Review of “Waiting for Superman”

This column originally appeared in the Oct. 14 Harvard Independent. Also see Adam’s post yesterday on this subject.

This weekend I saw Davis Guggenheim’s documentary, Waiting for Superman, an arresting look at the American public education system and the lives of five precocious children whom it lets down. Guggenheim, whose previous works include An Inconvenient Truth and Barack Obama’s campaign-capping infomercial, is Michael Moore after anger-management therapy. He’s pissed off, but he’s not going to scream in your face; he lets his subjects tell the story.
That story is a grim one: We funnel more and more money into public education, and test scores barely budge; we talk about leaving no child behind, but the gap between high-performing and low-performing schools doesn’t narrow. The quality of the school your child goes to is often dictated by where you can afford to live.
One of Guggenheim’s subjects wants to become a veterinarian; another wants to become “a recorder, like you guys,” as he tells the film crew. The fact that our public schools can be so inadequate as to imperil these ambitions is heart-breaking.
Guggenheim’s explanation for this dysfunction is pretty simple: We need better teachers. Under current union contracts, teachers can almost never be fired for incompetence. Once granted tenure, bad teachers are virtually untouchable. And, for a child, the difference between having a good teacher and having a bad one can be the difference between advancement and stagnation.
The teachers’ unions are one commonly identified villain in this story, and it’s true that they have not always played a constructive role. In 2008, for instance, the D.C. teachers’ union rejected a proposal from reform-minded chancellor Michelle Rhee that would have begun to phase out tenure in exchange for bonuses for high-performing teachers. Guggenheim makes much of this, and tends to lionize Rhee, but his film, which was unveiled at Sundance in January, does not address the fact that, in June, the district and the union agreed to a rather similar contract, albeit with smaller bonuses.
The unions have not, in fact, denied that teacher effectiveness is a crucial issue. They’ve simply denied that it’s the only issue, and that it’s a simple issue. You can understand why teachers are on edge about the prospect that their jobs might hinge on the performance of a couple dozen schoolchildren on a standardized test, especially since it’s debatable what those tests measure, exactly. But there doesn’t seem to be an alternative, except the status quo: keep shoveling money into public schools without asking if any good is coming of it.
Some reformers cast their lots with charter schools, independently-run public schools, some of which have had remarkable results. Of course, those that have proven successful are quite popular, and the only “fair” way of deciding who gets in is to hold a random drawing. In Guggenheim’s film, the five young students and their families pin all their hopes on a lottery with impossible odds: hundreds of applicants for a few dozen spaces.
This storyline puts the movie on a terrible collision course with reality: We know that the kids cannot all get in. Of course, someone’s kids get in, and presumably that’s better than everyone’s kids going to the same failing public schools. The question raised by the film’s discussion of charter schools is one of scale: If charter schools are successful not least because of energetic parents and eager students, how can they cure an education problem that stems to some degree from the lack of these? How can the lessons of charter schools be broadened to help less motivated students and less engaged parents?
One major lesson is that kids need more school, period. The KIPP chain of charter schools, for instance, extends the normal school day by about three hours and offers sessions on Saturday and during the summer. The American school day and school year are among the shortest in the world, and the traditional three-month summer break is an anomaly.
As with policies like teacher tenure, these schedules might work for adults, but they don’t seem to work for kids. They’re especially harmful to low-income kids, who often have no one to structure their time between the end of school and the end of the work day, or during the long, lazy summer months.
President Obama has made intermittent gestures regarding the need to “rethink the school day,” but not much has come of them. By nature, the president cannot have a great deal of influence over education policy; the 50 states and thousands of local school boards still have a lot of authority. What Obama can do is make the public case for experimentation and open-mindedness. On the issue of the calendar specifically, he’s going to bump up against a lot of nostalgia for carefree childhood summers, and he’ll need to convince a media elite whose kids, let’s face it, are probably not the ones falling behind.
Like An Inconvenient Truth, Guggenheim’s new film ends with an exhortation to do something, and some suggestions of what to do. A lot of Harvard students, of course, apply to programs like Teach for America, where they spend a couple of years teaching in low-income neighborhoods. To the extent that these programs actually provide a gateway to careers in teaching, they probably do some good. But, as with charter schools, Teach for America hasn’t been unambiguously supported by studies of student performance. And while TFA boasts that 86% of its alumni are “impacting education or low-income communities,” only 34% are actually teachers.
In light of these numbers, you can see why career teachers feel threatened by reformers like Rhee (a TFA alum), whose policies seem to suggest that teaching should be something you try out for a couple years, to see if you’re any good at it, and then desert if and when you find that you’re not. But such concerns draw our focus back to adults, and if there’s one lesson to draw from Guggenheim’s film, it’s that we need to keep the focus on the kids.
Photo credit: Flickr stream of —mikey—