Waiting for Superman is a documentary about the failure of the American educational system, and it’s compelling. It’s hard to watch the movie and not feel outraged—the film points fingers directly at bad teachers, complaining that it’s impossible to fire them thanks to out-of-control teachers unions. But once you leave the theater, you start to notice some discrepancies.
The pat answer the filmmakers arrive at, very early on, is: It’s the bad teachers, stupid! This feels overly simple. For instance, all the parents in the film are perfect: They work long hours to send their kids to private school or tutoring. They research every alternative possible to get their kids to better schools. They support their kid’s educations wholeheartedly. Never once does Superman even begin to suggest that any of the problems of our educational system might be due to lack of interest on behalf of the parents. This is probably savvy filmmaking—you wouldn’t pay to see a documentary that explicitly identifies you as a problem, would you?—but it feels as though an enormous part of the issue isn’t addressed. To point fingers at a union and suggest that workers’ rights are the sole source of difficulty makes me feel itchy on an ideological level.
Waiting for Superman is all done at SIFF, but it’ll open in wide release this fall. It should at least prompt an interesting discussion.
I saw this movie a little while ago and thought the same thing, that they were ignoring both the parents and a more systematic flaw in education. But you’re probably right, cognitive dissonance etc etc doesn’t make for a well received movie.
It wont prompt discussion.
It’ll prompt months of idiotic bleating from FoxNews
I am so done with the cavalcade of excuses for the poor performance of our public schools. We can’t simultaneously say that teachers are the most important piece of student achievement and then hold them harmless for rotten results. Unfortunately, parents come in all kinds of packages, some pretty, some not so much. Their children shouldn’t pay for their sins or ignorance. But as the movie suggests, they are the only people who DO pay and pay dearly. We may not like to admit it, but some teachers are not fit for their jobs and the sooner we deal with that reality, the better.
Ah, nothing America loves more than the finger wag…
there are three parties involved in aducational failures: the teacher, the student, and the parents. if a teacher has 30 students and 20 of them are performing at grade standard, how is that a failure on the teacher’s part? If a parent, by comparison, has 3 children, and none of them are performing to grade standards, how is that not a failure on the parent’s part?
While I believe that the ultimate cause for a kids’ educational failure is his or her parents, the teachers and the administrators, not to mention the entire system, are the only elements that we, as a society, have any real control over. If a parent is lazy or willfully ignorant, we can’t take any real action to fix that. The same can’t be said for teachers.
The unions, for the good they’ve done, have spent far too much time and energy protecting bad teachers and creating systems (like tenure) that do a lot to decrease quality in teaching.
@5 & 6 – Thank you. This needs to be pointed out, but is almost never part of the discussion.
I write for a Seattle education blog and I saw Waiting for Superman on Saturday. I did give a comment and a question to the panel (which included the director). The comment was ” You left out that charters can write in or out any student they want. Public Schools have to take ALL comers and that includes the unmotivated, the non-English speakers AND Special Education. It makes for challenges that charters don’t have to take on.” My question was “Why did you leave parents and principals out of the equation and put all the blame on teachers?” The director said (lamely) that his previous film had been about teachers and so this one was and a member of the panel (who was a former teacher) was gracious enough to acknowledge that yes, a principal makes a HUGE difference in whether a school succeeds or not.
Parents are the third rail in discussions of education. You simply cannot talk about it because it’s supposedly finger pointing when, in fact, we all know parents who really don’t do their best when it comes to sending their kids to school ready to learn.
This film’s message was “teachers bad, charters good”. After more than 10 years, overall, charter schools do no better than public schools. There are a few great charters, many bad charters and a lot in-between. Maybe it might be better to work on the schools we have rather than abandon them for untried schools.
I think that innovation is very important (check out the alternative schools in Seattle, most of which were started by parents and are over 15+ years old AND are very popular).
The teachers’ unions will have to work harder and be willing to have teachers be assessed but teachers are not the bad guys in public education.
@6,
“If a parent is lazy or willfully ignorant, we can’t take any real action to fix that.”
Not exactly. If a child is perpetually truant or disruptive, child services is supposed to step in and find out what’s going on in the home. Of course, that only happens in places where child services isn’t already stretched razor thin… like, places where the community actually funds reasonable social services instead of endlessly complaining about taxes and welfare.
This is a right-wing wet dream. Get rid of teacher unions and all will be right with public education (no pun intended).
There are places where teachers unions are either nonexistent or pretty weak, and their education system has not miraculously been fixed. Go figure. So then they start blaming the “illegals” for dragging down school system. Never once do they look in the mirror to see if they might be part of this multi-faceted problem.
In my ideal world, perhaps if we started paying attention to child poverty – ensuring that all kids have access to health care, healthy foods, safe places to sleep and play – we’d start to see some changes each year. Then if we had better sex-ed, meaning fewer teenage pregnancies, we’d see even more results. Good, affordable prenatal care as well as good access to birth control would also help. There’d also be more (free) parenting classes like Love and Logic that parents would be required to take before enrolling their child in preschool or Kindergarten – all offered with free daycare – so that parents learn how to actually be parents rather than just their child’s “friend”, indulging their every whim. A better foster care system and additional transitional help for kids who age out, as well as more support for those who want to go to college will help as well.
But silly me – politicians and those big-money conservative foundations don’t really want to “fix” public education by actually addressing the problems, because that type of change will take time and require a sustained investment. Rather, they want a quick flashy fix – throw a bandaid on the gaping wound – so they can be seen as the saviors of public education who rescued the kids from those evil (liberal) teachers unions.
@9, I agree. But the thing is, the vast majority of parental laziness and willful ignorance doesn’t manifest itself in behavior that is reportable to CPS. It manifests as a passive approval of ignorance and/or the arbitrary rules curriculum one finds in schools.
Also, another huge problem that is rarely discussed is that a student can make A’s and B’s throughout school and still not know very much about life or art or history or people or the world, in general. The way school itself is structured is not conducive to real learning for most students.
@11 True. Part of the issue with grades and learning is that various parties have different ideas as to the purpose of school. The current movement is to “prepare students for work”, with various corporations/foundations providing a lot of money towards this, hence the standardized curriculum with a focus on grade-level mastery of specific content and the reliance on test scores and other arbitrary measures of accountability as evidence of “learning” – all part of the unproven market-based ideology espoused by certain conservative and neoliberal factions.
Others believe that the purpose of school is to create good citizens – literate, critical thinkers, self-directed learners. In this environment, testing is infrequent, low-stakes, and evidence of learning is cumulative and often demonstrated by producing a product or through a performance assessment. Finland’s current system is a prime example of this.
Well, ok, but what should we do about it? I think it’s something we could work around instead of trying to fix; many kids’ homes might not be conducive to learning so let’s have the kids do their “homework” during school hours (longer school day, etc). That would still be a systematic change involving the unions’ consent.
@13, many people (myself included) think that homework is part of the problem (@12 is right about Finland). I think the biggest problem of all, a bigger problem than teachers, than unions, than administrators, than parents, is the fact that there are millions of smart kids who simply hate school. They hate the arbitrary curriculum, the arbitrary rules, the authoritarianism. They are expected to learn what the school wants, the way the school wants them to, even when what they teach is ultimately useless and the way they teach it is arduous.
Kids who are having a hard time with writing are expected to learn chemistry. Kids who can’t figure out fractions and percentages are expected to read Moby Dick. The time kids waste learning stuff they’ll never use in life is the time they could be mastering the things they’ll need to use in life and then, even better, the things they’re actually interested in.
The fact is that every kid learns in different ways, but our school system has no real flexibility. There are only square holes for the variously shaped pegs that are kids and they hate being stuffed into holes they don’t fit inside.
Until this system of arbitrary curriculum and uniformity of approach (not to mention ineptitude and corruption of officials) is addressed, things aren’t going to get any better for our kids.
How about the biggest discrepancy of all?
This horrible educational system, that we’ve been castigating for 100 years now, somehow produced the richest most powerful nation on earth. The one that produced the most patents, the most scientific research, the most popular filmed entertainment, the most popular musical entertainment and so on and on and on.
I’m sick of this nonsense, and films like this.
#15 – The film gives a thumbs up to American education as it was 50 years ago (as far as the system matching the needs of the economy). So I don’t think there really is a discrepancy as you point out.
The problems are beginning to come out as we see many highly paid, highly skilled jobs in this country going to people who were educated outside of it. It’s undisputed that America’s top talent ranks among the top in the world, but there aren’t enough of them to fill all of the opportunities that have been created.
You can be sick all you want, but it doesn’t change what is true. If things don’t change, I don’t think America is forecast to be the richest and most powerful nation 100 years from now.
@16
50 years ago when schools were segregated, racism and sexism were classroom norms and the poor and minorities dropped out or were forced out before high school? Oh yeah, the good old days. I will acknowledge that at least those drop-outs still had a chance of getting a living wage job.