Save Our Students

"When Dr. Napier came to me offering this job, I saw the lightning flash. I heard the thunder roll... I cried, 'My God, why has thou forsaken me?' And the Lord said, 'Joe, you're no damn good. ...you're no earthly good at all, unless you take this opportunity and do whatever you have to... transform and transmogrify this school into a special place... where the hearts and souls and minds of the young can rise.'"

— Joe Clark, Lean on Me

Nobody's school system is perfect, but some are really bad. Whether it's a single class that's lost the will to learn, or an entire school that would be "better off as a parking lot", the students that go here are only an inch from completely giving up on themselves — if they haven't already. And just when all is darkest, here comes a new teacher...

They may be a Trickster Mentor, or a Magical Negro, or a Zen Survivor. They may be a former student who came back to salvage their once-proud alma mater, or they might not be an actual teacher. They might not even want to do it. But whoever they are, they'll take these kids, and show them that they don't have to give up, and that the magic was inside them all along.

The students will be inspired to ace their SATs, or finally graduate from the 10th grade, or not join that gang, or even get a passing grade on a single test. Sometimes they win some competition. You can always expect one student to say "You don't know shit about us!" in the beginning and be the most antagonistic towards the new teacher. But over the course of the story, they'll have a Heel–Face Turn and become the teacher's biggest supporter and star pupil. Often, at the end, the teacher will leave again for one reason or another, but not without the class thanking him in a deep, heartfelt manner, especially the former troublemaker.

Often, though not always, has a racial/class element to it, with either a white, sheltered teacher in a gun-ridden Inner City School, or a black, fought-his-way-to-the-top teacher among privileged-but-bored upper-class white kids. Also has a strong tendency toward Glurge.

See Also Save Our Team, the sports version of this trope, and White Man's Burden, which also frequently appears in such works. Often overlaps with Sucky School or Boarding School of Horrors. The protagonist is usually a Psychologist Teacher and/or Enthusiastic Newbie Teacher.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Great Teacher Onizuka is a fairly downplayed example despite the name. He doesn't teach them how to do well in school and ace all their tests or whatever, but rather teaches them about the moral principles necessary to live a good life. And usually by accident, at that.
• Gokusen's Yankumi literally saves the school from being closed, in one episode.
• Episode 11 of Excel♡Saga is a merciless parody of this, though more focused on being a better baseball team than students.
  • Another one is the movie Ultimate Teacher.
• Done in the beginning of Negima! Magister Negi Magi. Negi's class happens to be the worst on campus. Under Negi's leadership, they manage to hit the #1 rank. Then after the resident Mad Scientist (and smartest person in the whole school) transfers out, they promptly drop to second-to-last.
• Being a deconstruction of the Fighting Series Played for Laughs, Ramen Fighter Miki deconstructs this trope with Kayahara Sensei: This is the kind of teacher that she strikes to be, she is a Bully Hunter, always trying to stop any abuse. Unfortunately, she is always depressed and is always being taken as a Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl, unable to admit she didn’t enjoy teaching at all, and all her students are afraid of her and the only thing she accomplishes is being a Sadist Teacher.
• Class 3-E of Assassination Classroom contains the students with the school's lowest grades, where they are subject to all sorts of school sanctioned mockery, bullying, and oppression in order to motivate the rest of the school to work hard to keep their grades up. One of the major premises of the series revolves around Koro-sensei (a nigh unkillable super-creature hell bent on destroying the world) becoming Class 3-E's new homeroom teacher and inspiring the students to excel despite their circumstances. It may very well be the most gloriously outlandish example of this trope in all of fiction.
• From Iruka's perspective, this is the plot of Jewelpet Sunshine. Iruka is the teacher assigned to the Plum class, considered the worst class in Sunshine Academy. His approach is to be as gung-ho about everything as possible. In the epilogue, almost all of the students are leading successful lives.
• GTO: The Early Years: Hot Teacher Nao Kadena exploits the male students' lust to get them to study hard, offering them a Marshmallow Hell or more if they do well on their tests. She motivates the female students by showing them the hot guys who go to prestigious universities. It's super effective.

Comic Books

• Spider-Man: Peter Parker briefly turned into one of these. And of course, he was much better as a superhero than as a teacher.

Films — Live-Action

• Big Brother (2018) is about Hong Kong-American ex-Marine Henry Chan taking up a job as a teacher in a dysfunctional classroom, and becoming a father figure to five students with Dark And Troubled Pasts. Things are muddled with the presence of Jianying, an influential mobster who is trying to sabotage the school so he can buy the building and convert it into an apartment, and also holds a grudge against Henry for a tragic incident that happened years ago.
• About a decade earlier, Poitier was on the other side of this, playing the ringleader of a classroom full of delinquents that Glenn Ford tries to reach in Blackboard Jungle. It's still one of the best, partly because the progress is slower and harder than in most of these examples. The end is only the beginning of victory.
• The Grizzlies is a darkly literal example of this trope, where a history teacher assigned to a small Arctic town struggling with the highest suicide rate in North America decides to form a lacrosse team to give students a sense of purpose and belonging.
• Lean on Me, starring Morgan Freeman. However, Freeman's Joe Clark turns the school around by kicking all the troublemakers off campus and applying no-nonsense "tough love" to the rest. The movie is claimed to be based on a true story, but it takes some liberties. Essentially, everything in the movie except the main character's name... is a liberty.
• Dangerous Minds: Classic example from The '90s based on a tell-all by a former marine-turned-teacher at an Inner City School.
• Stand and Deliver is similarly based on a true story, though a much more idealistic one, and one of the quintessential movies of the "genre". It's also notable for being a case of Unbuilt Trope, as it was one of the earlier films dedicated to the subject and subverting a lot of standard cliches. For one, Escalante is a hard-ass that simply pushes his students into extreme ends of hard work, rather than some trickster trying to win the crowd.
• The Principal also takes the tough love approach, straight to a climactic fistfight pitting the titular principal against the leader of one of the gangs that ravage the school.
• One of the classic examples would be To Sir, with Love, starring Sidney Poitier. In what might seem Hilarious in Hindsight to people who grew up with the modern version of this trope (white teachers, minority students), the film has an educated black teacher helping out inner-city white youths.
• Sister Act 2 fits the formula quite well, and it allows the sequel to be different from the first film. Deloris' nun friends ask her to help turn around the choir of the Catholic school she attended as a child. Also overlaps with Saving the Orphanage, since thanks to the greedy superintendent, if Deloris can't turn the problem class around, the archdiocese is going to close the whole school and have it torn down to make, yes, a parking lot.
• An interesting variant appears in the 1987 movie Summer School, where a clueless gym teacher is forced to teach a remedial English class during the summer, and will be fired if his students don't pass the end of the term test. So,instead of applying the Trickster Mentor method, he promises to do each kid a favor if they study.
• Dead Poets Society: One student ends up dead, and another gets expelled. The remaining students learn, though. Those two students had bad "endings" because one had an oppressive father and the son couldn't handle the constant verbal abuse and over-the-top expectations so he committed suicide. The second student arguably misinterprets the teacher's advice and goes a bit too far with it, although it is also suggested that he was a naturally rebellious type who would have rubbed the school establishment up the wrong way at some point anyway.
• The Chorus has a failed musician who becomes a supervisor, and turns his class into a Cherubic Choir, transforming the mischievous children's lives in the process.
• A variation appears in The Hairy Bird, a teen comedy set in the 1960s at an all-girls school. Faced with the prospect of their school merging with an all-boys school, the girls at Miss Godard's School plot an uprising to prevent the coed merger and preserve their school's legacy.
• Simultaneously parodied and played straight in High School High. The school is initially absurdly run down and overrun by criminals, but Mr. Clark plays the "kindhearted Cool Teacher" trope pretty much straight. Him being The Comically Serious is part of the joke.
• Hamlet 2:
  • Wonderfully parodied when the teacher thinks of himself as saving both the drama program and his gangbanger students, but it turns out that the kids are pretty well-off and get good grades, and they end up being the ones to save the teacher and his stuck-up pet students.
  • Also parodied in that the 'teacher' is a struggling ex-actor who, much to the bemusement and derision of his students, gets all his ideas on how to teach from these kinds of movies.
• This is actually the main plot in Lambada (1990), of all films. It wasn't supposed to feature the trendy dance when it was written, but Cannon Pictures wanted to beat a rival B-Movie studio's lambada film to theaters, so they added some dance scenes to it.
• Done in the movie Only the Strong. The protagonist teaches his proteges how to use Capoeira, which somehow reforms them into better people using team mentality to go against the local gang.
• The Ron Clark Story, with Matthew Perry as the titular teacher who goes to teach inner-city middle schoolers.
• School of Rock Played With this. Academic wise, the kids were fine. However, they have various other issues such as low self esteem, strict parents, etc. that they overcome with The Power of Rock. The film in turn served as a Genre-Killer for this trope, replacing it with a new sub-genre combining this with Adults Are Useless.
• Inverted in the HBO movie Cheaters. The teacher comes in to coach the Academic Decathalon Team which is a Super Bowl for nerds. Intimidated by the school team that had won the competition every year, the team members stumble upon a copy of the test. When said teacher finds out, he encourages the team to cheat.
• Coach Carter is based on the real story of Kenneth Carter. This story is a variant where the teacher is actually a High School basketball coach who enforces a strict regime and code of conduct for his players, including getting good grades. To enforce it, he is perfectly free to tackle his players since he is not a teacher. When too many of his players are slacking off seriously on their studies, he suspends all team activities until he sees some real improvement and must fight for his decision with the school board and the public.
• Played straight in Freedom Writers, based on "The Freedom Writers Diary," which is a non-fiction book. The Los Angeles riots have split the school apart. Fights break out, gangs are formed, racism and abuse abound. Teacher Erin Gruwell takes on the task of teaching an integrated classroom of at-risk students, also known as "unteachables".
• Played equally straight in 1999's Music of the Heart, starring Meryl Streep as Roberta Guaspari, the teacher who started the Harlem Schools Violin Program. And yes, it was also based on a true story. Unfortunately, the focus is less on this trope, and more on the Very Special Episode aspect of raising awareness of the importance of music education in schools^note It was released at the height of VH1's "Save the Music" campaign, which seeks to stop schools from cutting music education programs, and / or reinstating them in schools that already have..
• The Substitute movies are a rather dark and action-y take on the old formula, as the main character's approach to violent gang-bangers invading the school isn't so much to instill them with a passion for academics as it is to smash them in the face and then throw them out a 3rd-story window. Not terribly inspirational, but perhaps more fun to watch.
• The Emperor's Club applies this to rich kids. Kevin Kline is the Roman History teacher at a prestigious boarding school, and is trying to get through to an arrogant problem student, played by Emile Hersch. In the end, he fails: the kid grows up to be financially successful but morally bankrupt. Kline feels better, though, when he sees that all of his other former students are happy, well-adjusted and respectable.
• This trope is applied in a military school in Major Payne. The school has a very non-attentive dean who doesn't care about the kids as long as they're out of his hair, and the counselor can't get through to the boys, likely partially due to the dean not listening to her, so nothing changes. But that very attitude on the part of allows Payne to whip the ROTC class into shape, and while several of his methods are very questionable, others win the admiration and respect of the boys, such as when he defends a student from an abusive stepparent who was about to hit him. (Payne had been about to hit that student himself earlier, but had backed off on realizing what a terrible idea it was, and that it wouldn't work anyway.)
• Deconstructed in The History Boys. Irwin is hired by the principal in order to get the pupils to pass the Oxbridge examinations, and he succeeds. Specifically, he succeeds through his encouragement of lies and pretense, the sort of thing that the inspirational Cool Teacher was trying to steer them away from. And the Cool Teacher gropes his pupils. And the principal doesn't really care about the students as much as the school's ranking.
• Played for laughs in Funny People with the Stylistic Suck Show Within a Show Yo, Teach!, a sitcom which one of the characters stars in; from what we see of it, it is apparently an obnoxiously trite version of this trope.
• Played straight in Hunky Dory, in which drama teacher Vivienne attempts to inspire the students of her apathetic school through a rock musical rendition of Shakespeare's The Tempest.
• Parodied in one scene in La La Land, where Mia auditions for one of these films.
  Mia: (reading from a script) This is my classroom! You don't like it, the door's to my left!
  Casting Director: Lady, why you be trippin' like that?
  Mia: No, Jamal... You be trippin'!
• Played with in Class of 1984, which is about a music teacher starting at a troubled Inner City School - where the troublesome students aren't just delinquents, they're outright sociopaths! The plot is about the teacher's attempts to improve his music class while the delinquents terrorise him as much as possible (they're not in his class but one of his students is given drugs from the gang and dies because of it). One sequence has a science teacher getting revenge on the gang (they kill all his animals saving two students from assault) by bringing a gun to class and forcing them to answer questions at gunpoint! And then the climax is really about the teacher hunting down the gang and killing them one by one after they kidnap his wife.
• The German comedy Fack ju Göhte^note a horribly (and deliberately) mangled attempt at writing "Fuck you, Goethe" is about a small-time bank robber who hid the spoils from his last job in a construction site just before the cops caught him. When he's released from prison some years later, construction has long since wrapped up, forcing him to accept a teaching job at the newly built Goethe Comprehensive School as a cover for his attempt to recover the booty. Naturally, his rough and disrespectful behavior gets him put in charge of the school's most troublesome class, with the story proceeding exactly as expected from there.

Literature

• The school in The Year of Miss Agnes has one room, teaches things decades out of date, can't hold onto a teacher, and doesn't even bother trying to teach the town's only deaf mute.
• Up the Down Staircase is another classic example, and one of the first to feature a female teacher.
• The children's book Miss Nelson Is Missing! is arguably a parody. A classroom of rowdy grade school kids is scared straight when their normal kindly teacher, the titular Miss Nelson, is replaced by a mean and strict substitute, Miss Viola Swamp. They're all too glad to have Miss Nelson back, and never suspect Miss Swamp was Miss Nelson in disguise, aiming to teach her class a lesson.
• Another book, aimed at the 10- to 14-year-old-crowd, is called They're Torturing Teachers in Room 104. It's about a group of kids who drive out every teacher they have, most within less than one day, until a magical teacher named Miss Merriweather comes. She makes all the kid's pranks backfire on them (a gum bubble grows to the size of a weather balloon and pops on the girl who's blowing it; a boy who mocks one of the girl's concerns about her hair gets his turned blue and curly, with an irremovable big pink bow) and eventually turns them into respectful, self-motivated students through Applied Phlebotinum.
• Push by Sapphire: Precious' basic reading/writing class is a mild example. The average age in the class was around 19. What makes it mild is this is not the main thrust of the book.
• Don't Care High may qualify, in that the entire student body doesn't care about much of anything, with the epitome of this being the student who ends up being used to help turn the school around. The one actually behind the reversal is a newly-transferred freshman from Saskatchewan.
• The book Shut Up And Let The Lady Teach, by Emily Sachar, is about a (white) education newspaper reporter who taught in a (primarily black) New York school for one year, teaching a subject she wasn't really authorized to teach about.
• The Water is Wide by Pat Conroy, adapted as a theatrical film (Conrack) as well as a TV movie (see Live Action TV, below).
• Michael Flynn's Firestar Series involves a charter school company encouraging students to competence on a massive scale - and that's before the copycats get in on the act.
• Played for laughs in Hating Alison Ashley, when a new young teacher starts teaching a rowdy class of students at a rough Sucky School and, much to the astonishment of everyone, manages to get them under control. It's not because she inspires them, however; instead, it's because her surly, sarcastic 'I'm-not-gonna-take-any-shit-from-any-of-you-little-bastards' manner ends up terrifying the living crap out of them.
• Harry Potter:
  • At the start of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry's first two Defence Against the Dark Arts teachers, Quirrell and Lockhart, have both been lackluster and were not known to have taught their students anything of use, making the subject a joke with the students. Quirrell turned out to be a host for Voldemort and subsequently died, while Lockhart turned out to be a fraud and ended up giving himself amnesia trying to obliviate Harry and Ron. Enter Remus John Lupin, who proves to be a highly competent expert who teaches the Hogwarts students everything they need to know about dealing with Dark creatures. He's even introduced waking up from his Hogwarts Express nap to save Harry from a Dementor. Through some early antics like putting Peeves in his place, DADA quickly becomes almost everyone's favorite subject, with only Draco and his cronies daring to disparage him.
  • Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix inverts this. Dolores Jane Umbridge is a Ministry appointed tyrant who suppresses Defence Against the Dark Arts education and dishes out horrific punishments - resulting in the students forming a secret society to learn the spells they should be getting taught in class. Later in the story, Umbridge takes the helm and the entire school conspires to drive her nuts until she resigns.
• Deconstructed in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The title character fulfills all expectations at first, but it slowly becomes clear that she's having a very harmful effect on her students, which she remains completely unapologetic about. Highlights include grooming a girl that reminds her of herself to be the Replacement Goldfish in an affair with the art teacher, and influencing another girl to fight (and die!) in the Spanish Civil War.
• Ms. Wiz's first book introduces Ms Wiz as a Cool Teacher who must take on the troublesome Class Three. Of course she's actually a witch (sorry, Paranormal Operative) and she manages to earn the children's respect both by magic and unconventional teaching methods (such as teaching them math by having her pet owl poo in a pin when they get a sum wrong). She leaves the school at the end of the book, but reappears in their lives as a Blithe Spirit whenever they need help (as a doctor, babysitter, library assistant etc).
• Stinger: During his last day on the job before the school's final class graduates, Mr. Hammond reflects on how less than half of his students have ever attended college and most end up poor or in gangs. He tries to appeal to gang leaders Rick Juroda and Cody Lochett about how much potential they have and how poor the choices they're making are. They respect him a bit for trying, but dismiss the sentiment behind his words, at least until the aliens arrive.

Live-Action TV

• The Water Is Wide, a Made-for-TV Movie, and one of few examples of this trope that is not set in the city. The idealistic young teacher in this film worked in a run-down school located on Yamacraw Island in South Carolina. See RealLife.
• The 1990 Made-for-TV Movie, Gryphon.
• The series Boston Public dipped into this territory at times.
• The BBC drama Hope And Glory was all about maverick head teacher Ian George (played by Lenny Henry in a rare non-comedy role) turning around an inner-city comprehensive. Based on the then-current "Superheads" phenomenon (see Real Life, below).
• Seven Periods with Mr Gormsby is a comedic example.
  • Something of an inversion in that Gormsby is old fashioned to the point of parody.
• Welcome Back, Kotter:
  • Kotter doesn't exactly revolutionize the school. He becomes reasonably popular with his students, but they remain solidly mediocre.
  • However, since the principal fully expected them to drop out without the skills to survive, the fact that Kotter kept them in school, let alone with some enthusiasm, is a worthwhile feat.
• The '80s sitcom Head of the Class inverted this by giving Howard Hesseman's Mr. Moore a classful of academically gifted students who were so singularly focused on achievement and grades that their social and emotional development was lacking.
• Cold Case:
  • "True Calling":
    • This episode deconstructs this trope. The teacher is killed by another teacher who's basically a jaded, older version of her, when she tries to get him to confess to drug use to save the future of the student he forced to carry for him. The student in question feels so responsible for her death that he descends into the life of crime he would've had without her intervention, despite his obvious talent as a writer. Ouch.
    • On the other hand, one of the students went on to become a teacher and teaches at the same school hoping to help the students like she helped him. There is also a memorial with flowers dedicated to her outside the school, with a plaque that says "She made a difference." Also, the student she tried to stand up for begins studying for his GED at the end.
  • Inverted in the episode "8.03AM", when the white teacher at an inner-city school has a black pupil who is genuinely trying his best (it's not his fault that his education so far has been so bad he can barely read), but instead of encouraging him, she mocks and insults him in front of the class.
• This is The Greatest American Hero's day job.
• Parodied in MADtv (1995)'s Nice White Lady sketch, one of their better, and better-known, efforts.
• Parodied in a few Armstrong and Miller sketches where the apparently earnest teacher has the ability to engage his students in a matter of moments and gets them really interested in learning. Then the bell rings, and he stops in mid-sentence and tells them to fuck off because it's his time now.
• Deconstructed throughout the fourth and fifth seasons of The Wire with several characters, notably three of the main kids meeting ends ranging from Michael taking up Omar's mantle after his death to Dukie's and Randy's being downright tragic. And the teachers are usually pretty helpless, against both the violence pervading the school as well as the looming threat from superiors in the school system of losing their jobs and their funding unless they either bring test scores up or "juke the stats". It seems as though only the "stoop kids" and the "corner kids" from Bunny Colvin's experimental class have any sort of a happy ending.
  Marcia Donnelly: Lambs to the slaughter here.
• The last couple seasons of Happy Days occasionally delved into this, with Fonzie teaching auto shop at Jefferson High. Fonzie tried the "customary dress" of the teachers of the time, but the students were still quite meh about him, so he started wearing his leather jacket and jeans to teach. (Which were better for working with auto stuff anyway.) He spent several hours in-universe that episode working in the school shop with the most rebellious of his students, who learned to respect Fonzi once the student realized Fonzi actually cared and didn't hold a rough background in contempt.
• On My Name Is Earl, Earl teaches a class of rowdy high-school pranksters in order to get the teachers there to help him pass his GED exam.
• The titular teacher in Kinpachi-sensei spent nearly 40 real world years inspiring and helping his students through their issues.

Video Games

• Disgaea:
  • Disgaea 3 does this on occasion, with Evil Academy having various difficulties after the former dean died ...sort of..., and his immediate heir didn't exactly take care of the academy in his stead. With the administrators almost entirely being demons, very little stands in the way of the academy falling apart. Then again, with the students almost entirely being demons, nobody really cares. (They're a bit more interested with Tyrant Overlord Baal swiping their stuff.) Despite all this, Mr. Champloo still has his teaching integrity. Helps that he had direct orders from the former Overlord to keep the academy from falling into an even deeper level of hell.
  • Raspberyl will also spend the vast majority of her DLC trying to keep the academy from going under. Her attempts to become a better teacher tend to backfire rather extravagantly.

Visual Novels

• Zigzagged in Double Homework. At the start of the story, the summer school class is stuck with a teacher, Ms. Walsh, who refuses to teach them, insisting that her teaching assignment is due to an administrative error. Johanna salvages the class by writing a lesson plan for Ms. Walsh to use (after it’s clear that the so-called error wouldn’t be “corrected”), and later on, it is revealed that Ms. Walsh was selected for her incompetence, and the kids in the class would get credit for the class no matter the outcome.

Web Original

• Dangerous Wands, a College Humor parody of Dangerous Minds, puts an adult Hermione Granger in charge of a class of inner-city magic students.
• Inverted and parodied by The Onion. "Frustrated Inner-City Students Running Out of Ideas to Motivate Teachers."
• In the Cracked parody A Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever:
  Wealthy, Succesful Protagonist: I've got to use tough love to help this Latin American teenager to believe in himself.

Western Animation

• One episode of American Dad! had Roger dress up as a professor and spout "inspirational" nonsense which convinces one of his students to kill his father.
• Bob's Burgers: In "Bob and Deliver", Bob becomes a substitute home economics teacher, only to learn the class is considered a dumping ground for underachieving students and involves them sitting around watching educational videos. Bob manages to inspire the kids to enjoy learning how to cook, to the point where they open a successful student-run restaurant, but it brings him in conflict with the company that provides Wagstaff School's lunches.
• Parodied in an episode of Family Guy, in which Brian gets a job as a teacher and tries to inspire his students. He soon grows frustrated and apathetic. In the end, he only manages to inspire his students to be the best prostitutes and janitors (and ditch diggers) they can be. This is complete with a Shout-Out to Dead Poets Society.
• Also parodied in Pinky and the Brain, where the Brain becomes a teacher to earn money for his latest plot. Pinky joins his class ... but despite being a parody, the trope itself plays straight, including a fight breaking out when the miracle teacher is absent.
• Stand and Deliver (see Movies) is parodied mercilessly in the South Park episode "Eek, a Penis!", where Cartman is sent to teach at an inner city high school. He takes on the pseudonym "Mr. Cartmenez" after Kyle points out that the pupils would outright murder a WASP teacher, and teaches the kids to cheat their way to the top, including talking one girl into getting an abortion because it's the ultimate form of cheating.
  Mr. Cartmenez: How do I reach these keeeds?

Real Life

• As noted above, Freedom Writers is non-fiction.
• Similarly, Dangerous Minds was based on an autobiographical account: My Posse Don't Do Homework.
• The high profile "Superheads" assigned to failing British comprehensives by local authorities in the early 2000s were supposed to be Truth in Television examples of the trope. The jury is still out as to how effective they were.
• You're thinking of Jaime Escalante.
  • See Stand and Deliver (also listed above).
• The Teach For America program hopes to inspire this, using people who who wouldn't normally be teachers. It has a UK equivalent called Teach First. Both are notorious for burning their teachers out by assigning ill-trained but well-meaning individuals to the toughest schools.
• The solution-du-jour lately to save inner city students from themselves has been to create "charter schools": privatized non-union institutions that rely on private (and occasionally public) funding and tuition to operate, like a cheaper version of a prep school.
• Pat Conroy was a teacher before he sold his first book. His memoir of this, The Water Is Wide got adapted twice.
• This trope is Older Than Radio. In Upper Canada (now Southern Ontario) in the 1830s and 1840s, some schools were set up to teach the children of the local Black community. These schools were generally run by white Abolitionists who were teaching what was considered "proper" in those days, though the prevailing attitudes of the time led to segregation of the Black students from the white students.

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