The UALR Joel E. Anderson Institute on Race and Ethnicity is partnering with the Historic Arkansas Museum, to host a screening of TESTED a documentary that follows a dozen racially and socioeconomically diverse 8th graders as they fight for a seat at one of New York City’s specialized high schools. Curtis Chin, the film’s writer/producer/director, will answer questions from the audience following the film. Please see details below. All welcome!
TESTED
The gap in opportunities for different races in America remains extreme. Nowhere is this more evident than our nation’s top public schools. In New York City, where blacks and Hispanics make up 70% of the city’s school-aged population, they represent less than 5% at the city’s most elite public high schools. Meanwhile, Asian Americans make up as much as 73%. This documentary follows a dozen racially and socioeconomically diverse 8th graders as they fight for a seat at one of these schools. Their only way in: to ace a single standardized test. Tested includes the voices of such education experts as Pedro Noguera and Diane Ravitch as it explores such issues as access to a high-quality public education, affirmative action, and the model-minority myth.
CURTIS CHIN, WRITER/PRODUCER/DIRECTOR
Curtis Chin has written for shows on ABC, the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon, as well as projects for NBC and Fox. He has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the San Diego Asian American Film Foundation, among others. His first documentary, Vincent Who?, has screened at over 400 colleges in four countries and won awards from the National Association for Multicultural Education and the Asian American Justice Center. As a community activist, he co-founded the Asian American Writers Workshop and Asian Pacific Americans for Progress. He has appeared on MSNBC, CNN, and NPR, and in Newsweek and other media outlets. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at New York University.
