The media accolades that have greeted the new documentary Waiting for Superman confirm what FAIR documented in the September issue of Extra!—that the corporate media debate over education “reform” is heavily tilted in the direction of those who bash teachers’ unions, cheer the White House’s Race to the Top grants and charter schools, and lionize “reformers” like D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee.
Dana Goldstein’s review of the film in the Nation (9/23/10) is worth reading. As she puts it right at the beginning:
Here’s what you see in Waiting for Superman, the new documentary that celebrates the charter school movement while blaming teachers unions for much of what ails American education: working- and middle-class parents desperate to get their charming, healthy, well-behaved children into successful public charter schools.
Here’s what you don’t see: the four out of five charters that are no better, on average, than traditional neighborhood public schools (and are sometimes much worse); charter school teachers, like those at the Green Dot schools in Los Angeles, who are unionized and like it that way; and noncharter neighborhood public schools, like PS 83 in East Harlem and the George Hall Elementary School in Mobile, Alabama, that are nationally recognized for successfully educating poor children.
More organizing around the film is taking place at NotWaitingforSuperman.org, a project of Rethinking Schools.
What you also don’t see are the efforts over the years of local, state, and national teachers unions to improve or “reform” the schools. In Columbus, OHio, we in the Columbus Education Association negotiated a number of progressive changes, including the establishment of a number of alternative schools within the Columbus public system.
The school authorities fought hard against the changes, but ulitimately agreed. The alternative schools have evolved over the years, but still are fairly successful. We also improved teacher evaluation; established a program to help struggling teachers; democratized decision making at the building and district level. We were not alone, nationally, in pushing for progressive–useful, actual changes, that empower kids, not subject them to more mindless, competitive testing.
From what I have seen, a small number of charter schools in a school district can be beneficial to that district. They can be a way to evaluate new methods for the entire district, and a way to educate small groups of students that fail in traditional schools. But they need to be a part of the larger system.
Helen,
Charter schools are not necessarily more innovative than public schools. They are quite traditional for the most part. It is a fallacy to imagine charter schools try out educational ideas public schools are not willing to look at. In my district the public schools offer Montessori, an alternative high school, a science-math magnet curriculum, voc-ed specializing in a variety of high-tech fields, programs that allow students to take college courses early, programs to help students who got in trouble with the law and more… The local charter schools offer none of these options.
The drive to privatize everything will not lead to cost savings or better services. It just takes programs out of the public oversight and end up costing more and serving less. Charter schools are not the answer. Small neighborhood schools with good teachers and community outreach and involvement is a better and more cost effective way to go.
It is clearly a propaganda piece, sadly in the style of the more valid, An Inconvenient Truth. It will spur more critical dialog but it will empower the further destruction of public education. the abandonment and/or neglect of much of our most venerable youth demographics and the continued desensitization of responsive, child-centered (rather than data and profit-centered) education via doltish privatization/corporatization.
The essential expose about NYC’s education debacle by Sally Friedman, The Education and Deconstruction of Mr. Bloomberg, is highly recommended. It is clearly revealing as to why this film and issue is fluff, manipulation and propaganda. Plenty of sound education practice and theory exists prior to the routing of public education by politicians, power mongers and profiteers.
http://www.amazon.com/EDUCATION-DECONSTRUCTION-MR-BLOOMBERG-ebook/dp/B003VRZVBM
It is a bed to launch more criticisms of gov’t schools which are already ailing from lack of sufficient funds, support and blaming of unions as the universal terror to our land. Or so they would have us believe in the John Birchite mentality that is seeping into our very culture. So common is it that the Birchers are openly welcomed back into the Republican fold.
I don’t know that there is one grand answer to the educational problems plaguing our schools, but one thing I do know is that there’s a number of different issues that effect different schools in different areas. So one grand solution is not going to work. I have only one kid in college & I’m not a teacher but I see that not all schools are created equal as the main problem, yet all children in them, by virtue of our founding principles are created equal in this country. My kid went to public school as well as a public charter school. He got in by lottery when the elementary charter school opened up for 8th grade enrollment. It was a nicer newer school, away from the inner city, which he had previously attended by traveling on a 50 minute bus ride. By the way, his school was only 6 miles away, at best. But tax dollars via property taxes paid for the busing. No busing was offered at the charter school 3 miles away, so I was forced to pay an extra fee to hire a private service for transport for a latch-key kid while I worked. The class sizes were 5 to 10 students smaller. To me, that’s a big difference. I don’t believe any class should be larger than 25, period. The parent involvement in the public/charter school seemed to be about the same as the public school, maybe slightly better. But the quality of the teaching was no different and in some cases inferior to the public school. They downplayed the arts, humanities, and gym class. The food was just as awful. So how do you compare? You ask the child. My son says he hated the charter school. He said that in essence they were mostly kids that got in that were Christian private school kids that couldn’t afford to go to those schools anymore. In fact, even though it was a lottery, curiously it had only a handful of AfricanAmerican children as part of the student body. In his previous public school it was half and half at least. Schools tied to property taxes eventually fail if the tax base goes down in those inner city schools. There’s an unequal distribution of the money in most cities, with the most in need getting the least in resources. I wanted my son to go to a charter school because the building looked newer and smelled better. Unfortunately, I didn’t know enough to evaluate the teachers in those schools. That’s where I’m torn, as most parents are. I went to every parent teacher conference as a working mom, but that’s not enough to learn about the teacher. And parents have little recourse if a teacher is awful or a principle won’t address a concern cause they’re too buy addressing money, resources, infighting, and behavior problems throughout the school. So tenure, I used to believe in it. But I’m not so sure anymore. It never seems to get revoked on bad teachers, and there doesn’t seem to be a principled way to do that without lawsuits. I’m very pro teachers union however. They should organize and fight for better wages and healthcare. I support that wholeheartedly. I just think “privatizing” or diverting funds for corporate backed charter schools isn’t necessarily the best answer to our already ailing public schools. They do need to consolidate schools more as populations shift so they don’t pay heating bills on buildings that are 100 years old and have dwindling enrollments. I used to be able to walk to school when I was a kid. I was lucky. PTA was just as robust, if not more in our schools then. But teachers were Gods back then, and parents reinforced this. We do hold our teachers in contempt in our society these days, and that saddens me completely. Plus, they’re not allowed to try new things anymore in the classroom without the dictates of the most stress-oriented standards regimen. Experiential learning seems to be a thing of the past, sadly. They ought to listen to Jonathan Kozol. I always thought he had some good ideas. And maybe they could teach child psychology and child development to new teachers more when they’re in college, not just how to make a lesson plan. New teachers don’t seem all that clued in to those factors in their teaching when they’re evaluating children’s needs and abilities, especially if they don’t have children themselves.
SRginGR…please remember that when writing as you did above to include personal insult to conservatives and George Bush at least every 100 words.That is the norm on FAIR.Your thoughts were a breath of fresh air.
I am a conservative and disagree with some of what you wrote.I think it is now proof positive that it does not matter how much money you throw at this problem.And I have serious problems with the teachers union.I do agree that a state should pass out tax base to schools that need it.On that basis.This idea that certain areas have higher tax base and so better funding is not a fair situation.I have always been angered that inner city teachers recive far less than teachers in wealthy areas.It should be in fact reversed.Battle pay!
m.e. You didn’t fall asleep during that reading?
not at all- not at all..Good bit of work
The thought of this movie has been haunting me for some time. Could someone please explain to me how putting children in a different set of four walls is going to change anything? Do any of you actually think that specific teachers think that “I’m only going to be a teacher for a charter school or vice versa?” Teachers are teachers, that is who they are meant to be!!! What is happening in the world today is the breakdown of the partnership between teacher and parent. Usually in the high tax bracket areas, where you would see high parental support, is where you are going to see success. The children have support at home. They are well fed and cared for. Areas in which children do not have support are typically the ones that are not performing well in school. Putting kids in a school with no support at home is not going to change anything. Whenever there are problems in the world people look for someone to blame. In this case, I think everyone is looking at the wrong set of people, the teachers, they care for the kids they teach – have you actually ever gone and watched them work? If the answer is “no” maybe you should before you pass judgment.
All in all, the “Waiting for Superman” documentary is good entertainment, but it is too deeply flawed to be used to design policy.
Superman blames tenure for most of our problems in education. Agreed, tenure can be horrible and is hard to justify as an all-purpose teaching contract provision.
Superman blames teachers unions for blocking progress in education. Some truth there.
Superman ignores federal mandates in education which increased our school system paperwork overheads, raised the administrative cost of education, but failed to put anything useful into a classroom 0 instead it pulls teachers out of classrooms and into administrative roles.
Superman ignores unrealistic federal mandates – for instance, that ALL children will have equal math skills in 2014 (note well: the only point where all can be equal is at birth with no skills at all). On the bright side we do have a massive new bureaucracy in place just to measure someone else’s kids’ math skills and punish any school district that, God forbid, has even one child who can’t keep up.
But that bitch list is nothing compared to Waiting For Superman’s most serious flaws. These are on different and more sinister levels.
1 – selection bias
2 – no control group
3 – blind to any parental role in education
4 – political call to action from conclusions based on wildly skewed data.
The Superman documentary claims statistical validity for all its claims and strongly suggests its model for education is good for all of us and ought to replace our present system.
That, my friends, made me sit up and take notice.
Let’s take these four items apart.
Number 1.
Superman’s showcase success kids weren’t picked at random. Sure you saw a lottery on the film as kids were drawn for enrollment in a better, stronger, high energy new Superman school. But which kids were in the lottery? The kids in the lottery were entered by motivated parents based on the parents wanting their kids in a new “improved” school. Unmotivated parents didn’t show up to put their kids in the drawing. With kids selected by a lottery from only motivated families it is no surprise that the kids then did well in school. By analogy, what if they’d invited only kids with parents over 6’6″ feet tall and then concluded that their Superman schools made all kids taller than average? This is called selection bias – motivated (or tall) families were the only ones in the lotteries. Unmotivated (or short) families stayed away. And just like that, Superman “success” data is seriously biased in favor of motivated families. Such selection bias invalidates all Superman claims of success for its methods of teaching because they only taught winners of a success-biased lottery.
Number 2.
To measure educational method outcomes, you have to compare outcomes with various groups using different methods.
One group should have gotten the whole Superman treatment, a carefully matched one getting the vilified union teachers. But both groups have to be selected the same way or no comparison can be made. (You can’t compare geniuses in a Superman school with disabled kids in the regular classroom. You have to compare geniuses in both settings.) Superman included no such comparisons. None. In statistical lingo, Superman’s backers failed to use “control groups.” The lack of comparison (control) groups invalidates all of Superman claims.
Number 3
We are back to number 1 in a different light. The kids in the high intensity Superman schools had high intensity motivated parents (evidenced by tearful, anxious parents in the movie). But the parents contributions to their child’s education was otherwise totally ignored. The kids were treated as if they arose from the sea like Venus on the half shell with no family attached – no umbilical cord, not even a belly button. Classroom discipline was treated as if it were invented out of thin air by Superman teachers – not so, every kid in every room had a motivated family. Any school teacher anywhere on earth will tell you that every child’s family is crucial to the child’s readiness to learn and to classroom discipline. In short, for Superman to pre-select families and then claim all success resides in the teaching paradigm is a selection bias that invalidates all of Superman’s claims.
Number 4
No control groups, blatant selection biases, but now a political agenda? This documentary degenerates into pure sales propaganda for the Superman school format of long hours, no teachers on tenure, and a promise of college for all. Such conclusions are not supported because their data is all invalid. To move such garbage into the political arena is unforgivable.
While watching Waiting for Superman, I grew more and more angry at it. Superman was not about fancy non-union school teachers using high intensity or long hours to create success – the filmmakers had accidentally documented that the crucial and unmeasured factor was parental motivation. And then they refused to credit the parents, instead taking credit – grandstanding on film – for their own educational brilliance. The Superman teams deliberately relied on parental motivation to lure the most educable kids into the Superman setting – and that’s the real story. Meanwhile, unmotivated families, for whom (Superman not withstanding) there is NO data for success, are now supposed to be subject to Superman’s regimen at public expense? Why? Based on what? As Superman’s supporters go after our public dollars they are shown to be political liars of the first water. They are selling unproven Superman Snake Oil as if they are our saviors for having discovered it. They discovered what we all knew all along – if the family supports strong education, the child is ready to be a strong learner.
So what now? Does this Superman Snake Oil really work? Superman documentary is misleading and can’t be trusted, but it’s enticing. Certainly, if it works, we ought to be using it. For now, it needs formal validation, not emotional political support. Right now, we need control studies. Since success is claimed in the documentary to be 100% improvement in one year, a well designed large scale one year study should do the trick.
But then there’s a problem – this new study has to start by measuring parental motivation for their kids to be educated. If we get a test for that, it leads to the next problem: Once parental motivation is measurable, what do-gooder governmental program will arise to fix all parents and make them equally motivated? Will this new Superman Motivator program, like our present math policy, yield absolutely equal but zero-level motivation?
Sheesh.