Watching McFarland USA forces a high paid SAT tutor to reveal how rigged society is.
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Popularly speaking, McFarland USA is going to be viewed in two ways:
- Exactly how Disney intended it, as a feel good movie about a man who finds his true calling while in the service of others.
- Through the lens of the Social Justice Warrior who will recount the tale of white privilege coming to town to save the brown people.
There are few who will see it the way that I do.
Few people are going to sob on their way home as a single word echoes between their ears: traitor.
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I was born and raised poor, in a small town.
We had enough, and the truth is, I never knew we were poor until I got older and saw all the things other people had. Getting a single video game at Christmas was indicative of Christmas, not of my parents’ lack of wealth. I wasn’t struggling as hard as the kids in McFarland, but I definitely skipped meals in high school so that I could save for gas money and get the hell out of town a few times a week.
Today, I barely recognize my past life unless I’m visiting home. I work twenty hours a week and live a more than comfortable life. I pay rent and see doctors when I’m sick. I write and work out and play sports with my friends, activities for which I forsake work twice a week, despite the fact that I could earn hundreds of dollars if I would just pound the pavement instead.
I get to make these choices because of my clientele. They’re rich—some of the richest people in the world. Up in the hills, I sip cappuccinos made by personal chefs in houses that overlook the most sought after links in all of golf. My students have the best of everything. Their grandparents own football teams. Their moms spend most of their time volunteering because dad’s job covers everything and then some. There’s a very high likelihood that the name on the back of the computer you’re using to read this features the last name of one of my protégés. I Skype kids while they’re on vacation in Hawaii for the weekend.
I’m a tutor. I get kids into college.
The only problem is, they’re not the kids who really need me.
I love these kids, my silver spoon suckling babes, but I am a traitor. That’s where McFarland stabbed me, right in my sense of righteousness. I have a wonderful life right now in spite of a great many things, including a recent divorce and near-perpetual singlehood that has haunted me since the split.
I’ve done well for myself, but that’s just it. I’ve only done well for myself. Since my high school years, I’ve understood what Mr. White in McFarland USA only comes to understand in the end: working comfortably for well-off people may be a means to an end, but the true reward comes from helping others save themselves from destitution.
If one of my students fails to get into college, his parents will fund his silly dreams.
He’ll take a gap year, do community college, and still drag home a salary larger than mine because of his parents’ connections. He will caddy on a golf course and schmooze a millionaire who will see that glint in his eye—that confidence that I helped to put there—and he will rise above.
The kids I’m not helping, the ones that I would recognize staring back at me from any mirror, won’t. Without my services, the $200 an hour drills and practice tests, they’ll be stuck in their hometowns. I’m part of a bigger problem, the pushing of the achievement gap between rich and poor students.
Some of my students deserve a 1200 on the SAT, but with me, they’ll walk away dyslexically slipping those first two numbers into a 2100. Meanwhile, testing is crushing the dreams of some kid who buys his lunch based on which chicken sandwich feels heavier. Before long, he might knock up the local beauty queen who just happens to be a mess when she drinks too much. He might get his ribs broken and pray for the day that he can become the manager of a Pizza Hut and finally afford a vacation to Vegas he has always dreamed of. The world outside won’t exist. He’ll probably self-medicate with whatever’s handy and guide his kids through the same exact process, assuming he avoids prison long enough to do so. The poverty cycle turns again.
Luckily for him, he’ll never know just how circumscribed that existence is. He will never know what he could have been. He’ll never know what he could have been molded him into. While dozens of my trained rich pupils take up rows in lecture halls they never would have occupied without me, hundreds of deserving teenagers are trying to sleep while their parents punch walls and scream at each other.
I’m rigging a purported meritocracy.
Right now, somewhere, there’s a kid who, ten years from now, could have this life I live. A kid who will never know this life because I’m too content to be driving my brand new car and living by the sea.
As the migrant workers’ children run their race at the end McFarland, they see the finish line and press harder. They “lean in” as so many self-help books would tell them to, but modern viewers have no idea. Thirty years ago, they could do that—finish the race and ride the wave into a comfortable life. But today, there’s a mountain of men like me between them and the real finish line.
Most of us don’t care how bad the system is…
…and those of us who do, are too busy trying to pay off our student loans to listen to our consciences. The truth is, I couldn’t do it on a teachers’ salary. I couldn’t live a decent life and pay my bills. I’d be anxious and broken, torn between doing the right thing and doing what my principal told me to do. I watch my friends fall year by year, bitter and angry. College adjuncts and high school English teachers—all of them get pulled down by the weight that society refuses to take from their shoulders.
Even as I despise Mr. White for being so xenophobic and driven by traditional notions of success, I understand why he’d consider leaving the trappings of the underdog behind. There’s no way I could look the 18 year old me in the eyes and tell him what we will give up to have this life, and there’s no way he’d forgive me for doing it.
Photo: AP Photo/Disney, Ron Phillips