Waiting for "Superman", in case you haven't heard, is the hot new film from Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim. While his last film capitalized on liberal guilt over destroying our planet (and maybe voting for Ralph Nader?), "Superman" (yes, the film is weirdly insistent on those unnecessary quotation marks) is for people who feel bad about sending their kids to private school while poor kids wallow in the slums.
"Teaching should be easy," Guggenheim declares as we watch a cartoon teacher rip open his students' skulls and pour what looks like blue Spaghetti-O's inside. (When he closes the skulls the kids sprout wings and fly out the open classroom window.) This is about as close as the film gets to depicting actual teaching. (I checked with the friend who paid for my ticket and he confirmed this scene was meant seriously, though thankfully not literally.)
Despite repeatedly insisting poor kids just need better teachers, the film never says what it is that better teachers actually do. Instead it highlights the voices of American Express pitchman Geoffrey Canada and Bill Gates, whose obsessions with higher standardized test scores have led their schools to cancel recess and art in favor of more hours of scripted memorization. Why bother with art if teaching is just about filling kids' heads with pre-determined facts?
The real crisis in American education isn't teachers' unions preventing incompetent teachers from getting fired (as awful as that may be), it's the single-minded focus on standardized test scores that underlies everything from Bush's No Child Left Behind to Obama's Race to the Top to the charter schools lionized in the film. Real education is about genuine understanding and the ability to figure things out on your own; not about making sure every 7th grader has memorized all the facts some bureaucrats have put in the 7th grade curriculum.
This would be obvious if the film dared to show real teaching in the schools it lauds. Instead of the rich engagement you imagine from progressive private schools, you find teachers who read from assigned scripts while enforcing a regime of zero-tolerance discipline. They're nightmarish gulags where children's innate creativity is beaten out of them and replaced with martial order. Because standardized behavior is what makes you do well on standardized tests.
Film is the perfect medium for showing what this life is like. Seeing terrified kids up on the big screen, you can't help but empathize with them. So we never see it. Instead, the film hides behind charts and graphs and interviews. "When you see a great teacher, you are seeing a work of art," Geoffrey Canada tells us, but this is something Guggenheim would rather tell than show.
The film has other flaws. It insists all of America's problems would be solved if only poor kids would memorize more: Pittsburgh is falling apart not because of deindustrialization, but because its schools are filled with bad teachers. American inequality isn't caused by decades of Reaganite tax cuts and deregulation, but because of too many failing schools. Our trade deficit isn't a result of structural economic factors but simply because Chinese kids get a better education. Make no mistake, I desperately want every kid to go to a school they love, but it seems far-fetched to claim this would solve all our country's other problems. At the end of the day, we have an economy that works for the rich by cheating the poor and unequal schools are the result of that, not the cause.
I'm glad a talented filmmaker has decided to draw attention to the horrible inequities in our nation's schools. But I'm terrified that the solutions put forth by its proponents will only make things worse. We know what happens when we fire teachers who don't do enough to raise their students' test scores, or when we adopt more stringent requirements for classroom curriculum: we squeeze out what little genuine education these schools have left. And that's something we should really feel guilty about.
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http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/Social_Sector/our_practices/Education/Knowledge_Highlights/Closing_the_talent_gap.aspx
It concludes that the best lower-level public education systems in the world are those of Finland, Singapore, and South Korea (not the oft-cited China). And the one largest difference those three countries have with the US is a massive focus on hiring the best college graduates for teachers.
That said, a few comments:
Standardized tests will never go away. It's the only way we have to measure curriculum success. And in the case of the SAT's, it's the only benchmark colleges have to equalize varying teaching methods across the country. In the absence of national standards, what else is there?
Secondly, I believe one of the reason's Geoffrey Canada's model is so successful is that they train the parents as much as they train the kids. They get a commitment from them to make sure kids are doing their homework before they fall too far behind. That is the missing piece in many under-performing schools: there are home environments in which parents can't (working multiple jobs) or won't (don't have the skills or don't value education) support their kids.
And lastly, our attempts to create "perfect world" diversity in local schools, while well-intentioned, have had unintended consequences. The San Francisco Unified School District is a perfect example of political correctness gone haywire in that almost no one can attend their neighborhood school, leading young professional families to flee to the suburbs or to opt to pay for private school.
No, it's not just about the teaching. It's about this country's commitment to education from the government, parents, and taxpayers.
We need a different strategy for these kids, and I think Geoffrey Canada's model, which operates in a tough neighborhood, is a great one to emulate.
The country has numerous schools that succeed with kids from all backgrounds and demographics.
We know what works - we just lack the will to do what works. Teacher unions and hover parents are the main opponents. The book 'Nation at Risk' cleqarified all this in the 80's and we are still fighting progress at every step.
More $$$ in poor preforming schools has produced continually poor performing schools so we pour more $$$ in. Garbage in still equals garbage out.
Interestingly, I talked to woman yesterday that taught in Japan. She said that there were some fascinating differences between our schools and their's. For example, I was taught in Language Arts that the most important thing one can in writing is to get the idea down on a piece of paper before it evaporates into the ethers, and that it can always be cleaned up later--one can see this all the time in rought drafts with double spacing to allow for rephrasing and word-smithing and doing away with perfectly bad ideas.
In contrast, in Japan, it's got to be perfect before it leaves the pen or it's not put down on paper--ever, there are harsh consequences otherwise. Also, junior high the filter to determine if you are going to a high school that will either lead to somewhere or to one that will lead to nowere. And that although corporal punishment was made illegal 10 years ago, it still goes on. And finally, in their culture, parents are subservient to the teachers.
So here is the question for the conservatives: Are you really willing to be subservient to the teacher in order to goose the math and science scores?
If a teacher in Medical School teaching surgery had failed his own tests 9 times I would never want to go to any doctor he had taught.
He said doesn't miss it a bit. He also seemed like a genuinely earnest guy; and his retirement seemed like profound loss the community.
( when I could no longer afford it ) While they were behind " traditional " schooling they have more than made up for it . THe school they now attend is small combined grades (1/2 3//4 5/6 ) K-12 and is wonderful !!! It is up to the individual school and parents input ??? Tough one.
Baloney.
Teachers hit back at Obama and privatization, above....