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Author: Sam
I write books and talk about stuff.
Transforming Schools to Match the Needs of a Minority-Majority Nation
There’s an Op-Ed in today’s Washington Post in which the New America Foundation’s Maggie Severns urges states to rethink teacher preparation in light of our country’s ongoing shift to a minority-majority nation. As Severns explains, immigrant youths and the children of immigrants are among the lowest-performing groups of students in U.S. public schools, AND they will account for virtually all growth in the workforce over the next 40 years.
Severns lauds the work in Illinois, where teachers are being given special training to meet the needs of bilingual learners, something preschool teacher Christina Gomez appreciates: “Before, I felt like I was kind of in survival mode,” she explained, “just trying to get them through. It’s not just a challenge for monolingual teachers but for bilingual teachers. Just because you speak the language of a child doesn’t mean you know the strategies or best practices for teaching” them.
This is an essential issue, and it’s great that Severns has raised it. I’ve spent all year in two DC-area schools, both of which have Spanish-immersion programs, and I’ve seen first-hand not just the challenges of supporting the needs of children who don’t yet speak English, but also the benefits of having all children learn in a biliterate environment. Different students possess different strengths and weaknesses in different settings. Brain-based research is starting to demonstrate that the benefits of being bilingual go a lot deeper than knowing another language. And the schools — and states — that are ahead of the curve are acting accordingly.
But what else can we do? We might start by heeding the advice of University of Texas professor Angela Valenzuela, a founding member of the Forum for Education & Democracy (an organization for which I briefly served as National Director) and a leading scholar on education policy. I recall asking Dr. Valenzuela what specific policy changes she’d like to see, and here is some of what she recommended.
- Ensure more appropriate assessment for special education students and bilingual learners (BLLs) by underwriting efforts to develop, validate, and disseminate more appropriate assessments in the content areas for these students, and by ensuring that the law and regulations encourage assessments that are based on professional testing standards for these groups. This would include helping to develop and requiring the use of tests that are language-accessible for BLLs and appropriate for special education students, and evaluating their gains at all points along the achievement continuum. Additionally, assessments for placement for bilingual learners must occur before we devise assessment criteria for outcomes. In order to do this, consistency in bilingual learner classification must occur. We need a measurement classification that is sensitive to the within-group variability of bilingual learners. This means that an initial assessment of bilingual learners must be conducted to gauge their command of both English and their native languages, mastery levels across core content areas. And we must improve monitoring of bilingual learner student progress, by establishing effective and valid methods of data collection that enables schools to monitor bilingual learners’ progress at all points of their education. This includes tracking fluent English-proficient (FEP)-classified students to ensure that they do not require programs or services later in their academic careers. Appropriate instructional strategies that address areas in need of improvement must be quickly addressed long before testing occurs.
- Strengthen supports for bilingual and Limited English Proficiency (LEP) students. Under Title III of ESEA, schools and districts are accountable for the academic achievement of bilingual learners and for enabling these students to reach English-language proficiency. However, these students face a unique set of challenges compared to other students. For example, it is difficult to generate advanced conceptual understanding from bilingual learners and LEP students when they are being tested or taught in a language in which they are not proficient. The federal government can encourage teachers, schools, and districts to provide equal education opportunities for these students by:
- Investing in the development of fully-qualified bilingual teachers who are sensitive to language barriers and cultural differences among students and able to effectively teach bilingual and LEP students;
- Aligning Title II and III by requiring that state local education agencies (LEA’s) demonstrate how their second language acquisition programs meet the academic and linguistic needs of bilingual learners;
- Lifting the cap on the amount of money appropriated for preservice preparation of bilingual and English-as-a-second-language teacher candidates, combined with restoring fellowship opportunities (Title VII) for graduate study in those same areas provided in earlier versions of ESEA;
- Encouraging states and localities to increase the pool of highly qualified bilingual teachers and personnel with expertise in working with BLLs;
- Supporting high-quality, research-based professional development opportunities for BLL/LEP teachers;
- Providing all staff with continuous professional development in effective practices, particularly as they apply to bilingual learners. Teacher candidates, and those already in the profession, should be provided financial support to complete higher education coursework in ESL methodology, or equivalent professional development in sheltered instruction in the subject areas. For those teachers already in the profession, meeting this goal should be fulfilled by the end of their second year in the classroom.
- Supporting early school intervention programs that help prevent bilingual students from falling behind academically, and
- Prohibiting districts and schools from testing bilingual student exclusively in English until they have become proficient in the English language.
What I appreciate about Dr. Valenzuela is her sensitivity to the ways in which we need to view bilingualism as a strength, not a weakness. That’s why she prefers the term “bilingual learner” to the more commonly used English-language learner, or ELL. The former describes the central aspiration we should have for all students. The latter describes the central deficit we see in some. Perhaps that sounds like mere semantics; but I agree with Angela — it’s a crucial distinction, and one we should all become more attuned to if we hope to create a society worthy of, and prepared to take advantage of, its own rich diversity.
Classroom Closers?
After spending yesterday afternoon watching my beloved Boston Red Sox blow another game in the ninth inning, I was reminded of a simple fact: some losses are more emotionally significant than others.
As my disappointment threatened to disrupt the rest of my Memorial Day – we were so close! – I realized there’s a good argument to be made that the one statistic in the data-obsessed world of professional baseball most likely to at least partially reflect the collective confidence of a team is the one the Sox’s shaky new closer, Alfredo Aceves, failed to earn for his team yesterday: the save.
Ironically, saves didn’t even exist as an official statistic until 1960, when baseball writer Jerome Holtzman proposed it as a way to better measure the effectiveness of relief pitchers. Since then, the relevance of the stat has been hotly debated for a variety of reasons, although no one doubts the emotional toll a string of late-inning defeats can have on a team – or, by contrast, the emotional power a string of late-inning victories can unleash. Indeed, the numbers bear out an intriguing truism: when an underrated team has a relief pitcher with a huge number of saves, that team is also hugely likely to overachieve.
Which takes us to the modern world of education reform, and the ongoing efforts to capture more accurately the elusive nature of teacher quality. What is the statistical equivalent of a “save” in teaching – and if we measured it, would it help us better assess a teacher’s ability to support the learning and growth of children?
This is not an insignificant question. The Gates Foundation is currently spending millions of dollars in an effort to “uncover and develop a set of measures that work together to form a more complete indicator of a teacher’s impact on student achievement.” Districts across the country are experimenting with new ways to evaluate what teachers do – and how they do it. And the Obama Administration is incentivizing states to undertake such work as part of its controversial Race to the Top program.
Despite all this energy, however, no one – as far as I can tell – is seeking to measure what goes into being a classroom closer.
In baseball, it works like this: a pitcher can’t receive a save unless the game is near its conclusion, his team is narrowly ahead, and he records the final out. In education, the rules would be a little less concrete, but not unbearably so: a teacher would need to recognize that a student was in danger of losing his or her capacity to participate meaningfully in a lesson, and behave in such a way as to “save” the student’s ability to focus, and allow the learning to proceed.
Anyone who has spent time in a school knows that this sort of thing happens all the time, and is usually what educators are thinking of when they say that the true impact of their work can’t be measured. A child who can’t stay in his chair because he struggles with ADHD. A conflict between friends during lunchtime that threatens to derail the day. A new relative whose behavior disrupts the equilibrium of a student’s home life.
Just as in baseball, school-based save situations exist when the emotional stakes are highest. They are the moments that determine whether the ultimate win of the day – supporting the learning and growth of children – hangs in the balance. They are the relationship-rich exchanges that shape the success or failure of the most troubled students. And as with baseball prior to 1960, they are the blind spots in our current efforts to measure an educator’s overall value.
Of course, relief pitchers have a big advantage over educators when it comes to having their saves recorded: statisticians keep track of every single event in every single game. But that doesn’t mean we need to wait until a similar capacity exists in American classrooms – or even that we should pursue such a goal. Instead, classroom closers could earn saves one of two ways: by self-reporting the event, or by awarding one to a colleague whose learning-saving actions you were privileged enough to witness.
Keeping track of these sorts of events wouldn’t make sense for purposes of awarding bonuses or ranking teachers against one another. But it would be a way to remind us that, in the end, the skill of a teacher is as much about late-game emotional heroics as it is about everyday intellectual growth.
(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)
Bill Gates — Close, But Not Quite, on Teacher Evaluations
There’s an Op-Ed in today’s New York Times in which Joe Nocera discusses the Gates Foundation’s ambitious new efforts to crack the code of teacher assessment and evaluation, a valid goal is ever there was one. Piloting a new system in four districts — and providing local leaders with tens of millions of dollars to implement it — the Gates team seems to have recognized the limited value of test scores; in these communities, they comprise only a small part of a teacher’s evaluation scorecard. As Nocera writes, “The combination of peer review and principal review comprise 60 percent of the evaluation. And students are also asked questions aimed at eliciting how well their teachers are instructing them.” Significantly, Gates is also paying for a cadre of peer teachers, whose sole job is to work with classroom teachers and help them improve the quality of their practice.
Sounds great, right? And indeed, already this morning I’ve heard from friends and family who read the piece and wanted to confirm I shared their belief in the self-evident value of the Gates work. Except there’s something not quite right with this picture. You can locate it in the words of Thomas Kane, the Harvard education professor who advised the Gates Foundation as they gathered a wealth of data — from videotapes to in-person observations — to try and unlock the mystery of what makes some teachers so effective. All of that work, Kane says, was aimed at “identifying the practices that are associated with student achievement.”
There’s the rub.
If we really want to re-imagine education for the 21st century, the very first step is to recognize that student achievement — i.e., academic growth — is not the only goal we should have for our children (and, by extension, our teachers). Equally vital is a child’s social/emotional development, and to continue to give short-shrift to it is to misunderstand not just how people learn, but also the very way we see and interact with the world.
The world over, successful organizations and systems are aligned first and foremost around what they value, and the values then dictate what gets measured (including things that may not lend themselves to a metric at all), not the other way around. That’s why here in America, education reform will remain elusive until we clarify the type of growth — head, heart and hands — we value most in our children, our society, and our schools. And no amount of money will change that.
Living the DaVita Way
On a chartered bus in Nashville, surrounded by colorfully-clad nurses and office administrators, I knew I was in for a different sort of experience when the woman next to me found out I was a newbie, leaned closer and assured me: “Everyone remembers their first.”
It’s not what you think.
In fact, it was the annual conference for the 41,000 employees of DaVita, a Fortune 500 company that specializes in renal care – and, as it turns out, in creating a transformational organizational culture.
The bus was part of an elaborate plan to ensure that every arrival to the conference felt welcomed and valued. Volunteers were scattered throughout the airport with signs leading us slowly to the bus, where we boarded amidst an expectant, cheerful din. An orientation video provided further clarity of what to expect, although nothing can really prepare you for arriving at a hotel and being greeted by hundreds of red-shirted DaVita employees, a house band playing Jumpin’ Jack Flash, and the company’s CEO, Kent Thiry, personally greeting – and hugging – each new arrival.
Veteran staffers refer to it as “the DaVita way”, and it was on display for the next three days. Yet DaVita’s story is not just remarkable for what it is, but what it was, and how it remade itself.
Headquartered in Denver, DaVita was, as recently as 1999, nearly bankrupt. That’s when Thiry took the top post and chose to embark on an organization-wide effort to craft a new set of core values and sense of mission, and a work culture of shared responsibility, democratic decision-making, and continuous learning and growth.
“About a third of the staff said, ‘OK, that’s the fad of the month,’ Thiry recalled for the Stanford Business Review. “A third of the room was literally insulted that I would be demeaning them by thinking that they’d fall for that sort of rhetorical flourish. And maybe a third were interested.”
But Thiry persisted, so certain was he that a healthy culture helps people “feel an emotional level of trust and mutual commitment” and frees them from the feelings of fear, confusion and mistrust that plague unhealthy work environments.
After years of working at it, DaVita now describes itself as a global village with a Trilogy of Care: “for our patients, our teammates and our world.” As DaVita Chief Wisdom Officer Steve Priest explains, “When we choose to become citizens of the DaVita community, we make a decision to engage our head, heart and hands for the greater good of those around us.”
That means employees are expected to watch out for each other and work toward the good of the community. It means DaVita’s business objectives are always designed to support the village first, and the bottom line second. And it means that what drives each employee has more to do with who they are than what they do. “We say we are a community first and a company second,” Thiry said. “That doesn’t mean we don’t care about profit, but it’s a means, not the end.”
The clarity of this vision is on ubiquitous display at a DaVita conference. Giant banners list the company’s mission and core values, alongside personal testimonials from staff, clients and patients that testify to the power of the DaVita way. Thiry also models the values by publicly sharing the results of his own 360-degree performance review – and publicly reflecting on the areas where he sees himself in need of the most improvement.
As one attendee told me, “What makes us special is that our goal is not just to create better workers. We value all aspects of a person – head, heart and hands – and we evaluate people that way as well. That’s why our culture is so strong – we share a mission to cultivate healthy, happy people – our patients, our clients, and ourselves – and that is the standard against which we measure our work each year.”
Thanks to this clarity of purpose, the dark days of 1999 have given way to annual revenue in excess of $6 billion, alongside a strong commitment to organizational democracy. “A company produces most what it honors most,” says Thiry. “And we want a community of citizens, not just employees. You can’t create citizens unless you ensure that everyone has a voice and an understanding of how to use it effectively. It really is that simple – and that difficult.”
My neighbor was right. Everyone really does remember their first.
Kid Whisperers
In theory, Buck is a documentary about horses, and a cinematic profile of the laconic cowboy who has learned to speak their silent animal language.
In fact, Buck is a documentary about how people (and animals) learn – and a reminder that just because something has always been done a certain way doesn’t mean there isn’t a better way to do it.
Against a backdrop of horizontal landscapes, azure skies, and shape-shifting clouds, the movie follows Buck Brannaman as he conducts horse clinics across the country. But these clinics aren’t solely about helping people learn to ride horses. “A lot of times, rather than helping people with horse problems,” he explains in the film’s opening minute, “I’m helping horses with people problems.”
Buck’s own life story bears this out. A professional rodeo entertainer by the age of six, he was beaten mercilessly by his hard-driving father, Ace. By the time a gym teacher spotted the network of thick welts on his back and buttocks, the young boy had grown silent with fear and mistrust. Swift interventions by caring adults and a loving foster family slowly restored Buck’s sense of self-worth, but the father’s beatings left a permanent wound the son sought to heal through a different understanding of human and animal nature. “I was looking for a peaceful place to be,” he explains in a clipped, twangy rhythm. “There’s a lot of fear in both the horse and the human. So there has to be trust.”
Unfortunately, the historic approach to horse training was about anything but trust. Horses were tied to posts, whipped, prodded, and constrained – the logic being that the only way to get such strong animals to submit to a human’s will was by literally “breaking” them down. Brannaman’s clinics demonstrate a different approach, one based on a deep sense of empathy, respect, and communication – and filled with valuable lessons for the participants that extend beyond the riding circle.
“You can’t be a good guy when you leave the barn, and a bad guy when you enter the barn. Human nature doesn’t work that way.”
“Your energy moves the horse.”
“Everything’s a dance.”
“Respect isn’t fear; it’s acceptance.”
“It’s not the young-un’s fault. He just doesn’t know what’s expected of him.”
At one point, Brannaman demonstrates what he means by holding one end of a rope and asking a participant to hold the other. “If I jerk at you, hard and sudden, like this, you’re going to flinch every time I approach you. And that’s definitely one way to get the horse’s attention. But if I just pull gently and steadily until you feel the tightening of the rope, like this, then I’m operating on feel, and I don’t even need to grip the rope tightly. It’s how you get there, to that point of deep communication, that matters.”
What makes Buck such a powerful film is the way he proves what we instinctively know to be true about how people learn – and struggle to act upon. Too often, instead of providing the parental or pedagogical equivalent of what Buck does with horses – call it “kid whispering” – our actions result in whispering kids. Instead of engendering a deep sensitivity to the invisible, orderly dance that occurs between two beings learning to trust one another, our efforts result in visible indicators of control. It’s the modern manifestation of the age-old saying: children are to be seen, not heard. And it’s just as out of tune with how we learn as horse breaking is with how they learn.
Buck reminds us that when learning is understood as the effort to empathize with another, it transforms both teacher and student. He reminds us that the journey is certain to surface what is submerged, and require us to make sense of what we see. And whether we’re parents, teachers or trainers, he demonstrates that the art of the whisper comes in the search for, and discovery of, the delicate balance between reassuring structures and empowering freedoms, something Buck describes as the ‘soft feel.’
“Most people think of a feel as when you touch someone,” he tells us. “But a feel can have a thousand meanings. Sometimes a feel is a mental thing. Sometimes it’s a glance exchanged between horse and human from across the arena. But always it’s an invitation from the horse to come closer, and it’s a moment of perfect balance.”
Stories of Transformation: Blue (School) Skies Ahead
It was fifteen years ago, but I still remember the first time I saw Blue Man Group. Watching those bald blue aliens discover how to eat a Twinkie, or investigate the queasy vibrations of a giant Jello cake, or climb the walls of the theater to learn more about the people who were sitting there – well, anyone who’s seen the show knows there’s nothing quite like it.
Since that time, Blue Man Group has become an international phenomenon, and an unlikely aesthetic portal through which to vicariously experience the wonders of inquiry, discovery and mischief. And now, those same core ingredients are at the heart of a remarkable new school in New York City – a school I got to visit and see through the eyes of two of its founders, “Blue Man” Matt Goldman and his wife, Renee Rolleri.
“Blue Man Group started in the 1980s as this outrageous idea,” Matt explained, shortly after we entered the school’s kinetic entry hall on a recent Friday morning and placed our shoes amidst a beehive of cardboard storage tubes lining the walls. “Our goal was to inspire creativity in our audiences and ourselves. We wanted to speak ‘up’ to the intelligence of our audience members while reaching ‘in’ to their childlike innocence. We wanted to create a place where people continually learn and grow and treat each other with just a little more consideration than we typically find in the ‘real world.’ And we wanted to have fun doing it.”
By the mid-2000s, their oddball idea now a full-fledged, flowering franchise, Matt, fellow founding Blue Men Phil Stanton and Chris Wink, and their wives formed a parent-run playgroup. Soon thereafter, they realized the same principles that formed the foundation for a successful theatrical performance could also be at the center of a successful school. “Better still,” Renee added, “those principles might even help spur a re-imagining of education for a new era, and a restoration of some of what this recent era of test-driven accountability has cast aside.”
The school’s mission statement spells out the core ingredients such a re-imagining will require: “cultivating creative, joyful and compassionate inquirers who use courageous and innovative thinking to build a harmonious and sustainable world.” And all of these characteristics are visibly on display for anyone who visits the school’s building on Water Street, formerly the Seamen’s Church Institute, near the southern tip of Manhattan. Student artwork is ubiquitous, from paintings to sculptures to support beams that have been turned into trees. Every floor has a common space that the children are responsible for decorating. A construction lab features a treasure chest of wooden blocks of all sizes, and everyone likes to spend time in the “wonder room” – a black-lighted, fully padded playspace with a disco floor – yes, a disco floor. Otherwise-drab hallways are brought to life with pastel colors, feathers, and fabric. And each classroom is anchored by adults who are deeply skilled in progressive teaching practices that date back more than one hundred years.
In that sense, aside from its distinctive decorative flourishes, much of what the Blue School does is not new, and does not claim to be. After all, John Dewey knew a thing or two about how people learn, and as Renee pointed out, “Dewey’s Lab School was both a destination for learning and a base camp for cultivating culture. That’s what we want here as well.”
However, two components of the Blue School’s program are new – groundbreaking, even – and the rest of us would be wise to take notice.
The first is the school’s educational framework, which takes its organizing principles directly from the personality profile of the Blue Man himself. “When we were designing the show,” Matt explained, “we imagined the characters seeing and interacting with the world like children do. The Blue Man continually explores and researches the world around him. So we imagined him doing so via six different lenses:
- The Group Member – the lens of collaboration, connection, and global citizenship
- The Scientist – the lens of curiosity, critical thinking, experimentation and analysis
- The Hero – the lens of perseverance, commitment and leadership
- The Trickster – the lens of provocation, innovation, and play
- The Artist – the lens of imagination, instinct and creative expression
- The Innocent – the lens of emotional awareness and mindfulness
“These six lenses are mindsets or approaches children, teachers, and others in our community can assume to explore work, academic areas, an environment, and materials,” Matt shared while we watched a cluster of four-year-olds make mud in their airy, light-filled classroom. “We want to teach our kids how to surf in all of those different energies. And we want to help them develop critical life skills and practices along the way.”
An educational framework organized around archetypal personalities, each of which is mapped to different core attributes that combine to make up a creative, joyful and compassionate person? I have never seen another school organized in such a way, and the elegance of the design extends to which lenses are likely to be most compatible with which components of the curriculum (which, befitting a progressive school, is negotiated between children and adults, and which therefore largely unfolds in real time based on expressed student interests). This is what makes Renee proudest. “We’re still learning, but so far we’ve been able to create a healthy, warm, safe, nurturing environment where community is paramount and where children’s interactions between classes are just as important as what happens during classes. It’s the kind of educational program I wish I’d had for myself and which we all dreamed we’d have for our children – a place where people feel like there is genuinely no better place to learn and to grow.”
What makes the Blue School’s framework even more exciting is its commitment to explicitly link everything it does to the latest research about how the brain works, and about how people learn. As Renee explained, “we know there is a broad range of expectations within each age group and that the rate of development varies greatly between children. This is why we believe age doesn’t matter nearly as much as sequence. There are clear developmental progressions that children experience – physically, cognitively, emotionally, and linguistically – and no one experiences any of them at quite the same pace. Why, then, do we continue to educate children in a linear, grade-by-grade process, when the research clearly tells us that this is not how people learn?”
Lindsey Russo, the school’s director of curriculum documentation and research, agrees. “Schools were not applying this new neurological science out there to how we teach children,” she said in a recent article profiling the school in the New York Times. “Our aim is to take those research tools and adapt them to what we do in the school.”
Consequently, children at the Blue School learn directly about the different regions of their brains, and what thoughts and behaviors they control. Adults speak daily about the importance of meta-cognition and helping children develop “supported autonomy.” And school leaders seek advice and feedback from leading scholars like UCLA neuro-psychiatrist Dan Siegel and NeuroLeadership Institute co-founder David Rock.
“Teaching and learning are reciprocal processes that depend upon and affect one another,” Renee said, smiling, as a phalanx of strollers and parents surrounded her. “We just hope our school can be one of the places to help us understand, as a country, how to support those processes in ways that help as many people as possible unleash their wildest, most beautiful selves on the world we all share.”
(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)
Hey Parents – It’s Time to Stop Playing Favorites
The other night over dinner, hours after my mother-in-law had returned home to New York, I casually asked my son Leo: “What was your favorite part of the weekend?”
As I watched him stare blankly back at me, struggling to find an answer, I found myself wishing I could have a parental do-over. Why do we ask children this question so often? Would it make a difference if we asked it a different way?
Anyone who’s a parent knows what I’m talking about: we’re always asking kids to tell us their favorite color, pick their favorite TV show, or select their favorite relative. And our intentions are in the right place; after all, we’re trying to learn about how they see themselves and others, and to give them a chance to reflect on what feels good and pleasing.
But here’s the problem: children don’t see the world as a set of isolatable favorites; we make them see it this way. Watching Leo’s face, I realized that for him, there was no single favorite memory – just a pastiche of happy experiences that blended together to make up a general feeling I’ll call “Weekend with Nana.” It wasn’t until I asked the “favorite” question that it even occurred to him he should decide which of his experiences with her was the best of all.
This distinction is not exclusive to Leo. All of us benefit greatly when we develop metacognition – or the skill to reflect on our own thoughts and feelings, see ourselves interacting with the environment and people around us, and become familiar with our own preferences and the preferences of others. Recent research even suggests this may be the most important skill of all when it comes to learning how to learn, both in school and in life. Yet the reality is that asking kids to pick favorites isn’t an optimal path toward helping them become more holistically self-aware; it’s an emotional short cut that teaches them to artificially divide their memories into preferred parts.
How might Leo have responded differently if I had asked this question instead: “What made you feel happy this weekend?”
The difference between the two questions is subtle but significant. With one, we’re asking children to rank the world. With the other, we’re inviting them to reflect on it.
Only one of those questions will actually help build the muscle memory of metacognition, and allow for a fuller understanding of the multiplicity of experiences that shape how we think and feel. And that’s not playing favorites.
The Politics of Education – Dueling Budgets
This weekend, I was on CNN to speak about President Obama’s and Representative Ryan’s dueling budget proposals, and asked to comment on which of the two lighted the surer path to true education reform. See for yourself:
Why You Should See “Bully” – and What We Should All Do in Response
Bully, the new film that opens today in theaters across the country, begins with the image of a heavy-diapered toddler named Tyler, happily staggering across the wet grass in front of his family’s Oklahoma home.
Moments later, we learn of Tyler’s painful path in the adolescent years that followed – years that were marked by relentless bullying and abuse at school, and years that culminated with his decision to hang himself, in a closet in his family’s home, at the age of 17.
Bully is a must-see film because it makes visible one of the most painful, universally kept secrets of our society and our schools: Every one of us has been bullied, and every one of us has bullied someone else.
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