Having seen both The Lottery, creditably directed by Madeleine Sackler and Waiting for 'Superman', Davis Guggenheim's brilliantly produced but misleading take on the problems with the education "crisis" in this country, I have found one significant similarity between the two films besides the perception they share that charter schools are going in the right direction for dealing with the problems of low-income and minority student education. The other similarity is that almost all the young learners featured in these films whose "waiting" for the lottery is climaxed by finding out the "winners" and "losers," with mostly disappointing results, are not typical of many of the students in this country who are getting a second-rate education.
Those depicted in the movie, mostly Latino and African-American young learners, are bright and highly motivated; they have loving, caring parents who are dedicated to their children "making something of themselves." None of them have problems expressing themselves or understanding English and, with the exception of one white student, have any apparent learning disabilities. Added to that the fact that the parents are willing to participate with these children in a form of extended "reality video" with apparently no reservations about revealing their personal lives for a potential national audience and you have the "poster families" for movies attempting to find simple solutions to complex problems -- as one of the graphics states along with the film credits in Waiting for 'Superman'.
Despite the personal problems most of them were dealing with, these movies present the exceptional rather than typical picture of young learners who are eager to get rescued from their overwhelmed, underfunded, understaffed district schools through the magic lottery number that gives them entrance to a Harlem Children's Zone or KIPP charter school.
I am not saying that most parents don't want their children to get a good education, but there are many reasons, mostly economic, that stand in their way of having the focus and energy to advocate for them as the parents do for their children in these films. For, if there is an unintentional message in both The Lottery and Waiting for 'Superman', it is that poverty is a significant element in the lives of these families. That issue should be addressed as part of the reason that some schools, not all, and certainly not in affluent or middle class neighborhoods, are "in crisis." And the "difficult learners" who have serious behavioral and learning problems, or who are recent immigrants, should also have been included in these moving portraits of the young who have been short-changed in many ways by this economic system. Those are the children you do not see nearly as often in charter schools as in district schools because their "scores" would bring down the average for these "special" schools. However, even in Waiting for 'Superman', Guggenheim reveals that charter schools are not as "special" as they might seem to the parents, and their children who it appear have waited all their lives for the opportunity to be admitted to one.
A statistic in the film points out that only 17 percent of charter schools have higher achievement rates than other public schools but this was not emphasized sufficiently nor was it mentioned that 36 percent of charter schools do worse than regular public schools. To his credit, Geoffrey Canada, the most interviewed and highest profiled charter school reformer, founder of the Harlem Children's Zone, admitted that "charter schools are not the answer." From a dramatic perspective, that is certainly not the impression created by the film. Also unmentioned is that Canada's and many other charter schools depend on private donations to provide the kind of resources and environment that the charter schools offer their students.
That "the crisis" in American education has been an ongoing issue for the last forty years is also mentioned in Guggenheim's film: not that the United States has gotten any worse, but that many other countries have caught up with and surpassed us. Moreover, if one were to consider that all American students are compared as a group to the selected "upper track" students that have entry into the academic programs in other countries, we are comparing the proverbial apples and oranges. The difference in our systems is that the students in these other countries who don't qualify for an academic track are given excellent vocational training in order for them to get good-paying jobs.
But the center of controversy in both films is that they create the impression that the teachers' unions, by "protecting bad teachers," share much of the blame for the "crisis" when the "crisis" is really about the increasing poverty of families whose children happen to go to schools in poor neighborhoods. There is no mention of the many outstanding school districts in this country where union teachers are doing a great job, in some significant part because their students come from affluent neighborhoods.
Thus, a major point of contention between the makers of these films and their critics is that union rules both provide protection for the innocent -- good teachers -- and the guilty -- bad ones. This ignores the fact that many "good teachers" can have some "bad years" and creates the perception that incompetent teachers are almost impossible to get rid of while what should be noted is that reliance on standardized tests scores to determine competence is, according to almost all knowledgeable educators, a grossly inaccurate way of measuring what students actually learn. I don't see that Randi Weingarten -- President of the UFT -- is portrayed as a villain as some critics have contended. She is recorded as forcefully arguing that the children's education is what's most important for her teachers. But what is not mentioned is that Weingarten has acceded to the use of test scores as part of the evaluation process for teachers. I fear that this is a very dangerous game to play with those "business model educators" like Mayor Michael Bloomberg who manipulate these test scores for their own political purposes.
But at least teachers are not being scapegoated in either of these movies. Many of these dedicated educators, both in charter and district schools, are shown in a very favorable light as caring, involved, and, in some cases, demonstrating very effective methods of teaching, the kind that are being crowded out by the emphasis on testing.
What I most fault the film for is the assumption that the test scores in the HCZ and KIPP -- another chain of charter schools -- are of themselves evidence of successful learning. And what is hidden from the audience is the rapidly increasing involvement by wealthy donors such as Bill Gates and the Walmart family as well as hedge fund entrepreneurs in trying to take the educational model of learning in this country and turn it into a business. Collateral evidence of this in Waiting for 'Superman' is the link that is given in the website of the film which connects it to the New Schools Venture Fund, (http://newschools.org/about) founded by Kim Smith (http://newschools.org/about/people/board/kim-smith), whose purpose, according to her website, is "to transform public education by supporting entrepreneurs."
Smith was "a founding team member" of Teach For America, a program that takes bright, young college graduates and puts them into high-poverty schools for several years to get a "taste" of teaching under difficult circumstances. That most of them leave after their allotted term of service is not surprising since they have had no professional preparation for teaching at all. Smith's background includes her experience as a marketeer, one of her jobs being with "Silicon Graphics Education Industry Group, where she focused on the online learning industry" (quoted from the website).
I would not question Ms. Smith's integrity in trying to support needed "reform" in the United States educational system, but I believe that her view of "reform" and those of experts in the field of education might be quite different. I invite readers of this column to try the link of the video The Charter Starters I wrote -- and co-starred in -- about some of the aspects of charter schools with which you might not be familiar. In the meantime, if the hope for those young learners eager for a better education is to be pinned on the continued expansion of charter schools, they might just as well be waiting for Godot as for Superman.
Amen. One of our takes on the subject: http://www.devstu.org/blogs/2010/08/26/what-kipp-has-to-offer-and-what-it-doesnt
Thank you for your post. You are a point of light in a sea of uninformed and misguided opinions. Please continue to write.
Just as many of our students are crippled by poverty, or by homes which do not value learning, teachers are impoverished professionally by a system that deprives them of the kind of daily, ongoing professional development that has become standard practice in countries which now excel in education.
As is typical for a U.S. high school teacher, I teach 5 classes a day—to 140 students. To, for example, cut that back to 4 classes, and mandate one hour per day for rigorous professional learning, observation, and collaboration with other teachers, would immeasurably improve my skills and those of my colleagues. Education would improve. Students would learn more. But it would cost.
Bold, significant change to U.S. education does NOT mean taking away the rights of teachers to unionize. It does NOT mean imposing a standardized model on learning, which typically occurs in very non-business-like ways. It does NOT mean spending LESS on teacher development and on school programs (it will require spending a lot more, actually).
Political and business leaders lack the expertise and the will to genuinely improve schools. Ours is an increasingly corporatized, mediated, anti-intellectual society where, for all the talk, education is not particularly valued.
My guess is that the film makers had a conclusion they wanted to push, so they set up their "evidence" to lead to that conclusion.
In short, the film makers are dishonest.
Thank you for the insightful article. It is like a breath of fresh air amid all of the charter school hype. I am a student in an urban education program at the University of Colorado Denver campus, and I am currently student teaching at an "under performing" middle school. Many of the students I am working with are impoverished, and/or coming from households of recent immigrants to the United States. Of course these kids are not going to do well on a standardized assessment. The students either do not have the language or contextual background to understand the questions on the test, or they are dealing with harsh realities at home, such as not getting enough to eat, and being evicted from their homes. What I am seeing is that not enough is being done to support and accurately test English Language Learners, and impoverish or highly mobile students are also not recieving the kind of supports that they need. I just do not see how the education system, for the student population I am currently working with, is going to improve unless these larger issues of poverty, and how we are doing assessments are addressed.
When I sent my child to school, I thought the school would teach him math, English, science, and I'd teach him Russian (my native language). Well, there is no time left in the week for that, as I have to supplement his school education with math and science from European curriculum, because American curriculum is so lacking. At his age, children in my country spend less time in school and on homework, yet learn so much more.
The whole debate about the need for education reform is based on the totally wrong premise. All debates center on throwing more $ at schools, disbanding teacher unions, creating charter schools and taking kids' summer away. But the real problem lies in what and how kids are studying.
Russian kids, who start school at 7 y.o., study algebra in 5th grade. My son here went to school before he turned 5, and he is studying factors in 5th grade. Same goes for other subjects. That's 1 problem. He spends 7 hrs in school + 2.5 hrs on homework (he works adult hrs) - that's 2 problem.
So can we talk about this?
It seems that Americans fail to understand that a good curriculum is even more important than a good teacher. If a subject is taught in logical incremental manner with homework centered on going over the subject matter taught that day, and the next lesson building on the previous one, with teacher going over homework each day, THE STUDENTS WILL LEARN REGARDLESS OF HOW AMICABLE OR CRANKY TEACHER IS. Seriously, please read http://underzodiacclock.com/2010/10/05/american-education-reform and comments by teachers underneath.
http://reading-sage.blogspot.com/
The Ravitch argument is that for reasons unrelated to child welfare, we should continue supporting systems that are objectively and hopelessly barnacled. I don't need to know anything about the children or their parents to know that a school where teachers are caring and skilled, as a condition of employment, are worth supporting and that buildings packed with unskilled and uncaring burn-outs who cannot be fired, ought to be shut down immediately. This is a matter of common sense and social justice.
Second, let's entertain the idea of improving government schools,really reforming them. How? What's gonna change? Look at the last half-century of truly concerted (and expensive) effort. Have the union contracts in even a single large school district been materially rolled back? Have the incentives acting on school principals and administrators changed materially and permanently? Why would they? The unions face no natural political opposition and where are there school boards and political control you have -- over time -- a material union veto. Schools or organized around a union principle of labor solidarity. Is that a bonafide, high-performance management structure?
Net-net, unless you take the politicians out of government school governance, you can't have real reform, nd if you do that, you have charter schools.
Unionized schools or public schools systems do not ensure that bad teachers are protected or that teachers of these schools are "unskilled and uncaring burn-outs that cant be fired." In fact, unions have promoted better qualified teachers by forcing their teachers to have credentials/certification. In many, non-unionized school districts, most notably Florida, where charter schools dominate and student performance is especially weak, individuals do not need any certification to teach. Also if you look at data from "right to work" states and unionized states you see that for the most part teachers are fired and kept at the same rate under each system. What this illustrates is that unions are not what is keeping bad teachers in the schools but administrators.
I do agree with your assertion that reform is needed to expedite the process of firing truly bad teachers.
Joel's reply to your analysis is spot on.
Of course, the opposite is true.
I am of the opinion that charter schools have tapped into the desire of "decent" families to protect their children from those of the "street." A description of the "code of the street" playing out in public schools can be found here: http://perimeterprimate.blogspot.com/search/label/Elijah%20Anderson
I also heard this expression used by another sociologist: "the incarcerated class." This is the difficult-to-educate subgroup that the public schools are trying do their best with, and that the charter schools have no interest in trying to reach. Saving their children from the "pack of wolves" (an expression I heard used by a charter school parent) is what is behind a substantial part of the charter school draw.
Michelle Alexander discusses our astronomically high incarceration rates in her book, "The New Jim Crow." The consequences of this on families are enormous, and are still being ignored.
This IS precisely the problem, but it's being ignored in the Reform Wars back and forth about who is to blame.
Unions are not wholly to blame, but when people point out obvious problems, simply repeating the blanket denials comes off as obfuscatory dodge-ball. This leads to the valid points of the union stance being shut out because they won't acknowledge and act upon the problems that do exist. The pat prefatory line of “nobody want to get rid of bad teachers more than other teachers” rings hollow because of the wholesale deflection that inevitably follows.
The default duck and cover position of relegating any and all concerns to “teacher bashing” shows an entrenched unwillingness to own any part of the problem.
The endless rhetorical contortions also weaken the teacher/union position: It's NOT a crisis, it's just that there's endless reasons why it's not really our fault. Until you alleviate all of the societal inequities, we will not be able to do anything about the enormous problems we are experiencing, but it's NOT a crisis.
Uh, ok.
The “unwilling learners'" difficulties will not be rectified until we specifically deal with them. It IS possible to help these kids, but only if we get off the damn blame game carousel.
How can we expect the students to take responsibility if we as a collective shirk our own?
Those kids could receive special tutoring, and if that does not help, they should be held back.
If that has no effect, then social services or special education may have to be on the menu.
It's OK to hold back kids that don't learn, and it's OK to have social stigma to go with it. This way kids have an extra impetus to learn if they are falling behind.
Everything else - charter schools, disbanding teacher unions, etc. - is unnecessary fluff that changes nothing.