While the big-bellied graybeards in both major political parities argue over who is more wrong and who is less right, the average American shrugs her shoulders insouciantly. Janey may or may not own a gun, but she is certainly weary of the sniping her elected leaders like to engage in. She is even less interested in what shouting heads or bloggers want to tell her about how her country is doing. The only way to pry her attention away from her Blackberry or soccer practice or Glee is to touch a specific nerve. Janey comes in many shapes and sizes, but there is one issue she will always feel passionate about: education.
Before Waiting for Superman made its big screen debut–even before Oprah dedicated a whole show to the film–the decibels were rising in the discourse about the state of public education in these United States. It was as if every Janey (and every Dick, too) had arrived at the same conclusion simultaneously: our schools are in bad shape and we really need to do something about that.
With a mid-term election looming, education would likely be a central issue given the small number of A-list offices up for grabs. It is, after all, a classic rallying cause for those seeking re-election or those hoping to unseat them. But jobs, God and the reach of government appear to be the major plot points in this November’s story. (Oh, and taxes.)
So, what is driving the bump in volume on the education conversation? The answer, believe it or not, is…documentaries. There’s 2 Million Minutes. Heart of Stone. The Lottery. The War on Kids. Race to Nowhere. And, of course, Waiting for Superman.
(via gapingvoid)
I Am Trying to Break Your Heart
Waiting for Superman is the latest film from Davis Guggenheim, the man who helped bring you An Inconvenient Truth. (He also directed a 2001 Peabody-winning documentary for PBS about teachers called The First Year.) Waiting for Superman is very clearly meant to help shift the conversation about public education in the United States. But in which direction is not quite so clear.
In the film, we meet four kids. Two from New York. And two from California. The age range, roughly, is first grade, third grade, fifth grade and seventh grade. We follow two Black kids and one young Latina from working class households as well as one White kid whose family lives in Silicon Valley. All four journeys deliver us to the same destination: school lotteries. School lotteries, by the way, are required by law when there are more applicants than there are available spaces at magnet or charter schools. (I think.) They operate just like you’d expect them to: kids’ names are etched onto something (ping pong ball, note card, discarded orange peel, etc) and are dropped into a hopper for a random drawing. This usually happens in public view and provides some pretty intense theatre.
Each of our kids and their families find themselves struggling against one of the ugly heads in the U.S. education hydra. Two attend neighborhood schools that look like Eastside High before Joe Clark arrived. One can’t afford to keep paying private school tuition. And one has a fairly simple dream that her school simply cannot help her achieve. (Something about wanting to become a teacher.) In short, none of the kids is (or manages to stay) enrolled at a good school. Each of them–at the behest of their families–submit to the lottery process in order to escape their respective shit shows in search of better opportunities at schools that are worth a crap.
As we get to know about the lives of the core characters–and the circumstances that shape those lives–Guggenheim lays out the stakes in the most dramatic terms. The difference between winning a lottery to attend a good school and being left to fight one’s way through the most geographically convenient school concerns not merely the amount of money a person can earn in a lifetime. It is, he shows us, the difference between having basic access to a modest version of the American Dream and being relegated to that other America. The one where you’re free to be, more or less, an indentured servant. If you don’t end up in prison. Or dead.
By the time we get to the climax of the film–the absurd school lotteries–what happens to those four harmless, innocent kids is shockingly heartbreaking. It’s the kind of thing that any Janey would probably curse at through her tears. “Is this bullshit really happening in America? How in the fuck did things get this way? Whose ass can we kick to fix it?”
The answer, according to Guggenheim’s film, is the teachers’ unions.
(via llisallindsay)
Say Hi to the Bad Guy
The title, Waiting for Superman, draws from a sound byte delivered by Geoffrey Canada, one of the more charismatic and authoritative education figures who appears in the film. It references a conversation he once had with his mother about the existence of Superman. (SPOILER: Superman is not real, yo.) The title doubles as a clarion call. And it is dangerously reductive. If there is to be a hero in our story, there must be a villain as well. Good storytelling can be that kind of simple if it chooses to be. And this film does.
Guggenheim, at his core, believes that great teachers create great educational experiences. In the film, he shows us the great, the awful and the unseemly. He tours all of the schools that are the destinations for the winners of the lotteries. Regardless of where they are in America, each of those four schools has in common a culture that nurtures and rewards great teachers for being…well…great.
The awful schools, on the other hand, do not share that culture. Guggenheim shows us failing (or failed) schools in Milwaukee, Detroit and Washington, DC. What all of those schools appear to have in common is an exceedingly restrictive relationship with their teachers’ unions. The best example of this comes from Detroit where union contracts and state laws conspire to ship bad teachers off to detention–with full pay and full benefits–instead of firing them. We also learn about the great travesty of tenure whereby union-negotiated contracts enable teachers who work in a certain capacity for a certain amount of time to qualify for automatic pay hikes based strictly on time served. Tenured teachers, we’re told, are virtually unfireable.
To underscore the point that teachers’ unions are to blame, Guggenheim explains to us that union contracts have made it exponentially more difficult to take away a teacher’s license in Illinois than it is to relieve a lawyer or a doctor of their right to practice. And by exponentially, he means a kajillion times less likely. It is as if the the U.S. public education system has chosen to condone educational malpractice. Or, in some cases, to reward it.
(If you’re a Janey, your blood should really be boiling now.)
The head of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) gets some screen time in the film to rebut portions of Guggenheim’s narrative. Truth be told, her case is a pretty difficult one to make. Is tenure a collective bargaining accomplishment that, in some states, has made it really tough to fire terrible teachers? Probably. Is tenure a fact of life for every teacher in every school district in the U.S.? Not really. From what I’m told, tenure is actually a bit of a mirage for the average teacher. It’s not as common as Waiting for Superman suggests.
So…we know that some of the things some teachers’ unions have accomplished at the bargaining table have resulted in some ill consequences for some school districts. But can all of the blame for the troubles of public education be laid at the feet of the unions? They might deserve some of it. But it’s not as if the AFT exists solely to bring about ruin in our nation’s schools. If Superman showed up tomorrow, would he visit the AFT or Washington, DC first?
(via Top Slam Dunks)
Who’s Gonna Take the Weight?
Shortly after Adrian Fenty was elected mayor of the District of Columbia in 2007, he did something that established our nation’s capitol as ground zero in the battle for education reform: he hired Michelle Rhee as the chancellor of DC’s schools.
Before she resigned her post, Rhee became famous for: 1) having no previous experience running a school district, 2) having a communication style that is direct and not very diplomatic and 3) firing a whole bunch of DC PS teachers.
(She has also overseen the closing, re-building and building of a bunch of schools and kindasorta gets credit for helping improve the overall performance of public schools in DC. But that’s probably another topic for another blog.)
Near the end of the film–before we get to the lotteries part–we learn about a contract proposal Rhee submitted to the DC teachers’ union in 2010. The deal was simple: keep tenure and get a modest pay raise or abandon tenure, accept merit pay and create the possibility that a top-performing teacher could earn $120K annually. According to Guggenheim’s version of events, the DC teachers’ union refused to even consider the contract proposals for fear that it would divide their membership.
(He’s right. It kinda did. For a brief time. Ultimately, the union voted to accept the merit pay model. The process to get that “yes” was, to be polite, acrimonious.)
Why would a teachers’ union oppose merit pay? There is the obvious reason, evident in the film, whereby crappy teachers want to keep their jobs. These people expect their union–to whom they pay dues–to protect them at every cost with no regard for how their lackluster performance affects the integrity of the union as a collective bargaining body.
And there is the not-so-obvious reason that the film ignores altogether: if you’re going to tie a person’s pay to performance, then how exactly will you measure that performance? A number of teachers and teachers’ unions disagree with existing performance metrics on the premise that they are based on flawed methods of evaluating students. Methods like that ridiculous mess otherwise known as standardized tests. It’s a legitimate negotiating point and it raises a second great intrigue: who controls curriculum?
Curriculums frequently originate with school boards. And not all school boards are created equal. There are those (*cough* Texas *cough*) who insist on fighting a moral war over whose story is really American history. Those battles have absolutely nothing to do with math, science, language or the actual skills that drive a nation’s economic success. Because the work done by school boards establishes the constraints teachers must work within, they play a central role in the public education narrative. In Waiting for Superman, neither school boards nor the havoc they sometimes wreak factors into the education conversation.
Regardless of what power any school board wields, we can assume that a thoughtful teacher would like to have some creative license to figure out how to fill his/her pupils’ heads with the knowledge they have been charged with imparting. At present, the constraints set by the average school board–and the accompanying bureaucratic tangle aimed at establishing the illusion of accountability–are rather limiting. The result is that lament teachers around the country have been singing for nearly two decades: “All I can do is teach to the test.” Where merit pay is concerned, some teachers are content to do just that in order to earn high enough marks to merit a pay raise. There are others–a lot of potential Mr. Hollands among them–who are driven away from the profession by their frustration with yielding to the great bureaucracy that serves the desires of adults much more than it tends to needs of the kids it is supposed to nurture. Consequently, merit pay is not such a simple issue and, maybe, teachers’ unions aren’t the bad guys. At least, they’re not the only bad guys.
(Did we lose Janey yet?)
(via Instructables)
Can It All Be So Simple?
In trying to understand what is really wrong with public education and how we can all band together to go about fixing it, there are two scenes in the film that scratch the surface of how complex the education problem really is.
In one scene, we see an animation that shows us the bureaucratic tangle produced by the people who author the various metrics which testing and, in turn, funding are tied to. We see that the federal government says one thing. State governments also chime in. County governments sometimes have a say. And don’t forget about municipal governments. The mandates issued at all these different levels of government jumble both good intentions and not-so-noble agendas to establish requirements aimed at producing proficient takers of tests. Should that be the point of education? The film, albeit briefly and swiftly, makes it clear that the bureaucratic tangle is not really helping students at all. If anything, it heaps more needless complexity upon them to create a system which overvalues its own metrics and undervalues the teachers who are tasked with executing its mash-up of mandates.
In the other scene, we see an animation showing us how the U.S. economy used to work. Way back in Don Draper’s heyday, a certain number of people went to college. Another cohort went to trade school. Other people worked in administrative capacities. And everyone else did the jobs that required physical labor. The spectrum moved from white collar to gray collar to blue collar. And the K through 12 experience was designed to produce people who could fill all of those positions. It made sense back then. But…that’s not our economic reality today. The entire U.S. educational system–as the film implies–has become outmoded. As such, we face a much bigger question than how to produce great teachers or how to give them the space to be great. We must ask: what exactly are the intended outputs of our public education system? What exactly do we need our graduates to be capable of doing? The film doesn’t touch those questions. At all. And maybe it doesn’t need to. But, with that new cliche, “Too big to fail,” still echoing throughout much of today’s American discourse, we need to be thinking in those terms. The process, we should all know, is only as good as the thing it produces.
(via SlipperyBrick)
G.H.E.T.T.O.U.T.
One of the final words in Waiting for Superman comes from Geoffrey Canada. He recounts how education was viewed in his family back when he was a child. He also describes the impact good teachers had on his personal development. He ends his thought saying something to the effect of, “We have got to restore in these kids that education is a way out.”
Um…
A way out of what?
Or, if you prefer…
A way into what?
Let’s start with the “into.” College is probably implied by that. College is also really expensive. And getting expensiver by the semester. There are people who are in their 30s today–including some Janeys–who are still paying off student loans that helped them finish college 15 years ago. Some of them are still paying off the interest on those loans. And we’re not talking about irresponsible people here, either. We’re talking about single people who make $50,000 a year. Who live in cities where $1,200 a month gets you a closet. To live in. If you’re lucky. Other young debtors are still sleeping under Mom and Dad’s roof. Regardless of what you owe, a college degree ain’t what it used to be. You can have a BA or even an MBA and you can still be downsized or outsourced. You could simply be unhirable for some random reason. You may get yourself into college, but what you get out of that…well…there just aren’t any guaranteed paths to prosperity any more.
As for the “way out”…clearly, Mr. Canada is talking about rough neighborhoods. Or poverty. Probably some combination of both things. That’s a hard point to argue. However, given what we know about the cost of higher education, maybe that escape is actually a pyrrhic one. It’s more likely, though, that Mr. Canada is correct. He’s just using the wrong words.
Nothing should be a way out of anything else. Not in America. There just isn’t anywhere else left to run to. We manifested our destiny and have conquered every place that’s worth conquering. Whenever we classify our neighborhoods or cities or regions as destitute, that’s just an invitation to speculators and developers to invade. When they do, they shuffle around the people who we would prefer not to have as our neighbors so we can christen that same neighborhood or city or region as…nice. Until, of course, the undesirables reclaim that space and make it not nice. Lather, rinse, re-gentrify.
What Mr. Canada–and Janey, if she’s still listening–should be calling for is a way forward.
(via Amnesty International)
There Is a Way
Davis Guggeheim–and whomever his financial backers are–leave viewers of Waiting for Superman with a call to action. The way forward regarding public education is simple, they tell us. All you have to do is visit http://www.waitingforsuperman.org. There you’ll learn what you can do to help fix our schools and, by extension, our country.
I’m no Janey (much more of a Dick, actually), but I figured I had to visit the website to learn more. And I did learn more. Like, I learned about the real purpose of Guggenheim’s film:
Waiting for Superman is simply an excellent piece of propaganda.
That’s all it is. Propaganda. Every creative decision in the film’s production chain was always intended to stir up emotions and drive everyone to be as passionate about education as the typical Janey would be. And I’ll be gotdamn’d if it doesn’t work.
The film isn’t supposed to give you all the answers. Neither is the accompanying book. It is simply supposed to roil your insides such that you engage with everything that is happening via the Waiting for Superman website. When you’re there, you can donate money to good teachers who need a little bit of extra help with things like text books or art supplies. You can share the experiences you’ve had at your kid’s school. You can learn how to effectively interact with school administrators or elected officials. You can talk with experts about testing methodologies. You can do…pretty much anything you want to in order to contribute to improving our schools. It’s a very well constructed site meant to facilitate the complex range of activities necessary for solving the riddle of public education in these United States.
Maybe you would have stumbled onto it without a nudge from Davis Guggenheim. Maybe you, like Janey, were slightly more focused on whether Emma was ever going to stand up to Sue on Glee. (SPOILER: She did.) Whatever the case, you can’t ignore the site–or the cause–any longer. While you may be mad because of the filmmaker, you can’t really be mad at him.
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