Season 4: When The Wire’s Realness Stumbled

The Wire: The Complete Fourth Season

I recently saw the 4th season of The Wire and enjoyed it greatly.  It’s a wonderful show much lauded for its "realness" which is, in part, due to series creator David Simon’s days as a police reporter for the Baltimore Sun.  His work on The Corner revealed his serious ability to connect research and art and The Wire took much that was learned in creating that painful show to produce a meaningful and commercially viable product.

That’s pretty darn hard to do.  So the glaring "fakeness" that pervaded Season 4′s portrayal of educational research was particularly disturbing though it certainly didn’t undermine the show as a whole and was probably accepted by most folks as real due to the public’s general misconception of such research.

Much of Season 4 focuses on the educational system and uses the twin examples of an educational research project conducted in the schools and a new teacher transitioning from another career.

The new teacher stuff is great and makes me wonder if David Simon is a fan of such education writers as Herbert Kohl and Jonathan Kozol.

But the tale of the educational research project starts with bullsh*t and uses that bullsh*t approach to fuel specific moments in the narrative in what is a dishonest manner out of keeping with David Simon’s work and reputation.

Since my PhD is from the College of Education at Ohio State University, I’ve studied with some of the world’s leading educational researchers and had peers who went on to do some serious research work in public schools.

I’ve also been involved with grant writing and know a bit about how that works for educational research grants.

When the educational researcher is introduced, he’s the kind of guy who would be out of touch with the streets.  That’s not necessarily a bad portrayal but it’s combined with the claim that he got this huge grant without actually having a clue about who he was going to research.

For the everyday viewer that probably all fits together.  However, for anybody with any knowledge of how such grants work, it’s obvious that this researcher would have had to have done some sort of pilot study that would have identified the population to be studied prior to applying for the grant.  He would have already been in there and would have written the grant only after doing the "what the heck am I doing here" part.

Nobody gives out that much money to people who haven’t done pilot studies and nobody lets you switch gears so radically from one age group to another without a lot of explanation back at the Foundation or wherever the heck the money came from.

On a related note, if you recall the first interview in the jail where the young man wilds out and can’t even comprehend the questions, you’ll be remembering a moment of drastic ethical code violations that could have cost this guy the grant and given him a huge amount of bad publicity as well as likely disciplinary action from his university if such behavior was uncovered.

Social scientists are not allowed to interview subjects who have not been fully informed of what’s going on and who can’t show that they are informed.  Getting around that is very difficult these days and certainly the interrogation room interview was in no way acceptable to any university’s review board.

For more on that topic, please see the Institutional Review Board webpages for Philadelphia’s Temple University.  It’s run of the mill, standard stuff for the most part and is the kind of thing fully discussed in everyone’s first graduate research courses in all fields involving human research.

Basically the initial scenes with the educational researcher were completely unconvincing and inaccurate.  Yet the general public’s view of academics as disconnected from reality and research as a shell game means they probably bought into these inaccuracies.

I will say the portrayals of the young researchers, who assisted the head researcher and the heart-warming cop, were well done.  There are a lot of strong young women coming through doctoral education programs who can conduct themselves successfully in multiple worlds and I was glad to see their strong characters.

I love The Wire for its truth.

I am deeply saddened by its lies.