When I reviewed Waiting for Superman at SIFF (and then again on its wide theatrical release in October) I couldn’t get on the feel-good train with all the other critics. Here’s my biggest problem with the movie:
The film points fingers directly at bad teachers, complaining that it’s impossible to fire them thanks to out-of-control teachers unions. This feels like a way-too-pat answer to a very complex problem…And to point fingers at a union and suggest that workers’ rights are the sole source of difficulty—to make teachers the villain of a movie about the educational system—makes me feel itchy on an ideological level.
Four months later, we have a governor basically declaring that worker’s rights are the problem, and now conservative sites like Big Hollywood are using Waiting for Superman as Exhibit A in the public trial against unions:
With what’s happening today in Wisconsin we’re hearing a lot about civil rights and workers rights and all those buzz words the Left uses to make something wicked sound noble. The idea that collective bargaining is some kind of right is beyond absurd…If you want to see first hand a heartbreaking and absolutely frightening look at the human toll of giving these corrupt teachers unions collective bargaining rights, I urge you again to see what is the most important film of last year, the unfairly Oscar-snubbed (for political reasons) ”Waiting for Superman.”
If you loved Waiting for Superman, I would encourage you to watch it again, bearing in mind all the Wisconsin-related developments of the last few weeks. It’s an entirely different film now.
I’ve pretty much refused to see this movie because of this theme…I can’t claim to say that I know the solution to the problems of public education, but I think this whole idea of teachers’ unions as the main problem is way too simplistic. It seems like looking at differing community resources, curriculum, support of parents, surrounding environment, standardized testing, etc. all play a role. Also, a major issue is that instead of teaching kids critical thinking, we’re using this model of education that treats kids as empty receptacles, and knowledge as based on simple facts (esp. history) and figures. I feel like we need some sort of basic review of what we consider basic educational literacy in this country, and restructure education to suit that. Yes, it would include arithmetic and mathematics and such, but also things that would enable more critical and imaginative thinking.
The strongest evidence against blaming teacher unions for the sorry state of American education is the American South, where teacher unions are practically non-existent and yet test results, graduation rates, etc. routinely show the lowest student success rates of any region in the country.
This takedown of the film in the New York Review of Books last November was fantastic:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives…
There is also a Facebook group who has issue with this film: http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/NotW…
I love (i.e., hate) how people take an issue as enormous as childhood learning – something that has literally millions of variables affecting it – and try to boil all problems down to one, single issue.
Placing the blame for lack of student success squarely on teacher’s unions is like placing the blame for global disasters squarely on gay marriage.
If you start with the premise that we must “fix” education without substantially increasing spending, you will naturally reach conclusions such as this.
@5 … or blaming greedy doctors for the health care coverage crisis. There are a lot of sticky fingers in that cookie jar.
As we have recently seen with Seattle’s School District, a large pile of money sitting around is a magnet for crooks, and they come from all angles.
“Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don’t need little changes, we need gigantic monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six figure salaries. Schools should be extremely expensive for governments and absolutely free of charge for it’s citizens just like national defense.
That’s my position. I just haven’t figured how to do it yet.”
-Sam Seaborn
I miss the good old days when Republicans blamed parents and students for the failure of schools.
The whole “unions are bad because they prevent management from firing bad workers” canard just infuriates me.
The reason it’s so difficult to fire people is because businesses have a long tradition of canning people for poor performance without providing any actual proof of alleged infractions or inefficiencies. Since the NLRA codified the right of labor organizations to grieve such dismissals, companies have had to implement a much more thorough process of documenting poor work practices and behaviors on the part of employees, which they hate of course, because it: A of all) requires an expenditure of time, effort and money on their part, and; B of all) greatly diminishes the power they have over employees in general.
I’m going to take you up on that offer, but I remember the movie quite vividly, and if you took from it that the teachers union is the only, or even largest problem, you’re watching the movie playing in your head and not the one on the screen. Automatic 10 year has been a union idea, an incredibly stupid one, but automatic 10 year isn’t what’s being discussed, I don’t think WI had it for elementary school teachers automatically. I see why so many different people take from the movie different opinions, but the underlining problems facing teachers are parents who think their child is the next coming of Jesus and couldn’t possibly need help. It has absolutely nothing to do with a bunch of scummy businessmen taking away the rights of organized workers to get a better deal on insurance and such by pooling their money together. I don’t even remember that being a topic in the film. The greatest threat to public education was educators who didn’t feel at any time that their job could be gone, that they could get away with anything in the work place because it’s impossible to fire them, and the money they take not doing anything while their appeal decisions to terminate them for being shitty teachers. Just because some, heck, even if most, teachers are awful, it doesn’t give anyone the right to shit on the good ones. You’ll scare them away, and we won’t get any teachers. That’s kinda the whole point though right?
@10: good to know. This is absolutely the first thing people bring up when having a conversation about unions, and I’m always at a loss how to respond. As for Waiting for Superman, I’m disappointed (though hardly surprised) that liberals bought that garbage. It just shows you how much of a libertarian streak lingers under the surface of modern-day liberalism. These people don’t want wealth distribution. They want wealth preservation.