Fiction or Reality?

This Chapter traces the representations of literacy in school films and education policy from Blackboard Jungle to the present in an effort to uncover reciprocal relationships between the shifts in education policy and the representations of literacy in school films. By examining representations of literacy in four school films—Blackboard Jungle, Up the Down Staircase, Lean on Me, and Won’t Back Down—alongside the education policies circulating and shifting in the same cultural landscape, the authors draw dire conclusions that the best representations of literacy and literacy instruction exist in the earliest film, while representations since gradually devolve into a sense of hopelessness represented in Won’t Back Down when a child with dyslexia is inappropriately forced to read aloud the directions to a standardized test.