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Wilson High is NOT in the ghetto. Those racial tensions did NOT exist, even at that time. Here's an article from the Long Beach paper:
Local: Portrayal of Wilson environment, teacher Gruwell are unrealistic, some say.
By Kevin Butler, Staff writer
Article Launched: 01/06/2007 11:06:05 PM PST
LONG BEACH - Former Wilson English teacher Erin Gruwell - and her group of former students who called themselves "The Freedom Writers" - are once again in the national spotlight, thanks to a motion picture adaptation of the book based on the students' diaries.
Although Gruwell has been warmly received as she appears on national television programs such as "The View" to promote the movie that was released Friday, some Wilson teachers aren't applauding.
They have a different vision of Gruwell from that in the book and movie. Some see her as an excessive self-promoter who has hurt the school's reputation.
"Every teacher that I know that is worth their weight in salt talks about their students, their students, their students," said Brad Rudy, who worked as a substitute teacher while Gruwell was at Wilson and now is a permanent world history teacher there.
"People that knew Erin Gruwell knew that she talks about herself, herself and herself and then her students."
Some teachers, like Rudy, are upset about what they see as the negative and misleading portrayal of Wilson in the book and film.
Gruwell's supporters, including former Long Beach Superintendent Carl Cohn, have said they admire
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Gruwell's dedication to her students, some of whom recorded their personal struggles with issues like gang violence in their journal entries.
"She turned her classroom into a family," said Cohn, who led the Long Beach district from 1992 to 2002. "And this family was a positive substitute for the negatives - the really big-time negatives - in their lives."
Other Wilson teachers also praise Gruwell's ability to connect with students.
"Erin was a teacher that came in and gave the students the opportunity to dream, maybe for the first time," said Horace Hall, a government and economics teacher who was present during Gruwell's tenure.
Gruwell said some teachers have unfairly attacked her because she dressed formally and taught in unorthodox ways.
"I would never say that everyone was against me, because that's a generality that doesn't serve anyone's purpose," Gruwell said. "But there were unfortunately individuals who were very, very acerbic and very open about their disdain for me, and not just to me directly.
"It was behind my back to students, \ in the teachers' lounge."
Gruwell said she is being unfairly criticized as a self-promoter for attempting to be the face of badly needed education reform, she said.
"What I realized is that the media needed a spokesperson for our story," she said. "And although I would try to sometimes divert the interview from me to my students or to the cause, (journalists) always wanted to interview the educator because I was the catalyst for it."
The foundation she established after she left Wilson has used book proceeds to fund college scholarships for her former students. Gruwell also has trained other teachers in her instructional methods.
"So if I were self-promoting, I would have profited," she said. "I haven't."
Department drama
There were indications of tension within the Wilson English department during Gruwell's tenure, Cohn said.
Some employees at the school wrote Cohn saying "she ought to be reined in," he said. Cohn said he responded in writing that he supported Gruwell.
The controversy regarding her tenure at Wilson has been renewed in the wake of the release of the movie, which some say unfairly paints the East Long Beach high school as a dangerous, gang-plagued campus.
The movie, which takes place in the wake of the Rodney King riots, features graffiti being openly painted at school as well as a large melee on campus.
It also portrays simmering racial tension among students in Gruwell's classroom that has explosive potential, leading to physical confrontations in the film.
Rudy said that this portrait of Wilson is contrary to reality.
"It's not the blackboard jungle that the movie depicts it to be," he said.
Rudy said he worries that when he and other teachers mention to others that they teach at Wilson, those people will ask, "Is the school that bad?"
"And we are going to be defending ourselves from what amounts to a character assassination," he said.
Tension overstated?
Wilson English teacher Sue Westphal, who was an English department head during Gruwell's tenure and still teaches at the school, said that the "Freedom Writers" story portrays Wilson as a "gang-infested school where nobody cares."
At the time of the Rodney King riots there was a fight involving 20 or so kids at the campus, said Wilson teacher Hall.
Like any large, urban high school, there were occasional fights at Wilson, but "kids I think felt pretty safe at school," he said.
Hall says that he's not worried about the movie giving Wilson a bad reputation, because the film is focused on Gruwell's classroom, not the entire campus.
Most of the action at Wilson takes place inside Swank's classroom, he noted.
Former Long Beach school board member Karin Polacheck, who is portrayed in the movie, said that any urban high school "is going to have issues and problems."
"Do I think it was overstated? Probably," she added.
Although some of Gruwell's students had been exposed to gangs, "I don't think that the story was dependent on that," Polacheck said.
"What Erin did with individual students had very little to do with the portrayal of the gang infestation and that kind of thing, other than where her kids came from," she said.
Composite characters
The movie's negative portrayals of two fictional staff members - an honors teacher and English department head that Gruwell says are composites - have also caused a stir.
In the movie, the English department head makes disparaging remarks about Gruwell's students, telling her that she can't make the kids want an education.
The male honors teacher also can be heard making what could be viewed as a vague, racist remark about the influx of minority students to the campus via busing.
In an incident drawn from the book, that teacher also makes a black student uncomfortable by asking for the black perspective on reading material.
Some say that scenes like those will reflect badly on other Wilson teachers.
The Freedom Writers story falsely implies that "no one cared about kids until she arrived," said Wilson drama teacher Randy Bowden.
"I've never heard a racist statement from a teacher in 35 years" at Wilson, Bowden said.
Suits and pearls
Gruwell said that she did face resistance from some English teachers.
Gruwell said a teacher told her she was making other teachers "look bad" by taking her kids on field trips. She was also told before she received a freshman class of at-risk students, "Let's see what you can do with these kids, hotshot," she said.
Some of those sentiments were fueled by Gruwell's business suits and pearls, and her peppy demeanor, said Gruwell, who has said there were some "phenomenal" teachers in the English department and Wilson as a whole.
She chose not to respond to the critics, instead opting to ignore the sources of the "negativity," she said.
"I fight back with success," she said. "I always felt that I was not here to win Miss Congeniality of the teachers' lounge. I was there to teach kids English."
Gruwell said that the two characters were much more negatively portrayed in an initial vision of the movie, but she successfully battled to have them "softened" for the final result.
Book dispute
In the film, the department head - a character named Margaret Campbell - is reluctant to give Swank copies of "The Diary of Anne Frank" because her students might lose or damage them.
When Swank suggests the class read "Romeo and Juliet," Campbell, portrayed by actress Imelda Staunton, suggests an abridged version, saying Swank's students couldn't handle the full text.
Westphal, who was an English department head during Gruwell's tenure at Wilson, disagrees with the portrayal of those events.
As far as the Anne Frank incident is concerned, she said that Gruwell "had free access to the book room." Gruwell was also free to use the full text, rather than the abridged version, Westphal added.
In fact, Westphal said she read one of the books Gruwell wanted to use in her class - "Night" by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel - and ordered it for the following year.
Westphal calls "baloney" Gruwell's statement that her business suits were off-putting.
"Everybody was wearing suits and dresses back then," she said.
David Beard, who was Wilson's head counselor during Gruwell's tenure, said that the Campbell character is a "Hollywood exaggeration."
Campbell "seems to be a composite of every single negative thing that was said about Erin" during her time at Wilson, said Beard, who has expressed support and admiration for Gruwell's work and sits on the advisory board of her foundation.
As to how such tensions are portrayed in the film, ex-superintendent Cohn said, "I think Hollywood on some of those things has its formulas that it uses.
Class continuity
Another source of unrest: Gruwell's highly unusual request to keep her kids for all four years of high school.
The request raised serious concerns, Beard said. If, after freshman year, she took control of a 10th grade class of the same group of students, what would the original 10th grade teacher do instead?
The fear was especially pronounced as the senior year approached, he added.
The department made the arrangement workable by making Gruwell's senior course an elective, Beard said. There were enough retirements and transfers during the four years to accommodate the unusual schedule changes, Beard added.
One of the most dramatic parts of the film's storyline is Swank's effort to get permission to continue with her students until their senior year.
In the film, Gruwell and Campbell - who opposes the move - meet with Cohn and Polacheck. Each makes her case in a dramatic moment.
In reality, the decisions each year to allow Gruwell to continue having her kids the following year were not a major, divisive issue, Beard said.
"We worked it out," he said.
That dramatic meeting in the movie actually never took place, according to Cohn and Polacheck.
As a board member, she wasn't involved in such school-specific decisions, Polacheck said.
During her students' freshman year, Gruwell was assigned to teach what could be called "regular" English classes, as opposed to those reserved for more advanced students.
Gruwell said her students had low standardized test scores. Some of them were ESL students, and others were from detention homes, she said.
But her classes became popular, and there were many students who wanted to transfer in, Beard said.
"Our difficulty was keeping kids in their own English classes," he said.
Unlike in the movie, where an honors teacher is infuriated when one of his students wants to enter Gruwell's class, such transfers were not really "that big of a deal" to teachers, Beard said.
"There were a lot of teachers at Wilson in the English department who thought she was doing a marvelous job," Beard said.
Beard said that the media attention Gruwell and her students received may have made some teachers jealous.
"Some had the notion that 'Hey, one of our own is getting all these headlines and all these accolades,"' Beard said. "'And we work as hard as she does, and who ever comes and talks to us?' And that was a normal human reaction to that kind of thing."
Westphal said she is not jealous of Gruwell.
"I am very happy with what I've done in my profession," she said.
Gruwell "really did some good things, but she created problems as well," she said.
Education debate
The larger message of the movie is the positive impact of a high school teacher who makes a new connection with teenagers in the classroom, said Cohn, who is now superintendent of the San Diego Unified School District. Research shows that that tactic helps learning, he said.
"I hope the movie really joins the debate on secondary school reform," he said.
Polacheck said she understands why some at Wilson may be upset with the movie.
"If I were at Wilson now or if I were a parent of a Wilson student, I would say that's not what my school is like," she said. "And this is Hollywood. There is no question that this is not a documentary ... But the big story is what Erin did in the classroom and how she made a difference with those students." _____________________________________________
Long Beach is the spot where I serve my caine - Snoop
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