March Madness: Revisiting "Hoop Dreams"
An essential exploration of inequality and opportunity
It’s March Madness - a perfect time for questioning the bizarre relationship between higher education and athletics in the US, acting like a genius when your bracket miraculously ends up in the 97th percentile (personal flex), and revisiting one of my all-time favorite documentaries.
Hoop Dreams, the 1994 documentary directed by Steve James, is ostensibly about two Chicago high school basketball players and their aspirations to play in the NCAA and beyond. Below its appearance on the surface as a film about basketball, it is really one of the most fascinating, unscientific longitudinal studies exploring access to opportunity, motivation, and what makes economic and social mobility possible.
Hoop Dreams follows two high school basketball players - William Gates and Arthur Agee. Both travel over an hour every day from inner-city Chicago to the prestigious St. Joseph High School in suburban Westchester, known for being the alma mater of NBA legend Isaiah Thomas. Both cope with a fairly similar set of racial and class barriers at the prep school and bond as a result.
In their freshman year, William starts on the varsity team and is touted as the “next Isaiah Thomas” by local newspapers, as Arthur struggles both athletically and academically. At the end of freshman year, Arthur is kicked out of St. Joseph when he is unable to pay tuition and can no longer find a sponsor to grant him a scholarship to play basketball.
There’s a whole lot that happens after that, but I’d suggest you go watch the documentary - I’ll keep this relatively spoiler-free. Let’s just say things might not turn out exactly as you’d expect given how they both ended their freshmen year, and there are some genuinely interesting twists and turns.
As one of the more layered and complex documentaries I’ve ever seen, Hoop Dreams has something for everyone and would appeal to both your die-hard sports fan and casual PBS viewer alike. Ultimately, the reason I wanted to write about it for this Substack is that it wrestles with the question I’m generally most interested in related to education - how do we facilitate and predict future academic and life success?
Once again, without giving too much away, Arthur and William’s lives are not unequivocally positively impacted by their ability to attend a school that would be considered better than their options in Chicago Public Schools. To add a policy perspective, Hoop Dreams’ ambiguity aligns with the mixed evidence we have surrounding school vouchers, suggesting achieving success is not merely as easy as taking students out of their locales and sending them to “better” (namely predominantly white, suburban, private) schools.
Overall, Hoop Dreams sticks with me because it captures the essence of a Sisyphean part of teaching and/or education research that is difficult to summarize - whether that be in a brief blog post, a dissertation, or in a nearly 3 hour documentary. All students, and by extension all schools, are caught in the middle of an extremely complex social web.
As someone who works in education research, this documentary grounds me in the fact that there is no one-size-fits-all solution or perfect way to determine which students will succeed while others will struggle. Likewise, there is no one intervention that will work for everyone, and two students with extremely similar “profiles” can take drastically different paths due to things that are out of an educator or school’s control. In profiling Agee and Gates, Steve James and his team encourage us to take a broader view of their subjects - not as solely athletes or students but as full, complex, people. There’s a lesson to be learned here for anyone interested in social science.
Hoop Dreams is currently streaming on Max and Paramount+. It is also available for free on Crackle and Pluto TV.