The American Dream In The Wire

Title The Wire is one of the rarest yet most intriguing shows I have ever seen. It captures real life issues that many people tend to push to the side. Ed Burns and David Simon, creators of The Wire, cover a wide area of problems that vary from police institutions, the school system, politics and the corner. No matter which side an individual is on or which institution they are involved with, only one side can overcome the other. Many people believe that the American dream is one hundred percent attainable and obtaining that dream means that they have overcome everything else. This dream that many people want is just a farce in reality. The people do not overcome the institutions, the institutions overcome the people. One of the most corrupt …show more content…
Considering Sherrod was not going to school to begin with, it made his process more difficult. Sherrod’s guardian is perplexed at the idea of promoting a student who has not even finished third grade level material. The assistant principal states, “Social promotion; we don’t have the resources to repeat grade levels and we feel to place the older children in the younger classes is unfair to teachers who are responsible for maintaining order.” The students should be the main priority in this scenario, but instead the faculty is more concerned with maintaining order and spending money they do not have. As a result of all this, Sherrod felt uncomfortable in the situation and ended up skipping class constantly. He ended up where they all go when they feel helpless, the …show more content…
A new grant-funded program was put into place, which took the misbehaved kids and put them all together in a corner class. These kids do not listen to any rules, but once they realized there was no way out of the class, some began to behave. The whole point of the class is to get in the minds of the corner kids. These are the few teachers left that care about the students. Simon and Burns show the different sides of social promotion because the corner class is a reaction to the negative results of the corrupt system. Bunny Colvin, one of the teachers in this program states, "But it 's not about you or us or the test or the system. It 's what they expect of themselves. I mean every single one of them know they headed back to the corners...We pretend to teach them; they pretend to learn. Where they end up? Same damn corners." Bunny makes it clear that the system is just fooling itself. These children grow up in homes so devastating, therefore they take their bad behaviors to the next institution they are in. It takes certain devoted people to try and help them out of this never-ending