Abbott Elementary S2E20, “Educator of the Year”

In the episode “Educator of the Year,” a 2-minute scene captures a contentious conversation between the protagonist and second-grade teacher at Abbott Elementary, Janine Teagues, and Cassandra O’Neil, the mother of her student Deshaun. The scene begins with Janine alone in her classroom, checking her phone and sighing before walking into the hallway and spotting Ms. O’Neil, whom she has been expecting all day. With a smile and welcoming gesture, she invites the woman inside, but is quickly corrected by “Ms. O’Neil” with a nonchalant and uninterested “Cassandra is just fine.” The camera follows the two back into the classroom—Janine in a puffed turquoise and light green dress encircled with a gold belt, and Cassandra in a blue button-down uniform—as they sit down and promptly get into the circumstances of the visit. As Janine enumerates the details of Deshaun’s behavior, the stable view of her is disrupted as the camera flits back and forth, showing a progressively more irritated Cassandra who rolls and widens her eyes, sighing in her seat. There is then silence and a wide shot of the two women, Cassandra looking down and saying “Mm-hmm, I see,” and checking her watch. The tension builds as the camera closes in and jumps rapidly from Janine to Cassandra, Cassandra to Janine, with Cassandra’s heated retorts like “Thought what, exactly?” producing a furrowed brow and backtracking from Janine. Although she sustains strong eye contact, speaks slower, and uses more exaggerated hand movements, Janine’s attempts to break through with Cassandra are shattered as she snaps, “We are not a team. And I don’t know how he could be the best student he could be with a teacher like you.” Janine, in a sitcom-style fourth wall break, glances at the camera in disbelief, stammers, but ultimately loses control of the situation as Cassandra gets increasingly frustrated, collects her things, and states “If this is the best you can do, you are the worst teacher I have ever seen” before walking out, leaving Janine bewildered, silent, and sad. 

Set in an underfunded elementary school in Philadelphia, Abbott Elementary regularly explores the intersections of race, gender, and socio-economic status within its community. In this particular scene, we observe two working Black women attempting to navigate their respective struggles and motivations, albeit unsuccessfully. Both viewers and Janine enter the scene with an expectation of solidarity, an assumption of understanding between two individuals who are vying for the same objective (Deshaun’s academic success) and have overlapping identities (Black, woman, career). And yet, the interaction is frustrating and hard to swallow as the two women fail to see eye-to-eye, their opposing viewpoints on the matter embodied in the rapid cuts and minuscule zoom-in techniques that create layers of misunderstanding. As the protagonist, viewers are often more immediately sympathetic to Janine, whose most prominent trait is her confidence in her teaching ability. Indeed, on Reddit and X, viewers absolutely HATED Cassandra, finding her rude, dislikable, and yet sadly familiar to many real-life teachers. And while conscious acting choices (tone of voice, hand gestures, facial expressions) are key in creating this characterization, I think many viewers jumped to attack and shame this figure of a Black, working mother as rude, ungrateful, standoffish, etc… especially next to the warm and determined figure of Janine. There is danger in binarizing the two women as good and bad, right and wrong, but the show perpetuates such a reading by not bringing Cassandra back at a later point in the episode for further conversation and/or context. Instead, what we get is a disheartened Janine, crying to her coworkers about a parent who “destroyed her,” and the remainder of the episode is dedicated to her coworkers uplifting and affirming her teaching ability. And while I do not doubt that there are parents who exhibit those traits and who degrade teachers who are just trying their best, I also think Cassandra’s character contains more nuances than just being a “bad parent.” We don’t know the circumstances at home, the toil of her work, the presence or absence of another caretaker…I believe the show could have benefited from a deeper examination of Cassandra’s background, even at the risk of communicating less potently the message of educators’ inability to solve every problem for their students.