By Adrian Horton, Photo: Argot Pictures, The Guardian, August 15, 2022
There’s a moment early in Let the Little Light Shine, a riveting documentary on one community’s fight to preserve their grade school, when it becomes clear that Chicago’s National Teachers Academy is no ordinary place.
It’s a school assembly, and the students – overwhelmingly Black and brown children from the city’s South Side, kindergarten through eighth grade – pack benches in the cafeteria. Two of the older students perform a welcome march; the trombonist plays fine, but the clarinetist is wildly squeaky, every note off. You would expect his peers to laugh – middle school is not renowned for being a forgiving place. But the students are quiet. When the music teacher asks the clarinetist to try again, they clap in encouragement. After another squeaky run-through, the principal takes the stage and reframes the potentially embarrassing moment into a strength: “It took a great amount of courage for them to try and try again and persist.” The students give a standing ovation.
Their encouragement, the general camaraderie of the scene, is surprising and heartwarming – emblematic of a warm community and the clear-eyed film capturing its mosaic. National Teachers Academy (NTA) is, in intangible ways like the school assembly and on paper, a standout elementary and middle school. Opened in 2002, NTA had become one of Chicago’s best public schools, one of the very few to be high-percentage minority, high-percentage low-income and also have the district’s top performance rating. Yet despite its success – a rare beacon for Black students in the Chicago public school system – the district announced, in spring 2017, a plan to transition NTA into a high school that would serve predominantly white families that had moved into Chicago’s gentrifying South Loop neighborhood.
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