps in academic performance by funding early-childhood education, paying their teachers higher wages, tackling high turnover rates and major gaps in staffing levels.
The massive workload on teachers is compounded by student-to-faculty ratios that keep children cycling through overburdened schools, overworked teachers, and curricula inadequate for meeting basic state standards—which in turn results in year upon year of “underperforming” ratings for a district.
The report also found more subtle ways that underfunding undermines educational quality.
The majority of states lack progressive teacher-staffing ratios, for example, so that students who face high poverty levels are assigned the same distribution of teachers as better-off children, or are actually in schools with fewer teachers per class compared to more affluent districts. In Florida, for example, the poorest districts have about 25 percent fewer teachers per 100 students than low poverty districts.
OUTSTANDING SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A COMEDY SERIES
Since the Great Recession, many states have systematically disinvested in education. Accompanied by successful social media campaigns, protests had Americans all over the country asking why public school teachers are not paid enough to support their families, why students are using dilapidated textbooks and attending crumbling schools. Real life, not an Abbott Elementary episode.
From the beginning of television, series set in schools have been nominated or won several awards, including Emmys and the Peabody.
Let’s say we all become vested show runners in creating a television series featuring a country that actually prioritizes an equality of education for all and wins an Emmy in the category of “Talk The Talk, Walk The Walk.”
This column is by Ritchie Lucas, Founder of The Student Success Project and Think Factory Consulting. He can be reached by email at ritchie@thinkfactory.com and on Facebook and You Tube as The Student Success Project.
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