In the next few days and weeks you are going to be hearing a lot about a film called “Waiting for Superman.” It’s directed by Davis Guggenheim, who made “An Inconvenient Truth,” and its focus is school reform. More precisely it focuses on how certain charter schools are providing new and different opportunities for low-income kids, but are being fought and bad-mouthed every step of the way by established interests content with a miserable status quo.
Sound simplistic? Well it is, but the film is an effective vehicle for its powerful message, even if it paints in black and white issues that are decidedly gray. To be fair to the movie, it does not do what some of its critics in the teachers’ unions say. It is not a “teacher-bashing” movie. Guggenheim goes out of his way to point out there are great teachers in most every school. So don’t buy the anti-movie propaganda from the usual suspects.
Across the country, advocacy groups that endorse the Obama-Duncan style of education reform are gearing up for a huge publicity and advocacy blitz to promote the film. Heck, it was featured on “Oprah” yesterday. That alone practically guarantees boffo box office.
Groups pushing the film believe that “Waiting for Superman” provides them with an unprecedented opportunity to advocate for accelerated reforms, even as a backlash builds against those reforms. Expect titanic clashes through October between proponents and critics of the film’s message.
Which side are you on? Here’s a cheat sheet. If you believe that public education in this country is in need of major change, particularly in cities, and that change has to come primarily from external forces, then you will probably like “Waiting for Superman.”
If, on the other hand, you believe that educators are better positioned than anyone else to make the needed changes, and what they need first and foremost are more resources to implement those changes, you will probably hate the movie.
Lost amid the sturm und drang surrounding “Waiting for Superman” is “The Lottery,” a movie that explores the same themes, even focuses on some of the same characters. And it may well be a better movie. It opened last spring, in extremely limited release (Denver was one of four cities where it showed, briefly).
“The Lottery,” the first film by 27-year-od Madeleine Sackler, follows four families as they try to get their kids into Harlem Success Academy charter schools in Manhattan. Like “Waiting for Superman,” Sackler’s film has a clear point of view. But “The Lottery” sparks outrage quietly, and without a hint of didacticism.
Sackler lets the four families tell their own stories. She treats them with dignity and respect. The camera tells hard truths – one little girl’s home is so devoid of sensory stimuli that it’s no surprise she cannot read – but remains non-judgmental.
If “The Lottery” doesn’t make you tear up a time or two, then you’re harder-hearted than I.
The filmmaker stays far in the background, whereas in “Superman,” Guggenheim at times makes himself a central character.
I attended a conference at The Aspen Institute last week where Sackler was one of the featured speakers. She is utterly without pretense, and makes no claims to be an education expert. But the act of making the movie sparked outrage in her, and, she says, made education her new passion.
Some critics have dinged “The Lottery” for being one-sided. There are interviews with Joel Klein and Geoffrey Canada, but no representative from any teachers’ union appears on camera. New York Public Advocate Besty Gotbaum speaks for charter skeptics in the film, but much of what she says sounds ill-informed, almost nonsensical, and she looks like the camera gives her gas.
Sackler said she made the movie she was able to make. She wanted a more balanced film, but could not get any teachers’ union representative to appear on camera. She tried for over a year to get an interview with American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. Ultimately, even Weingarten’s spokespeople refused to go on camera. So she proceeded to make the best movie she could with what she had.
Guggenheim’s bigger, higher-profile production succeeded in getting face time with Weingarten. But the brief clips of her interview struck me as the most disingenuous moments in “Waiting for Superman.” Weingarten was shot in unflattering light and from bad angles, making her look every bit the villain she actually isn’t. She hails from the more reasonable wing of a movement that has gone badly off the rails, so treating her shabbily strikes me as counterproductive.
During her talk at the Aspen conference, Sackler synthesized in a couple of sentences one of the ongoing school reform debates. Some people, she said, argue that you cannot fix schools until you fix poverty. After spending time in urban schools and with the families subjected to them, it became clear to her that the opposite is true. And that fact seems so simple and obvious to her that she seemed puzzled that people continue arguing over this issue.
I don’t see it quite that way. If only it were that simple. The fact of the matter is both sides are right. You can’t fix poverty without fixing schools but you can’t fix schools without fixing poverty either. And with the political system so seized up that it imperils our society, no one can muster much will to do anything on a large scale about either interlocked challenge.
And so we slide downhill. No movie alone can fix that.
Popularity: 5% [?]
I haven’t seen the movie and I have no plans to, even though I “believe that public education in this country is in need of major change, particularly in cities.” I’ve repeatedly read that in the movie the director states that essentially any teacher automatically receives tenure after two years. This is simply untrue – I remember being furious after reading the same lie in a Newsweek article months ago. It’s not true in any schools in the Denver Metro area, and it’s not true across the country. Maybe it was true 10-20 years ago – I don’t know. But stating so in a current movie is the equivalent of stating that 2+2 =’s 7. As the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan stated “people are entitled to their own opinions but they’re not entitled to their own facts.” If the director can’t even be bothered to get the simple facts of due process (it’s not even tenure, at least like a college professor has it) straight then it’s not hard to imagine what the rest of the movie will be like. This is typical of a lot of the top-down management self-styled “education reformers” “who believe that change needs to come from external sources” that they don’t let facts get in the way of their grandiose theories. Pointing out basic factual errors in a movie isn’t “anti-movie propaganda from the usual suspects” unless you confuse reality with propaganda.
While it is true that WFS does not throw teachers under the bus it certainly does teachers unions. I like a provocative experience, but the only provocation that WFS provides is for non-chartered public school teachers. The movie could have explored or at least highlighted the fact that there are just as many “bad” charters as there “bad” non-charter public schools. The impression that I had when I left the viewing was that if you care about education you need to fight for charters. There was a public charter highlighted in the movie, but there were no non-charter public schools even remotely offered as an option. When the movie was over, I couldn’t help but feel that Guggenheim had produced a movie that allowed him to release the guilt he alluded to at the beginning of the movie as he sent his own kids to private school. Guggenheim hit the mark with climate warming–it exists and it is caused by humans. He missed the mark with WFS by skipping the cause and only promoting his solution.
Alan writes: “You can’t fix poverty without fixing schools but you can’t fix schools without fixing poverty either.”
This would be a convenient truth, but alas it is clearly false. There are a lot of very good schools with high-poverty demographics who have not fixed poverty. It’s not easy, but it is certainly possible.
However I am still waiting for an example of someone solving poverty and opening schools.
Yes, but how about education writ large? Therein lies the challenge.
The more I read of so-called educational reform, or “accelerated reform” as Alan Gottlieb phrases it, the more I wonder what the definition is. Charter schools are, in my view, simply a perpetuation of the status quo reformers (or deformers) say they want to change. The management style, authoritarianism, remains the same. In Colorado, SB 191, not only institutionalizes authoritarianism, it perpetuates the cronyism now prevalent in many school districts. The legislation hails the same “strong man” principal that has been the norm for public schools. It empowers the principal to play the leading role in teacher recruitment and retention. So, what has been common practice has now been codified. How is that reform? Of the two films mentioned as extolling “reform” and especially charter schools, what I viewed and absorbed in “The Lottery” was an educational system that has become so callous and crass that the quality of a child’s education is dependent upon being selected by lot. Being that the reform movement is being financed partly by corporations, many hostile to public education and run by the same top down management style, it’s perfectly clear what direction is most favored by deformers. What’s being created is an American form of educational apartheid. Exclusive charter schools such as Denver School of Science and Technology (DSST) exist for the privileged and the lucky while regular public schools will house special needs students and most students of color and poverty. Of course, according to the deformers, poverty isn’t a significant factor in student achievement. That attitude reveals that so-called reform is based on opinion rather than research. A quick check of credible studies, refutes that as fallacious. Finally, teacher unions are not obstacles to reform. They advocate, for example, for reducing the vocabulary gap that prevents many students from achieving at the same level as their peers. And, they are resisting the perpetuation of the status quo being advocated by the deform movement.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rick-ayers-/an-inconvenient-superman-_b_716420.html
At a time when China has an educated middle class that outnumbers our entire population, this country engages in the practice of offering quality education to the few and a mediocre to poor one for the masses. That prescription will produce second world status for the USA by no later than 2050. That’s a sad commentary on a great civilization. If any “reformer” reads Rick Ayers’ brilliant essay, a lesson can be learned. It’s not too late to turn away from “reform” that’s really rote learning to take a test. That’s it!