Hard Times At Douglass High: A No Child Left Behind Report Card

"The No Child Left Behind Act was created to boost academic levels of American students by setting standardized goals across the nation - and holding states, districts and schools accountable for performance. For urban schools in high - poverty areas, reaching these goals is a daunting task, and many now face the possibility of being taken over by the state - even being shut down.

At Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore, MD, the expectations raised by NCLB have reached a critical point. Academy Award winning filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond (I Am a Promise: The Children of Stanton Elementary School) offer a yearlong look inside a storied institution at a time when its very existence is in doubt. From cautionary profiles to triumphant tales, Hard Times at Douglass High serves as a reminder that education is inevitably an achievement of people, not policy."

The experiences of the staff and students at Baltimore's Frederick Douglass High School offers critical insight into the shortcomings of the controversial No Child Left Behind Act as filmmakers Susan and Alan Raymond document the frustrating battle for quality education in one of the nation's oldest African American High School. Frederick Douglass High School has an impressive history; among its successful alumni are such people as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. But today the school is in a shocking state of disarray: two thirds of the teachers on the staff are non-certified, and a substantial number of substitutes are unqualified to teach their subject areas. Confronted with the threat of sanctions unless the students are able to raise their scores in the annual standardized tests, the staff struggles with how to improve attendance and remedy the apathy of a student body that lacks the most basic reading and math skills. These are students from broken homes and poor backgrounds, their difficult situations in life often serving to distract them from their studies. Likewise, the story of Frederick Douglass High School is the story of many of the country's public schools, one in four of which were threatened with sanctions after failing to show improvement under the No Child Left Behind Act.