Davis Guggenheim's film "Waiting for 'Superman' " is an indictment of the public education system in America. It cuts to the bone, exposing bureaucrats and special interest groups, in the form of teachers' unions, as major impediments to our kids' success in school. The point is brought home by following five children and their families as they try, against the odds, to gain access to a quality education. Charter schools, run by visionaries and free of arcane regulations that hobble traditional public schools, emerge as a ray of hope, but admission is by public lottery. The stories of just five of the over 40 million children sitting in public school classrooms today compel us to ask, can something as important as a child's future be left to chance?
From an education advocacy standpoint, this film is a gamechanger. As Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa stated at the screening, "If your blood is not boiling by the end of this film, then there is no blood pumping through your heart." My blood was certainly boiling. Further, having fallen in love with these five children, it was hard to distinguish between the tears of rage, sorrow, and triumph by the end. This film will inspire change.
From an education reform standpoint, "Waiting for 'Superman' " also delivers huge. The film illuminates obstacles to widespread accomplishment of two of the three critical components to educational success. Variously framed by experts, these components boil down to: 1. Hiring and keeping good teachers, 2. Maintaining an efficient infrastructure that allows administrators to do their jobs, and 3. Acknowledging that every child counts when measuring success. I think of these as the "what" and "how" of good public education (the "why" is obvious). Guggenheim draws attention to an indiscriminate system of teacher retention and tenure, fiercely guarded by teachers' unions, that ties the hands of school administrators wanting to purge their schools of sub-par teachers. The film offers up publicly funded, but independently operated, charter schools as an alternative for kids lucky enough to be admitted. And while I was at the edge of my seat rooting for the five kids to get into their schools of choice, and utterly awestruck by the heroes like Harlem Children's Zone CEO, Geoffrey Canada, who have stepped up to pull our children out of an education system on fire, I found myself wanting to know more about how to replicate these acts of sheer heroism so that no child is left behind. Yes, it occurs to me that this is not an original impulse but instead that as Guggenheim points out, while every American President since Lyndon Johnson has pushed forward education reform policy, student achievement has flatlined since the 1970s.
In the film, Geoffrey Canada expresses his own moment of defeat when he realized that Superman does not exist -- that there is no man or woman strong enough or fast enough to rescue every child in a failing public school. Of course there are public schools and charter schools producing amazing results under impossible circumstances, and we should learn from these examples. Simultaneously, we cannot ignore the complexity of these issues, or the data telling us, on average, charter schools aren't performing any better than public schools. In some cases, they aren't even performing as well. Charter schools are no more the silver bullet of public education reform than were the magnet schools of the 60s and 70s, and eradicating teacher tenure will not ensure that children are engaged in learning.
So, I return to the third component of educational success, acknowledging that every child counts when measuring success. I take this to mean that every child learns differently, has a unique set of strengths, and is capable of contributing to a productive, innovative society. "Waiting for 'Superman' " touches on how to engage children in learning, featuring Canada's "birth to college pipeline" ideal, demanding schools be accountable for every child's success through college graduation. We also meet one gifted teacher who turns around plummeting test scores by teaching math through music. We briefly meet Bill Strickland, the famous educational reformer and CEO of Manchester Bidwell Corporation. He tells us about his own troubled childhood, and the sad fact that many of his former classmates are incarcerated, but not about how he turned it around, along with the lives of thousands of children, and is now heading up a multi-million dollar company that promotes social change through the arts, education, and career training. A company that began, incidentally, in Strickland's own backyard, which he opened up to neighborhood kids for making art after school. These are glimpses into the "how" of quality education.
We absolutely cannot underestimate the power of charismatic and visionary leaders, and I am grateful for the people who had the courage to make a film that celebrates education heroes, but there are not enough of those heroes to go around. We need to find as many ways as possible to find and feed children's passions, so that they can stop waiting for the Man of Steel who will never come, and start on the hard work of saving themselves. "Waiting for 'Superman' " reminded me that statistics have names, and that paying close attention to the hopes, dreams, and needs of every child is an important step in public education reform.
P.S. ARTS is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving children's lives by bringing arts education to underserved public schools and their communities. P.S. ARTS believes that every child deserves high-quality arts instruction that contributes to personal and intellectual growth, and promotes the development of creative, academic, and social skills.
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I certainly hope this film doesn't contribute to the fear and misunderstanding of public education that is already prevalent among economically and educationally privileged parents. These same parents are the ones that can be part of the solution through active involvement.
Charter schools in Chicago have also been found to have a significantly lower proportion of students with disabilities and English language learners than the regular public school. Additionally charter schools do not have to go through the same procedures as regular public schools when expelling or "counseling out" students because the student who is being expelled can still attended the normal public school. As a result, even though charter schools use a lottery to select students, they have a almost limitless control over which students can stay at the school. This creates a huge disadvantage for Chicago public schools because all of the students deemed troublemakers by the charter schools just filter down into the non-charter schools.
This movie is no documentary, it's a sales pitch which seeks to sway peoples’ views by appealing to them on an emotional level rather than an intellectual one. I believe that Charter schools do have a place in our public school system. However they should not be seen as a complete replacement to the current system.
How do we expand the use of best practices throughout the public system? There is so much bi-partisan vitriol its difficult for useful legislation to ensure public schools that can afford to retain good or train excellent teachers with a living wage.
As much as I wish we could leave education as a state's right (and I've lived in state with excellent dedication to education - which all then end up blue states... b/c the populous is better educated?) I am fully behind the new push for national standards - now to get Arts a prominent place in those standards!
Charter schools are a major opportunity for a lot of rip-off artists and their associates to make a buck. Massive amounts of money are being lost and will never be recovered. Much more will never be discovered. The whole thing’s been set up so the oversight and regulation is weak. It’s a neo-liberal, anti-union free-for-all.
At this very moment, gobs of tax dollars are being spent on federal, state and local investigators who are looking into charter school schemes, not to mention all the legal and courtroom costs required to deal with the mess. The rules to tighten things up are slowly made after the fact, and are always met with resistance from the charter school movement. In the meantime, the schemers are highly motivated to always keep one step ahead.
When the issues are discovered and prosecuted -- -- taxpayers end up paying for BOTH the prosecution and defense; the charter schools operators use money from their publicly funded budgets to cover their legal defense. The whole scene is a big can of worms. A whole ongoing series of documentaries could be done about the scams. See http://charterschoolscandals.blogspot.com/
Honestly, how naive and stupid can people be?
StarShine Academy has developed, and has been utilizing this system to stray away from the standardized tests and new textbooks that you've mentioned. We are on the same page about what is wrong with today's educational system, but I want to inform you about the StarShine Effect, a solution since we opened in 2002 and have continued to expand rapidly around the world from the United Kingdom to Monrovia, Liberia.
I had to do something. It just so happens that I have a great tool to help take a stand. I own a an early childhood education entertainment business. At Sara Hickman's Top Secret Science we go to schools and perform entertaining and educational math and science events. After watching the trailer for "Waiting for Superman" it hit me. I live in Cincinnati, Ohio and there are plenty of low income schools right here in my area. I am going to take my events to these schools.
I sat down with my leadership team and we made a game plan. "Early Risers" have a goal to get the children excited about learning math and science and get it started early. By reaching our goal we hope to remind the teachers how fun teaching and learning can be. When children are having fun while learning it is a win/win for everyone involved.
Next, what are we going to do. Low income schools will receive 3 events per year for children PreK to 2nd Grade. The teachers will also receive follow up activities for after "Early Risers" leaves. The schools pay nothing for these services.
For more information on Early Risers go to www.sarahickmanstopsecretscience.com
http://www.waitingforsupermantruth.org/
http://www.racetonowhere.com/
We should look at real solutions that can improve ALL schools and outcomes for ALL students like the original vision behind charters that was hijacked by corporate interests or utilizing the ecopedogogical work of Paulo Freire. Or giving the humanities, arts, and other subjects that have been proven to improve academic and social behavior as well as encourage critical thinking as much weight as the narrow subject matter covered on standardized tests.
All of those things would be better than handing our public schools over to corporate interests.
And here is where we fail, and why charter schools will never be the long term solution. Based on conservative numbers, somewhere around 20% of children suffer from learning disabilities in the dyslexia and agnosia categories. But the latter; most teachers, administrators and even pediatricians have never even heard of. This means that 20% of kids are failing to get a proper education because no one is giving them proper assessment or learning designed to work with their slightly different brains. I got into an argument one night with someone, who insisted that the cost of the necessary assessment/tools was too much to expect to deal with 20% of the kids. But you start talking on kids with Aspergers (and other more obvious learning disabilities) and you're probably talking more like 30-40% of kids.
We have to stop thinking standardized tests and new text books are the answer. The answer is developing a system that actually teaches and engages all children in the way that best engages their brains. We need to use the new technologies we have to develop an educational system that's about real learning, not just rote repetition of useless dates/facts. Think it's bad kids can't find Iran on a map? It's worse that they don't know why they should care where it is.
And a random 5 kids is hardly worth this kind of indictment of the entire educational system.
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