Those Who Can't

William Hundert is a passionate and principled Classics professor who finds his tightly-controlled world shaken and inexorably altered when a new student, Sedgewick Bell, walks into his classroom. What begins as a fierce battle of wills gives way to a close student-teacher relationship, but results in a life lesson for Hundert that will still haunt him a quarter of a century later.

When principal Joe Clark takes over decaying Eastside High School, he's faced with students wearing gang colors and graffiti-covered walls. Determined to do anything he must to turn the school around, he expels suspected drug dealers, padlocks doors and demands effort and results from students, staff and parents. Autocratic to a fault, this real-life educator put it all on the line.

Jamie Fitzpatrick and Nona Alberts are two women from opposites sides of the social and economic track, but they have one thing in common: a mission to fix their community's broken school and ensure a bright future for their children. The two women refuse to let any obstacles stand in their way as they battle a bureaucracy that's hopelessly mired in traditional thinking, and they seek to re-energize a faculty that has lost its passion for teaching.

At Phoenix Progressive School, students take notes lying on parlor couches and are encouraged to explore their gifts through electives like break-dancing and graphic-novel writing. In the midst of all this liberal pedagogy and budding talent, Molly Maxwell feels unexceptional, until she falls for her attractive English teacher, Ben.

After flying home to L.A. for the funeral of his estranged record-producer father, a struggling man discovers that the will stipulates that he must deliver $150,000 in cash to a 30-year-old alcoholic sister he never knew existed, and her troubled 12-year-old son.

Justin McLeod is a former teacher who lives as a recluse on the edge of town after his face is disfigured from an automobile accident ten years earlier, in which a boy was incinerated--and for which he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Also suspected of being a paedophile, he is befriended by Chuck, causing the town's suspicions and hostility to be ignited.

In 1980, Queens, New York, a young Jewish boy befriends a rebellious African-American classmate to the disapproval of his privileged family and begins to reckon with growing up in a world of inequality and prejudice.

Set in the not so distant future, in Any Town USA, sixteen-years-old Herman Howards makes a fateful decision. He enters his suburban school and kills thirty nine students, two teachers, and a police officer. Just before his arrest, he emails his idol, famous journalist Lax Morales, sending him clips of the shootings captured with Herman's own digital camera. In the clips Herman tells Lax, "I want to tell my story on your show". Lax, haunted by his own past, is now face to face with Herman.

An unruly student at a private all-girls boarding school scandalously accuses the two women who run it of having a romantic relationship.

A chronicle of three weeks in the lives of several high school teachers, administrators and students through the eyes of substitute teacher, Henry Barthes. Henry roams from school to school, imparting modes of knowledge, but never staying long enough to form any semblance of sentient attachment.

When a Brooklyn high school student writes the police code for homicide, 187, inside a textbook owned by teacher Trevor Garfield, Garfield feels threatened. The principal dismisses the incident, but the same student stabs Trevor soon after. Fifteen months later, a physically and emotionally scarred Trevor relocates to California and takes up substitute teaching. To his dismay, his new school is as full of dangerously undisciplined students as his old one—including three Indigenous Latino American males and one European-American male claiming membership in tagging gang K.O.S. (Kappin' Off Suckers)—driving him over the edge.

Jaime Escalante is a mathematics teacher in a school in a hispanic neighbourhood. Convinced that his students have potential, he adopts unconventional teaching methods to try and turn gang members and no-hopers into some of the country's top algebra and calculus students.