Teachers are among the most-often portrayed characters in television and film—but all that screen practice hasn’t made for an accurate portrayal, or a particularly insightful one.
“Our work with EACH student is passionate and personal,” wrote James Winter, a 6th grade literature and language teacher at Odyssey Preparatory Academy, in response to a recent Education Week LinkedIn poll. “You cannot capture that on TV.”
Hugh Gundlach, an education researcher at the University of Melbourne in Australia and a longtime teacher-trainer and film buff, has built the Teachers on Screen Project, a database of more than 1,500 fictional teachers across more than 750 film and television series in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia.
The depictions range from a distracted and bumbling educator in the 1898 silent short “The Nearsighted Schoolteacher,” to Tina Fey’s insightful math teacher in the 2024 reboot of “Mean Girls.”
In part, the range is due to the fact that the job itself has some built-in highs and lows that appeal to filmmakers.
“It’s a double-edged sword to show how tough and thankless teaching can be,” Gundlach said, “while also taking some creative license to show how inspirational teachers and feel-good stories occur.”
On screen, teachers are often portrayed negatively
Gundlach coded each of the fictional portrayals and analyzed trends in the teaching accuracy and common tropes. On average, he found, teachers get a bad rap in these depictions: They are shown as lonely and financially struggling at home, while in the classroom they’re boring, lazy, antagonistic, or abusive. The few portrayed as somewhat competent in their subject often turn out to have a dark side, like Walter White in “Breaking Bad.”
For the most part, personal experiences with teachers trump media depictions when it comes to public opinions of the profession, said Larry Cuban, an education professor emeritus at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.
“When I look at public opinion polls, Americans, particularly those who have either gone through public education or currently have kids in schools, have faith in public schools and confidence in teachers,” Cuban said. “But there’s a disconnect in media portrayals, which tend to be bipolar—teachers as heroes or losers.”
In particular, fictional teachers serving low-income students or students of color, tend to be either lazy, bad teachers or maverick, usually white, “hero” teachers.
“The so-called ‘hero teacher’ films did not showcase very good practice,” Gundlach said. “When films like ‘Dangerous Minds’ [1995] and ‘Freedom Writers’ [2007] show the main character endearing themselves to the class by going off the set curriculum and doing unauthorized activities outside of class, this is not really best practice. Some movie teachers get too involved in their students lives, or focus on just one student, which is also inappropriate.”
That’s if educators are shown teaching at all. Relatively little screen time is given to actual lessons. When pedagogical discussions do happen on screen, they often gloss over complex or controversial learning concepts like multiple intelligences or repeat long-debunked myths about learning.
And while it’s hard to link fictional portrayals directly to how media has tended to cover teachers, representations of teachers have also tended to whiplash back and forth. In 2014, covering the Vergara vs. California trial over teacher tenure, a Time magazine cover depicted a gavel squishing an apple under the headline “Rotten Apples.” Just four years later, Time’s cover featured a teacher who, among other things, was selling blood plasma to pay her bills.
Stereotyped depictions of teachers have real consequences
Cinematic stereotypes can affect those entering the profession. A 2020 study in the journal Teaching and Teacher Education analyzed the journals of young Americans who volunteered to teach in Namibia via emergency teaching programs.
Jacob Henry, a human geography researcher at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who conducted the study, found that less-prepared teachers—those who had not attended traditional teacher-training programs—tended to view their practice in ways that mirrored Hollywood “white savior” arcs.
“Underprepared teachers’ ‘successful’ classroom activities are not necessarily based in educational theory, but in cinematic drama,” Henry said, noting that when the young teachers experienced challenges in the classroom, they tended to “reflect on their failure to inspire students in the mold of Hollywood.”
Unrealistic expectations in popular media also can be the straw that breaks an already overwhelmed teacher’s will to remain in the classroom. A meta-analysis of U.S. and international teacher-retention studies found that the social approval and status of teachers had a bigger impact their decisions to stay in the profession than any other factor except pay—greater than class sizes, student misbehavior, or even personal safety.
And while educators of color do make up the majority of the cast in the hit sitcom “Abbott Elementary,” television and film teachers are often much less diverse than reality. The Teachers on Screen data suggests, for example, that about 19 percent of on-screen gym teachers and 30 percent of science, technology, engineering, or math teachers are female, while federal data show that in the United States, 41 percent of real-life gym teachers and 54 percent to 70 percent of science teachers are women.
Gundlach suggested it may be time for education consultants to weigh in on the on-screen depictions of classrooms and schools, as consultants do in medical dramas. On the HBO series “The Wire,” for example, the fourth season’s Baltimore schools setting and the fictional teacher Roland “Prez” Pryzbylewski was based in part on the experiences of one of the show’s co-creators, former teacher Ed Burns, and interviews with teachers.
“I cringe when I see characters on screen use incorrect CPR technique that would be dangerous in real life,” Gundlach said. “Equally, showing teachers doing things that would have them dismissed in real life is probably the most serious aspect of unrealistic portrayal.”
Jill Breitbart Zahn, a Broward County, Fla. teacher, agrees. While “Abbott Elementary does highlight some of the real B.S. and nonsense we deal with,” she wrote in response to a social post from Education Week, “no media portrayal has really captured the reality of teaching.”
Her preferred show, she said, might be more like a documentary.
“I do wish there was a reality show where cameras follow a teacher’s actual day for an entire year,” she said.
