"He's a rockstar," says documentary director Davis Guggenheim of Geoffrey Canada, president and CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone in Harlem, New York, an organization that endeavors to increase high school and college graduation rates among students in Harlem. Mr. Canada appears as one of the few catalysts of educational reform in Guggenheim's provocative new documentary Waiting for Superman about America's notoriously crisis-ridden public school system.
According to Guggenheim, America's public schools are in desperate need of rockstar teachers and administrators visionaries like Geoffrey Canada. No one watching the charismatic Mr. Canada or hearing about his accomplishments would disagree, as the documentary records Canada's successes and follows the lives of several talented American children, whose education and future lives hang in balance.
Guggenheim invites viewers' outrage as he presents the shocking statistics that most Americans already know: our once great public schools are failing our young people and no one seems prepared to take bold steps toward change. Waiting for Superman is also a character-driven tear-jerker, elaborating the desperation of several American children, Anthony, Francisco, Bianca, Daisy, and Emily. These students come from a variety of backgrounds, both middle class and disadvantaged, African American, Latino, white; live in California, New York and Washington. These children occupy the center of the story, but nothing about their fate gives cause for cheer. Instead, the documentary devotes most of its energy to what it sees as the cause for their troubles, the political impasse of American education.
In interview Guggenheim waxes both prophetic and aphoristic: "Politics are essential." He means the troubles of American public school are political and the answers might be as well, though these remain unclear in the end. Hoping to expose the bad politics of public school education, Guggenheim takes on the teachers' union, the American Federation of Teachers, showing how it colludes with a corrupt public school system, which serves the teachers rather than the students. The AFT, one of the biggest donors to the Democratic Party, is a "special interest group" that claims to protect teachers while it in fact only seeks to preserve the status quo. Alone this willingness of a left-leaning director of the hugely successful film on global warming, The Inconvenient Truth (2006), to take on unions and his own political party render the film noteworthy. But beyond this initial boldness the film offers little profound analysis and few solutions. Its value lies rather in its medium as a film. For the large part of the American population that reads little news and participates infrequently in public debates about education Waiting for Superman serves as an introduction. Guggenheim acts mostly as the messenger here, as the political battles are already raging around the country.
One notorious combatant is Michelle Rhee, the controversial chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools system of Washington, D.C. In dark, grainy hand-held footage, Waiting for Superman trains on Rhee's disappointed face as public school teachers unanimously refuse to vote to relinquish tenure privileges in exchange for merit increases in pay. That implacable audience, Guggenheim tells his viewers, is driven by fear as well as addiction to an outmoded bureaucracy that preserves teacher's jobs while it refuses to make changes that would promote excellent teaching and better serve students' needs.
Guggenheim and Rhee are not wrong. Tenure of public school teachers has not merely provided job security and freedom of speech for the teachers; it has also permitted a chronic evasion of teacher responsibility and induced a bureaucratic nightmare rendering any disciplinary action most difficult. Yet Waiting for Superman often misses its opportunity to grasp its important subject, largely because the director remains uncertain about the complexity of many of the issues. Tenure, he declares, without much understanding of the concept, makes sense at the university level for professors who need security to publish their own research. Though he has little clue of the actual contents of university research, nor the widespread abuses of America's dying university tenure system, Guggenheim maintains a reverence for college teachers he lacks for the unionized public school educators. Indeed, Waiting for Superman depicts the latter with their feet up on their desks and newspapers rather than lesson plans in hand. They appear fat, slovenly and sometimes openly hostile to students, an image glaringly at odds with the claims of the AFT, which sees itself as the sole protector of the once naïve, disempowered largely female population of teachers. The evil force behind these pampered tenured public servants, who no longer serve, is the toothy, hawk-faced union president Randi Weingarten, who declares the virtues of serving a political interest group.
But the guilt resides not merely with potentially bad teachers protected by the evil union schoolmarm, as Guggenheim suggests. There are also the legions of administrators, enjoying six figure paychecks and a myriad of bureaucratic shelters from external evaluation. There is also a history of federal government intervention, which the film describes as outdated and not centralized enough, because regulations differ from state to state. Rather than developing these ideas, however, Waiting for Superman preaches to the converted, faulting the right as well as the greatly flawed Bush/ Kennedy No Child Left Behind Act, gleefully depicting the previous president's maladroit colloquial English.
If the system has really been made to serve adults as Guggenheim suggests, then he offers little in the way of suggestion of how to help school age children--besides the confession that he drives his own children past three public schools to drop them off at their private school. Such a mea culpa from the director at the opening of the film invites viewers to ask themselves as well if they have been honest with about their fears regarding American education. Have they been honest, or are they tragically unrealistic, waiting, as Geoffrey Canada suggests for a "Superman" to come and save them from certain doom. To make clear the absurdity of the situation, the film cuts to a clip of George Reeves from the original "Adventures of Superman" series saving schoolchildren on a runaway bus whose driver was unconscious at the wheel. The montage elicits a rumble of knowing chuckles from the audience. If the educational system is so entirely asleep at the wheel, then what is the political solution Guggenheim seeks? His film only shows the impending doom.
Politics may not be as intractable as the documentary suggests. In 2010 Michelle Rhee won a partial victory getting unions to accept pay raises and bonuses of $20,000 to $30,000 for merit, in exchange for weakened teachers' seniority protections and the end of teacher tenure for one year. Whether such changes will help the several children Guggenheim follows in his documentary remains unclear. Only two get accepted to the charter schools that may or may not help them succeed. In the end, the documentary fades to black as the young student Anthony lies down on his bunk bed at his new school gazing at a Polaroid of his deceased drug-addict father. It's a touching moment for sure, but the documentary offers few suggestions of what to do for American children at large.
I personally am forming the opinion that educators need to stop with the degrees in Education, and focus on content areas, like history, science, literature, language, etc. I do think that all teachers should have at least a Masters degree - and not in Education.
I work at a community college, and if I have to attend one more meeting where we "process" and "brainstorm" on flipcharts and post it notes I will go mad. I know where the money is going - into non-educators trying to assess what educators are doing. When they can't figure it out, they impose "process meetings" and require educators to spend less time prepping and working with students, and more time in meetings brainstorming about how best to meet the needs of students. WTF!!!!
This on top of taking every opportunity to increase class size and standardize liberal education. Which is a contradiction in terms.
http://www.mendeducation.blogspot.com
can you believe 50% of our elementary school teachers cannot do 8th grade math? about 60% of middle school teachers cannot do 12 th grade math.
FIRE those incompetent people.
Hire people with math and science education background.
This is very important.
My experience as a parent has shown me that if I want a good school for my child, I look at the kinds of parents that live in each school's area. Once you have a majority of education-minded parents, the schools become better. One reason is because the better teachers and principals will gravitate toward the districts where the parents support education. Another reason is because the children are more focused on education (their parents expect it) and provide some peer pressure toward education.
While I can find a good school for my child, I still find the education system lacking for today's world. Students are growing up in a very different world than my past. And I do not see the schools keeping up with that.
And yes, I could outline ideas of what I think needs to happen. But since I don't have formal experience in education or educational degrees, my ideas would be disregarded. This is part of the problem I see - society expects the ivory tower of education to figure out the solutions. I think the solution needs to come from many sectors, including educational
this is true for any inner city school.
we have a culture of celebration of idiocy or ignorance or un-educated-ness among people.
This is VERY VERY true in certain ethnic / race group. "You know what I am saying"
#2. 50% the teachers in our schools are awful. this cannot be denied. if it was any other profession and this was the scene there people would have been fired decades ago. I doont know why we have them in our schools.
I think you'd better check your research on your other claim as well - too many other professions have mediocre to bad employees and don't fire them.
One thing I thought about for some time is some kind of virtual TED conference where teachers that are truly "pushing the envelope" and seeing real results can share their methods with other teachers and, earned the praise it's a richly deserve. It would only be a small part in addressing a much larger and complex problem, but one that could be very helpful.
Marx wrote that the oligarchy would have to eviscerate the public education system in order to maintain its hold on power. A dumb electorate is an easily-persusaded electorate. And here we are. One must only look to the Texas Education Board's recent activites to know that the political henchmen of the oligarchs are hard at work continuing the decline.
The Superintendent should be an elected position (every four years), and must no longer be allowed to be selected by the School Board who currently do nothing more than feather each other's beds.
I would be agreeable to sweeping changes being proposed for public education only if we, the local teachers and principals, are given most of the control to decide what is best for our school community.
More pay, more decision making responsibility. The State and Federal education departments should basically be there to support our objectives and ensure our objectives are fair and sound for the needs of the community.
I agree wholeheartedly that we should be able to differentiate instruction in the classroom and schools to provide meaningful education for all abilities, from Talented and Gifted, to English Language Learners, to Special Needs.
However, that kind of individualized differentiation the government is mandating requires more staff in classrooms of which student populations are increasing year after year. The same support staff (like ELL, TAG and SpEd para-educators) that are being cut and are now gone in most districts.
If the government wants to mandate more and more, than it must provide the funding to back up those mandates. Otherwise, no one will be educated well. At this time of economic hardship government needs to back off and let us get back to the jobs of teaching again.
Schools are financed by local taxes and so public schools in poor neighborhoods also tend to lack funding compared to public schools in suburban neighborhoods. Duh.
Liberals and conservatives alike are ignoring poverty and social issues in order to preserve the myth of American individualism and equal opportunity. It isn't about education, it's about preserving upper class bias and assuaging guilt. As in, "There. I made a 'cry over the urban poor' movie. I'm absolved." That kind of narcissism is too familiar and not even a little bit helpful. It sucks to be poor and black. No kidding.
It reminds me of when Bush visited LA after Katrina and had to be hugging little black kid in every photo op. Give me a break.
“Education is a middle-class virtue. Children aspire to it only if they can see some payoff for them in the long run and the people they trust support them in this quest for knowledge.
The perceived decline of public education roughly parallels the decline of the middle class. All the factors which contributed to the growth of the middle class have been weakened: real wages have been declining since the late seventies; union membership, ditto; the cost of college is inversely proportional to the ability of the middle class to afford it; social mobility, which used to be mainly lower class to middle class, has been reversed by the recession.
Solve the problem of the dwindling middle class by instituting policies which will foster its growth, and you will have solved the problems of public education.”
The grinding poverty you mention is only part of the problem for children who see no way out and do not believe that education will be a ticket to any measure of success.
Either rebuild the middle class, or recreate education as some sort of subsistence-class institution. If we can't sustain a society which reflects what children are taught in school, they will only come to view what they are taught as fairy tales and lies.
Level A: Students that are gearing up for continuing education , beyond high school, that excel and keep the required GPA. Students only need to request admission to A level, and maintain required GPA to stay in. The level A schools will have the college prep / advanced level classes.
Level B: Students that intend to continue their education beyond high school, and are taking required classes, and maintaining required GPA. Also, all level B students are required to wear school uniforms. Students can request to be placed in the B Schools at any time. Level B classes will be actual high school level programs, not a lowered program to accommodate the majority.
Level C: This is public babysitting. No uniforms required. The basic lowered high school program.
Don't want to go to college? Great. Don't want to wear a school uniform? Not really interested in learning, or can't keep up? This is the school for you. The C schools should be independent locations, that are separate from the A/B schools.
There isn't any other option at this point. What we currently have is a dumb ed down school system to accommodate the majority.
Ever film at a funeral parlor, and have gang bangers show up? I have. What a fun night.