Documentary Film “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 socio-economically 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 is an award-winning writer and director based in Los Angeles. He has personally screened his films at over 600 venues in 12 countries, including with the White House, Lincoln Center, Amnesty International, the American Educational Research Association, the British Educational Research Association, the government of Norway and more. 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.He has appeared on MSNBC, CNN, and NPR, and in the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Newsweek and other media outlets. In 2008, he served on Barack Obama’s Asian American Leadership Council.