“Waiting For Superman”
Geoffrey Canada stated, “One of the saddest days of my life was when my mother told me Superman didn’t exist... I was crying because there was no one coming with enough power to save us.” Just as many children look up to fictional characters such as Superman, parents look up to our school system to educate, if not raise, their children. However, too many of these parents are beginning to realize that an effective education, like Superman, is nonexistent. In Waiting for Superman, Davis Guggenheim addresses a failing public school system in America that is a result of teachers unions, ineffective teachers, and false promises, among many other factors. The director’s selective perception in the video Waiting for Superman purports that public education is incapable of meeting the challenge of providing an adequate education to each one of its students and hence, charter schools are the answer to fixing the problem with education in the United States. He focuses on the plethora of public schools robustly failing its students and the factors causing them to fail. He gives statistics and facts to support his arguments and emphasizes that which makes a great school or a great student, is a great teacher. He criticizes the public school system by calling the federal, state, local, and district boards a “tangled mess of conflicting regulations and mixed agendas.” He states “the things we’ve done to help our schools work better have become the things that prevent them from working.” He hints on how some political figures believed No Child Left Behind was going to “fix” education, but after a few years of standardized testing in public schools it has only proved to show that in math and reading, students in the United States rank at the bottom when compared to students around the world.
While the majority of Guggenheim’s points are legitimate, he exhibited a bias view of the public school system in which I do not support. His promotion of charter schools in the film conveniently exclude the statistics that show that charter schools are not the silver bullet that will save a failing educational system. For example, a study from Stanford University's Center for Research on Education Outcomes discovered that while 17 percent of charter schools "provide superior education opportunities for their students," an alarmingly "37 percent deliver learning results that are significantly worse than their students would have realized had they remained in traditional public schools." Nevertheless, I have seen firsthand the problems faced by educators in the public school system and feel that charter schools do, in fact, have the ability to offer an effective education to their students if certain intrinsic motivations are the driving force.
In Waiting for Superman, Guggenheim attacks teachers unions and blames tenure for allowing ineffective teachers to continue teaching. The fact of the matter is that unions don’t grant tenure – administrators do. Too many school boards and superintendents attack tenure rather than hold their own managers accountable for hiring and supervising teachers and, when necessary, removing those who don’t make the grade. There is no need for teachers to have tenure in a public school. The principle of academic freedom today is so well established that no administration or board of trustees at any school district would dare violate it and risk a discrimination lawsuit. Tenure started in the early 20th century as a means of protecting teachers from being fired for wrong reasons. Back then, racial or personal bias could get a perfectly good teacher fired. Female teachers even faced being fired for becoming pregnant or for wearing pants to work. Tenure also served to protect professors whose research or teaching practices might ruffle the feathers of superiors, and to ensure job security for out of the box academic pursuits. Today, teachers are obligated to teach material that is needed for students to succeed and excel during testing. These requirements are rigorous but lack the need for creative or courageous teaching practices. I have noticed that most seasoned teachers, despite being tenured, are concerned more about test grades and observations from administrators rather than teaching children how to think critically or make judgments and calculations for themselves. Teachers should have no fear in being dismissed or receiving an undesirable rating if they are doing the job that they were hired for. On the other hand, if one is not effective in teaching or maintains a lack of motivation for their students’ success in life then there is no reason why that person should keep their position. Workers in most professions are fired due to inadequacies or dereliction of duty. Seemingly in a profession where the risks of not being competent in your duties can affect the lives of others, it is surprising that these inadequate teachers are retained.
New York faced intense scrutiny and criticism in 2009 when it came to light that it had been paying full salaries to nearly 700 tenured teachers who had been accused of poor performance or wrongdoing. These teachers were paid not to teach, but rather to sit in a guarded room from the start to finish of each day. How is the government benefitting our society by using tax payer’s dollars to pay for teachers to idly sit in a room when these dollars could be used to introduce new programs into the school, new technologies, new teachers, or advancing research into effective practices?
Some school districts have resorted to buyouts that effectively pay a teacher to leave their job. The practice has evolved as a way to avoid the extensive hearings and appeals required by union contracts and state-labor laws in firing a tenured teacher and reduce the costs involved which can run as high as $100,000. Ironically, by wasting time and resources to get rid of bad teachers, good teachers and students are the ones who are negatively affected. Instead, the Department of Education and the United Federation of Teachers should create a system based on contracts and performance. Franklin W. Olin College opened, in 2002, and stated that the school would not offer tenure to its employees rather; all of the inaugural faculties were to be placed on five-year contracts. The Massachusetts College’s founders said “a no tenure system would give the institution more flexibility to phase programs in and out as the needs of the industry demanded,” said Richard K. Miller, president of the college. “Nobody comes to Olin because they are looking for job security,” he said. “People come to Olin because they’re looking to make a difference.” Charter schools already have the ability to implement a system that ensures the effectiveness of their pedagogues. I think public schools should implement a similar system however; the criteria used in the measurement of performance can and will be endlessly debated. How does one measure the effectiveness of a teacher? Will it be through standardized tests? Administrative assessments? The debate fires on.
Guggenheim inferred that teachers are what make good students but there is a perplexing paradox which no one can seem to answer. In the film, he mentions that failing schools cause failing neighborhoods or neighborhoods with high crime rates and poverty. Others conclude that the neighborhoods with high crime rates and poverty are a result of an environment that is not conducive to learning. This chicken or the egg like paradox is fueling the debate of measuring an effective teacher and an effective educational system. Evidence suggests that inequalities exist between low socio-economical urban schools and middle class suburban schools. Ranges in school funding, student motivation and parent involvement all contribute to these inequities. Some charter schools have the ability to select their students and can siphon through unmotivated troubled students and select from top performers. These schools have the ability to expel behavior problems. These abilities contribute to a school environment that is conducive to learning and progress hence, higher performance ratings. Some public schools have adopted a charter school-like culture and it has fostered this conducive environment. Now urban students from poor neighborhoods have a chance to attend public schools which have higher performance ratings and are able to succeed. I feel that this has left the lower performing schools with lower performing and unmotivated students which further their decline in performance ratings. In such cases, students who would have otherwise been successful in a conducive environment have succumbed to the pressures of their peers and have lost their motivation to obtain an education. Also, these lower performing schools are often phased out and transitioned into charter schools which cause these students to find other schools. It is eerily similar to the “lemon dance” of ineffective teachers. Low performing students are left with low performing schools until they are phased out and passed along until they drop out or graduate.
Overall, it is difficult to compare the effectiveness of a charter school over a public school because of the many differences in students and the measurements of effectiveness. This movie made many legitimate points about the ineffectiveness of public schools. Perhaps, both types of schools can benefit from the effective procedures being used in each setting. Until intrinsic motivators, such as improving the lives of students, are the primary influence and deciding factors in this educational system, I feel that we will continue to wait for a superman and decrease our potency in providing an adequate education.