tavis: good evening. from los angeles, i am tavis smiley. a conversation with m. night shyamalan. schooled." got withoseph gordon-levitt cd.new we are glad you joined us. those conversations coming up right now.

>> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. isis: m. night shyamalan best known for scaring audiences with supernatural scary lines but he has taken a detour to tackle one of the most of the gold challenges this country reformw to education. he has put his work into a town

called "i got schooled," a roadmap for positive change. you and i were whispering to each other as the credits were rolling and the theme music about how if there is but one thing in our society we are going to get right, this would be the thing you would want to get right. and yet there are so many ideas that people have offered in the past and into the fray comes a filmmaker. how do you think that is going gete received before we into the text itself? >> i hope with great cynicism. you should start right there. and rightfully so. my hope was in the book that i was not giving my opinion. what i did was go around and meet with all the experts around the country and spent my time and resources from our foundation to put on the table all the information, all i

wanted to do was put all the information in one place that to see ifs had proven it made a picture and it did. it was the answer i wanted five years ago. what has been supported and researched about what closes the achievement gap, is there enough there in the research and the proven data from all the people around the world that have done this in our country especially, and it was a beautiful mosaic of everyone's expertise and hard work. tavis: we all know you as a filmmaker of course. this project, no supplies here really becomes your burden. he becomes a matter of the heart while you are scouting for a film. tell us how you came to this. >> i would not ascribe myself as a do-gooder. that is more my wife. just the obsessed guy who has been writing and making movies since i was a kid in my room. sometimes it would hit me in the face for it to become personal

and it did. we were scouting for a movie and i needed high school. we got in the van and the crew got in with me and checking out a location at this beautiful high school in philadelphia. the kids were rushing over when i came in. we thought you were making a movie, can i die in your movie? we had a great time and teachers were out and there was such buoyancy and excitement. it was a great spirit. the school was wonderful. we got in the van and drove four minutes, hardly a distance in philadelphia. and we got to the school where there was metal detectors and a guard there and we did not want to be there and we were treated like criminals as we walked in. the kids were walking through the hallways with their heads down and they were looking and one kid looks at me and in philly, a lot of people know me. the kid looked at me and he was like, for a second there was some recognition and he shook his head and kept going. there is no way i could be in his school. he kept on walking.

anything was possible in the other school. the classroom and the second school were locked behind bars and the janitor had to get keys to open each and every door. the top four had been shut down because there was so much drug use. the theater had been burned down. it was that kind of situation and it was hopeless. i got upset being there. i got upset for the kids and i remember seeing that same kid who stopped and looked at me as we were driving home. i saw him in his neighborhood and he was looking in the trunk of his car and looking around. it was not a good vibe. i was feeling personally responsible for those kids. they were in philly which is my home town so it started like that, what is the difference, are they doing things differently? is that about income, what is the difference there? and when i started asking experts, what do you think, what works and what does not and they would give a list and i would ask another expert. they would give it different list. i do not want opinion.

what is real? what is real? and i guess a counter my background. my family is doctors and the medical field is in evidence-based field. you cannot go, i think this is way to do heart surgery. i approach the research that way. have a proven anything or is everything contradictory when you look at it? tavis: you break this down into five categories. there are five things that you are -- have to be done to get this education reform on the road. one of the five is that we got stop road blocking teachers. tommy more. -- tell me more. >> this is your show. director somewhere here. what happened was i was looking at all the data and all the research and there was

contradictory findings and that is where everyone gets stuck for second. i thought, for example, i would see research about this one said classroom size has a big effect. this one said it does not and this one says this and this one says that. this will end up with me getting nowhere and i will end up feeling lost and the breakthrough happened when my friend who is a physician was telling me what he teaches his residence at the university of pennsylvania and he teaches them something simple. really basic. the body is a system. if you teacher patients that -- teach your patients that if they do these five simple things, have a balanced diet, workout three times a week, sleep eight hours a day, do not smoke, have a relatively low stress and work mental environment, your chances of getting all diseases, it has been riven by research, drops so dramatically. the body wants to be healthy. it went click. this is what i need to be

looking for in the research is a group of things when done together. tavis: that is the key phrase. when done together. >> that is why you got down on a treadmill if you're smoking. when he told his residence this, they do not do one of those things the chances go back to the norm and you will get a lot of false negatives. i started looking at it that way. can you categorize these things together? in this group of practices started to come together from the research. proven things done together and i checked it against the schools in the country that we are closing the achievement gap and they are doing every single one of those. >> the flipside of this and you know this is that there are a lot of folks who blame the teachers unions and it is teachers' fault that we are in this mess. >> we need to create a system that works for almost all the teachers to succeed. that is a scalable system.

we can just say it is just that -- the michael jordan teachers we need. it is scalable. that is the premise. from the researcher does not say that the number one thing you need to do is get rid of the very bottom. you need to get rid of those. that is one of the five things you need to do which i call the roadblock teachers. that is -- everyone is focused in on that. that is one of the things. our primary thing is making sure that 97% of the teachers working can succeed. gap.osing the i am not against the unions. there is no research that what thetenure, results of tenure after two or three years. one of the cool things about the research is that you can't fire a teacher. everyone hurts their class in the first three years. even michael jordan teachers do not do much in the first three

years. it is after that that that you can evaluate the teachers. tavis: one of the things you come to that most of us would -- with half a brain understand, small classroom size does make a difference. >> actually, no. it was my feeling, just yours. that is intuitive. that is a strong thinker politicians and the voters believe it. this is what the research supports. the research says classroom size when it is modest when you reduce it from 20 to 18 has almost no impact. if you'd reduce it dramatically in the early years it has some impact but not actually enough to close the gap. and it cost so much money and puts so much burden that the researchers said that is not one of the things i would do. to close the gap. if you wanted to close the gap. if you wanted to put it back on the health model is like having a pat. a pet has been proven --

people with pets have a longer life but that is not one of the five. it is nice to do but it is not what will close the achievement gap. i -- triage you need to do and there are these major things that have huge impacts. it is in effect size we are talking about and making classrooms smaller, a small amount, not part of the five tenets. tavis: if you have too many kids in the classroom and the kids -- the teacher cannot get around to help them, how could it not impact? >> is that fascinating that there is zero support for what you just said. if you look at just the research and take emotion out, everyone gets emotional about kids, i get it. take the emotion out of it. a parent should know this. if there was a choice between a teacher with 30 kids in their teacher,at is a great versus an ok teacher or a mediocre teacher with 19 kids

and their class, it is a no-brainer. your kid is the 31st kid in that class. proven by the research, supported. your kid will be -- achieve more than being with a better teacher than with the smaller classroom. that is the kind of thing you need to know. when you're making these decisions. tavis: your appetite is sufficiently whetted. the book is called "i got schooled." good to have you on the program and thanks for your film work and this is well. >> happy to be here. joseph gordon-levitt excels on so many creative projects. an actor, writer, director, singer, i hate this guy. now he is a variety show host updating that format for a new generation with a hit series

called "hitrecord on tv" which has debuted on the tv network david. it features short films and live performances and her interaction with its audience. let's look at a clip from "hitrecord on tv." day reading the instructions over and over again waiting for nightfall. and finally, the sun went down, dad turned off our yard light and we went outside. looked up into the sky with the goggles. light as far as i could see. there were stars, some of them clustered so tightly together, they made swirling patterns of white against the inky darkness. i stared. tavis: that clip gives some

sense of what this is. but i think this is one of the most innovative and creative concepts for how television can be used in the future and how you collaborate all these various media, social and beyond to make this work. that is my sense. tell me how this works. >> that film is a good example. every episode has a theme so the episode of our first theme is the number one. i put out a request and made a video and put it on our site saying, put stories that revolve around the theme of the number one. give me first times, unity, solitude, anything having to do with the number one. tavis: whatever one means to you. >> this young woman from nebraska, she contributed a story. this is a true story about how she grew up with an eye

condition where she could not see the stars and when she was 16 her father bought her this pair of night vision goggles from a russian military surplus catalog and so when she was 16, for the first time in her life, she saw the stars. a brilliantat was story so we proceeded to make short films -- a short film out of it and all sorts of artists got involved in doing that but i think the beauty of this is if i had hired a team of professional screenwriters and said write me a short film based on the theme of the number one they would never have, with the idea of a girl who had never seen the stars and whose dad buys her a pair of night vision goggles and she sees them for the first time when she was 16. they never would have come up with that. when you open the door to that kind of collaboration, that is what we do. anybody in the world or the internet can contribute. tavis: what you're basically saying to me is, whatever i have, six or eight producers who make this show work every night. >> i have 300.

or 500you could have 400 people who have various pieces in one episode. in a single episode. isin our first episode there 426 people whose work is featured. short film there were 1400 contributions that we whittled down to the exact -- i forget the exact number, 60 something. to the voiceover and people who play the instruments and people who did the animation behind the actress and contributed the individual illustrations that went into the animation all coming from different people. -- letthe beauty i think me back up. i think the beauty of the internet is that it democratizes this social media space. that everybody has a chance to have his or her say. i think that is good also long as they -- as long as they agree. everybody has their own voice. what does this kind of production mean for the future

of television? i do not think i am overstating that because reality tv whether one likes it or loathe it changes the whole business, the whole business model. stretch out 10 or 15 years and tell me what you think what this might mean for tv as we know it. >> sure. as long as you brought up the business i want to mention we'd to pay the artist to contribute. think it is only fair. people are doing a lot of hard work and contributing. tavis: there are a lot of people and you watch, i do not want to call them by name, you get these morning show and they pull stuff off the internet and the use it as programming. they get ratings off of that. they make money off of that. the people who load up the stuff on the internet do not get anything out of that. >> you are 100% right. we did not want to do that. we have been doing this for years now. as awas -- we launched it

production company in 2010. i was doing it as more of an informal hobby with my brother for five years before that. we have had lots of experience and lots of iterations to figure out what the best way to do it is and we have come up with a way that i think is really fair where we do pay artists out of the budget of each episode. there is $50,000 earmarked for each episode. for example, those 426 artist whose work were featured in the first episode will share that $50,000. tavis: if i am pressing too hard tell me and i will back up. you mentioned your brother, dan. can i go there? >> yes. thanks for answering -- asking. tavis: your brother was lost to you at a very young age create when he started this concept with you. see?uch did dan get to >> he died in 2010 and we had been doing it together since 2005 before that.

and so he saw it began to change from a hobby into something grander and more professional than that. and then he died just as we were taking off that way. but his spirit is very much a ont of what goes on "hitrecord." towas encouraging people step out of their comfort zone even if they did not see themselves, i am not a writer, i am not an artist, i cannot draw or maybe i do drop but i do not show my drawings to anybody. his big thing was to get evil to give it a try. he -- whatot what "hitrecord" is about. most of them, they are not professionals. they have not been hate for their art but they are talented nonetheless. giving them the first chance to contribute to something like

a really heartwarming experience and that is what he was about. even more than the final product . for him it was about getting people to get up and give it a go. >> i assume you would be happy with this project. >> he would be very pleased. tavis: given what you are seeing thisregard to dan's point, notion that everyone of us has something artistic, something creative to contribute, at different levels but all of us have something to offer or we would not be here. what do you make of what you are seeing vis-à-vis the creativity of everyday people? >> yeah, it is interesting. our culture said that leave singing and dancing and storytelling to the professionals. tavis: do not try this at home. >> you just sit and watch and pay us to entertain you. i do not think that is the natural way of things. i think if you go back before

the movie industry or the recording industry or the publishing industry, just go back to early human civilization you will find probably people were telling each other stories, gathering around at the local tavern or around the fire, whatever, and all participating in that social activity of communicating and entertaining each other, seeing each other songs and telling each other stories. that is the natural way they're supposed to go and it is cool that the internet is bringing us back to that. in the 20th century with broadcast technology, we all were taught to sit on the couch and be passive spectators. but i think we are more naturally inclined to participate. tavis: i imagine some caveman saying, did you hear the one about -- >> i think that is true. tavis: you're probably right. speaking of creativity, you had your rhetorical debut. -- directorial debut.

>> it was a movie called "don jon" and i love the experience and i am proud of the movie and how it turned out. it is very different from "hitrecord on tv." it is a satire about gender roles and the influence that media has on how people often objectify each other and treat each other more like things that like human beings and i play a guy who is a modern day don juan who is very objectifying, treats women just like objects, and it satirizes him and there is a light at the end of the tunnel at the end of the story. he does begin to take his first steps toward connecting with people rather than just consuming people. tavis: it is out on dvd. it is in my collection. do you want to do more? >> i would love to do more. "hitrecord on tv" is different

and are not conventional directing job. i love -- i want to do another just normal acting job. i never want to stop doing that. hopefully by have the opportunity. -- if i have the opportunity. i like watching all different kinds of music and movies and eating all kinds of different food. the variety is what keeps it interesting to me. i do not want to only just do one thing. if i have the opportunity i will always take it to try something new. you have done it all. the acting and singing and producing. it is in the blood line. >> my mom -- neither my mom nor my dad were in show business. i love correcting myself. tavis: your english teacher would be proud of that. either-or and neither-nor.

>> he was a grammar stickler. he was one of the blacklisted directors back in the mccarthy era in the 1950's who was prevented from working by the government because he had been to some communist meetings, and sort of a dark day, a dark era in american history where the government was just for talking, just for going to meetings, was denying people the right to work. tavis: i often wonder what america lost as a result of all those brilliant, talented people like your grandfather and like paul robeson and other giants who got blackballed, blacklisted because -- it is insane. the things that happen in america offends me every time i think about it. >> it is worth remembering because it was not that long ago. tavis: you get a chance to do the stuff you are doing including "hitrecord on tv" on

pivot. good to have you here. that is our show. thanks for watching and as always, keep the faith. >> for more information on today's show, visit tavis smiley at pbs.org. tavis: hi, i'm tavis smiley. join me next time for a conversation with the usually silent tell her about his new acclaimed ."cumentary, "tim's vermeer that is next time. we will see you then. >> and by contributions to

your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. >> be more. pbs. >> be more. pbs.

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