My wife and I saw The Boys of Baraka Sunday afternoon. They said 76% of black male students don’t graduate from high school in Baltimore. The film focuses on four of the twenty “at risk” seventh and eighth graders who went in the fall of 2002 from the streets of inner-city Baltimore to an experimental boarding school in Kenya. The “one step forward, one step back” dynamic is not whitewashed. It’s both a documentary and a story, but certainly not a feel-good story.

The movie didn’t make this point directly, but indirectly it told me it would be much better to fight poverty and crime in the classroom instead of adding more police to the payroll and building more jail space.