Public schools are facing “an inconvenient truth” in the form of a movie produced by the man behind Al Gore’s eco-disaster movie. Will it save the fate of America’s children? I’ve just returned from seeing it, and I have one word of advice: Go. This week.
Waiting for Superman is a documentary about some horrible public schools and several children who attend them–and are trying to get out. The children, human faces behind the education statistics, want a good education, but face very long odds if they attend the school assigned to them by the political establishment. Most if not all are destined for high schools dubbed “failure factories.” They are waiting for a superman to deliver them from what would otherwise be a disastrous school experience.
For these students, as for others across the country, Superman comes in the form of a charter school. Some charters have done so well as to send nearly all of their students–uniformly from low-income families–to college. For other families, the chance to send their children to a safe school, let alone a high-achieving one, is a blessing.
Charter schools, contrary to much misunderstanding, are public schools. They are free of much of the red tape that entangles public schools, and have more freedom to experiment with curriculum, pedagogy, and other factors. Almost without exception they are also non-union schools, which is one reason that teacher union officials have launched demonstrations outside some theaters that have shown the movie.
Charter schools have their challenges, including the fact that they’re hard, in the jargon of business, to “scale up.” State laws generally prohibit them from tapping into public bonding authority to pay for new buildings, though Minnesota charter schools do have something called “lease aid” available. (Even that, though, has come under fire lately.) The result of meager financing possibilities and burgeoning parental interest is that some charter schools have an extensive waiting list. In Harlem alone, 11,000 students want to get into a charter school but can’t, for lack of space. Nationwide, some 440,000 students are on waiting lists. It’s not just a problem for inner-city populations. Here in Minnesota, the Paideia Academyin Apple Valley has a waiting list for most grades.
When faced with overwhelming demand for seats, charter schools conduct a lottery. Sometimes it’s done in private, sometimes, as in the movie, in public. The public lotteries are gripping affairs to watch. Not being picked is a crushing defeat for those families who cannot afford private school tuition or to move to a neighborhood zoned for a better school.
Nationally, charter schools reach over 1 million out of some 45 million students. Not all charter schools are good, but as one father of a Harlem child puts it, “The reason there’s such a gravitational pull is not because they love charter schools. It’s because they’re the only game in town.”
Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute criticizes the film for advocating national curriculum standards and saying nothing about vouchers or tax credits that would let parents enroll their children in any school, including private schools. I share his objections to national standards, and will have more to say about that topic another day.
I’m with him that children ought to have a full range of options. In the ideal world, we would give parents $X thousand dollars and say, “Good luck with that, now go find a school that is suitable for your child.” We’re not there, and for now, charter schools are the most visible and largest form of tax-funded school choice. (The homeschooling phenomenon may actually be larger, but it’s not taxpayer-funded.)
Hillary Clinton has been mocked and criticized for saying “it takes a village to raise a child,” but there’s a kernel of truth in there. Providing widespread opportunities for educational success requires the action of lots of different people. President Obama, for one, could save the educational futures of some children in the District of Columbia by sticking up for a voucher program (one of the few in the country) that offers a lifeline.
Here’s a snippet from the William McGurn of the Wall Street Journal on what the president can do about DC schools:
“No one in Washington has more political capital than Barack Obama,” says Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, a Washington D.C., nonprofit that advocates for changes in public K-12 education. “All he has to do is to say two simple sentences. First, ‘I support anyone who gives D.C. parents more options and more accountability.’ Second, ‘We need to keep D.C. on the path of reform with a schools chancellor like Michelle Rhee.’”
State legislators can play a part, too. Ten states lack charter school legislation of any sort, and others have laws so onerous that they are next to worthless. Even in Minnesota, the home to the charter school idea, charter schools must deal with opposition.
Charter schools aren’t the only way to expand educational opportunities. Some states, such as Arizona and Florida, have substantial tax-credit programs that put Minnesota’s meager efforts to shame. Virtual schools are coming on strong, too.
But charter schools and tax credits help students leave traditional schools. What about those who remain? There many paths open to us: move towards weighted student funding, restore some modicum of the teacher’s authority in the classroom, and rethink our personnel policies governing teachers. Michelle Rhee, who plays a prominent role in the movie, was a teacher in Teach for America, a program that offers an alternative to ed schools for people who want to teach. Then she started the New Teacher Project, which along with the National Council for Teacher Quality, has focused the spotlight on the need for tenure reform and some sort of merit pay. In time she became the chancellor of the DC Public Schools, where, among other things, she found a way to fire teachers who needed to be fired.
The challenges to good public schools are many. Some are a matter of science: getting merit pay right is difficult, and it shouldn’t be the only or even the most important factor in teacher pay. Some are a matter of politics: teacher unions routinely kill plans for vouchers or alternative certification programs. Political machinations in Detroit prevented a business leader from spending $200 million on new charter schools in what is by many measures the worst school district in the country. Voters in Washington DC “thanked” Rhee for her reforms by defeating the mayor who has served as her patron. Now it’s widely expected she will get the boot.
There’s also complacency. In general, people think public schools are in trouble, but the ones near them are doing just fine. But as one institute pointed out about schools in California, middle-class schools are often not as good as you think.
If there’s a weakness in the movie for those of us in the Midwest, it’s that it doesn’t challenge us with examples of students who need help here. It doesn’t follow anyone from Detroit, Chicago, or even the Twin Cities, which has some of the highest achievement gaps in the country. So filmgoers here might be tempted to say “Oh, it isn’t that bad here,” when in fact, we have our own disasters, one child at a time. Of course, as national citizens, we also ought to care what happens in New York, LA, and the slums of the District of Columbia.
I want to believe in public schools, but …
One thing I like about the movie is that it makes clear that it isn’t just libertarian-minded economists who want structural reforms in schools. As it starts, we hear Davis Guggenheim, the film’s director, talking about his hopes for public schools. He mentions a film he made in 1999, (The First Year), which tracks (and lauds) teachers in their first year of service. He speaks of the hope that public schools will be an integral part of American democracy.
Sometimes after his 1999 movie, he became a father, and had to figure out which school his child would attend. Almost apologetically, he says that he drives past three public schools on the way to dropping off his child at a private school. Many families, he notes, don’t have that option.
This is all good. To paraphrase the first step in 12-step programs, the first step to fixing a problem is to acknowledge that you have one. And with public schooling, we have a problem.
The faces of five children behind the statistics
“Superman” then addresses a mixture of topics, scenes, and people, moving from interviews with experts to data-laden graphs to interviews with parents and children. It uses enough statistics (spending trends, national test scores, international comparisons, drop-out rates) to give you the big picture. Here it is: Test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress are flat, even after inflation-adjusted spending on schools has soared. Dropout factories abound. Even middle-class schools aren’t that good. American kids do poorly on international comparisons, except when it comes to self-esteem.
The power of the movie comes from meeting some people behind the statistics, which is to say, children: Anthony, Bianca, Daisy, Emily, and Francisco. The five children live varied lives. They are Hispanic, white, and black. They attend kindergarten, first grade, fifth grade, and eighth grade. They live with grandmothers, one parent, and both parents.They live in the Bronx, Harlem, Washington DC, LA, and Silicon Valley. They live in affluent neighborhoods and ones that aren’t.
Despite their differences, the five children face a similar problem: The school that’s assigned to them by the local school district isn’t good for them. Daisy wants to go to college and then medical school so she can “help people.” But if she follows the default path to high school, she’ll attend a dropout factory: Only 4 out of 10 students who start there graduate, and only a handful actually go to college. Francisco, meanwhile, is having trouble reading, and his mother can’t get the attention of his teacher. Even Emily, who’s contemplating attending a “good” high school in Silicon Valley, would be ill-served the the path assigned to her by the political process. She’s trying to avoid tracking, which the nearby high school practices.
We meet these children and their parents, visit their homes and schools, and come to hope against hope that they find a place in a good school. The interviews are good and touching. The honest answer of one of the children brought laughter from the audience.
Frustrated reformers
Some of the leading “talking heads” in education show up, too, such as Bill Gates (education is a matter of national economic competitiveness), professor Eric Hanushek (the impact of a poor versus a good teacher on student learning is profound), and Jay Matthews (education columnist for the Washington Post). Joe Trippi, a Democratic Party consultant, brings the perspective of a member of the political class who is ready to shake things up–even if doing so upsets his party’s largest backer. Hanushek’s message is especially powerful, and serves as the intellectual foundation for the movie’s call for making systemic changes to teacher tenure and pay.
We also hear from people who have tried to make reforms from the inside out. Howard Fuller, former superintendent of the Milwaukee Public Schools, talks about his frustration in trying to fire teachers who are not merely marginal, but derelict. Geoffrey Canada, a former teacher, thought that within 3 years of starting his teaching career, he would have reformed education–nationally. Now he run a charter school in Harlem. Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the DC Public Schools, gets significant air time, and we learn about her work in firing ineffective principals and teachers, and reducing the bloated central district staff. Rhee offers to double teacher pay in exchange for an end to tenure, but the teacher union refuses. In fact, leadership won’t permit a vote of its membership. There’s a fair amount of footage showing teachers holding signs and chanting in protest of Rhee’s ideas.
If providing effective teachers is the most important thing a school can do, it’s clear that tenure and current contracts get in the way. In DC, the district must take over steps to remove a bad teacher, and if the district misses but a single deadline, it has to start all over. In some school districts, it takes longer to remove a teacher than it does to conduct the average criminal trial. The result? Nationally, doctors and lawyers lose their license to practice at a rate that’s much higher than the comparable rate for teachers. The problem with schools isn’t bad people, it’s bad rules.
If I win the lottery
If an overly zealous system of tenure and foot-high teacher contracts are the problem, what’s the solution? Charter schools, which by design are free of many state rules are a good first step. Not coincidentally, they’re also usually free of teacher unions.
For various reasons, each of the five children we’ve met seeks entry to a charter school. To get there, they have to win a lottery. Not the one that pays millions of dollars in annual payments, but a different kind. The best charter schools don’t have enough room to admit all the children who want to attend, so by law they must conduct a lottery.Towards the end of the movie, we see, in five different rooms throughout the country, hundreds of families gathered. They are hoping and praying that their child’s number is called–one of the dozens of numbers that represent the opportunity for an alternative. The movie pans from room to room, and a counter on the screen shows the number of available slots ticking down. As they hear the results, the families are pensive, frightful, hopeful. Most end up stunned and disappointed, though as I watched it all, I did have an opportunity to cry for joy.
Overreaction to real risks creates far greater harm
Michelle Rhee nails it when she says (several times) that the problem with school districts is that the schools are run by adults for the benefit of adults. The adults go along to get along, which means they overlook the needs of the alleged beneficiaries of public schooling, children. Tenure laws and contracts induce an entitlement mentality that says “If I’m a teacher, I have a job for life.”
How did we get here? In part, it’s because we’ve overreacted to the problems of the past. Perhaps teachers should have some procedural protection against arbitrary dismissal, though you have to ask: how many private sector employees have that benefit? But the safeguards for teachers that we’ve built into public schools have become so massive that they produce far more harm than they prevent. In exchange for protecting teachers from principals, we’ve exposed students to incompetent teachers who set their education back in the course of a school year.
It would be as if, to eliminate any risk of traffic accidents, we set a national speed limit of 2 miles per hour. The good we would attain from that move would be far outstripped by what we would lose. In education, extensive due process rights for teachers doom children to academic failure.
Where I beg to differ
While I find much to commend in the movie, I do take issue with a few points Guggenheim makes. He suggests that we need fewer school districts and more national, top-down control. To that end, he supports national standards. But some states (Massachusetts) have good standards already, and nationalizing standards is as likely, over time, to lead to bad standards as to good ones. More generally, decentralization limits the damage that can be done by poor decisions.
Guggenheim also suggests that more children need to go to college. More children need to graduate from high school, and more need post-secondary training. Do more need a bachelors degree? I’m not convinced.
There’s one final, unasked question: Why must these good charter schools hold lotteries? Why aren’t there enough of them? It would have been useful, though beyond the scope of the movie, for Guggenheim to ask that question.
I want to believe in public schools, but …
One thing I like about the movie is that it makes clear that it isn’t just libertarian-minded economists who want structural reforms in schools. As it starts, we hear Davis Guggenheim, the film’s director, talking about his hopes for public schools. He mentions a film he made in 1999, (The First Year), which tracks (and lauds) teachers in their first year of service. He speaks of the hope that public schools will be an integral part of American democracy.
Sometimes after his 1999 movie, he became a father, and had to figure out which school his child would attend. Almost apologetically, he says that he drives past three public schools on the way to dropping off his child at a private school. Many families, he notes, don’t have that option.
This is all good. To paraphrase the first step in 12-step programs, the first step to fixing a problem is to acknowledge that you have one. And with public schooling, we have a problem.
The faces of five children behind the statistics
“Superman” then addresses a mixture of topics, scenes, and people, moving from interviews with experts to data-laden graphs to interviews with parents and children. It uses enough statistics (spending trends, national test scores, international comparisons, drop-out rates) to give you the big picture. Here it is: Test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress are flat, even after inflation-adjusted spending on schools has soared. Dropout factories abound. Even middle-class schools aren’t that good. American kids do poorly on international comparisons, except when it comes to self-esteem.
The power of the movie comes from meeting some people behind the statistics, which is to say, children: Anthony, Bianca, Daisy, Emily, and Francisco. The five children live varied lives. They are Hispanic, white, and black. They attend kindergarten, first grade, fifth grade, and eighth grade. They live with grandmothers, one parent, and both parents.They live in the Bronx, Harlem, Washington DC, LA, and Silicon Valley. They live in affluent neighborhoods and ones that aren’t.
Despite their differences, the five children face a similar problem: The school that’s assigned to them by the local school district isn’t good for them. Daisy wants to go to college and then medical school so she can “help people.” But if she follows the default path to high school, she’ll attend a dropout factory: Only 4 out of 10 students who start there graduate, and only a handful actually go to college. Francisco, meanwhile, is having trouble reading, and his mother can’t get the attention of his teacher. Even Emily, who’s contemplating attending a “good” high school in Silicon Valley, would be ill-served the the path assigned to her by the political process. She’s trying to avoid tracking, which the nearby high school practices.
We meet these children and their parents, visit their homes and schools, and come to hope against hope that they find a place in a good school. The interviews are good and touching. The honest answer of one of the children brought laughter from the audience.
Frustrated reformers
Some of the leading “talking heads” in education show up, too, such as Bill Gates (education is a matter of national economic competitiveness), professor Eric Hanushek (the impact of a poor versus a good teacher on student learning is profound), and Jay Matthews (education columnist for the Washington Post). Joe Trippi, a Democratic Party consultant, brings the perspective of a member of the political class who is ready to shake things up–even if doing so upsets his party’s largest backer. Hanushek’s message is especially powerful, and serves as the intellectual foundation for the movie’s call for making systemic changes to teacher tenure and pay.
We also hear from people who have tried to make reforms from the inside out. Howard Fuller, former superintendent of the Milwaukee Public Schools, talks about his frustration in trying to fire teachers who are not merely marginal, but derelict. Geoffrey Canada, a former teacher, thought that within 3 years of starting his teaching career, he would have reformed education–nationally. Now he run a charter school in Harlem. Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the DC Public Schools, gets significant air time, and we learn about her work in firing ineffective principals and teachers, and reducing the bloated central district staff. Rhee offers to double teacher pay in exchange for an end to tenure, but the teacher union refuses. In fact, leadership won’t permit a vote of its membership. There’s a fair amount of footage showing teachers holding signs and chanting in protest of Rhee’s ideas.
If providing effective teachers is the most important thing a school can do, it’s clear that tenure and current contracts get in the way. In DC, the district must take over steps to remove a bad teacher, and if the district misses but a single deadline, it has to start all over. In some school districts, it takes longer to remove a teacher than it does to conduct the average criminal trial. The result? Nationally, doctors and lawyers lose their license to practice at a rate that’s much higher than the comparable rate for teachers. The problem with schools isn’t bad people, it’s bad rules.
If I win the lottery
If an overly zealous system of tenure and foot-high teacher contracts are the problem, what’s the solution? Charter schools, which by design are free of many state rules are a good first step. Not coincidentally, they’re also usually free of teacher unions.
For various reasons, each of the five children we’ve met seeks entry to a charter school. To get there, they have to win a lottery. Not the one that pays millions of dollars in annual payments, but a different kind. The best charter schools don’t have enough room to admit all the children who want to attend, so by law they must conduct a lottery.Towards the end of the movie, we see, in five different rooms throughout the country, hundreds of families gathered. They are hoping and praying that their child’s number is called–one of the dozens of numbers that represent the opportunity for an alternative. The movie pans from room to room, and a counter on the screen shows the number of available slots ticking down. As they hear the results, the families are pensive, frightful, hopeful. Most end up stunned and disappointed, though as I watched it all, I did have an opportunity to cry for joy.
Overreaction to real risks creates far greater harm
Michelle Rhee nails it when she says (several times) that the problem with school districts is that the schools are run by adults for the benefit of adults. The adults go along to get along, which means they overlook the needs of the alleged beneficiaries of public schooling, children. Tenure laws and contracts induce an entitlement mentality that says “If I’m a teacher, I have a job for life.”
How did we get here? In part, it’s because we’ve overreacted to the problems of the past. Perhaps teachers should have some procedural protection against arbitrary dismissal, though you have to ask: how many private sector employees have that benefit? But the safeguards for teachers that we’ve built into public schools have become so massive that they produce far more harm than they prevent. In exchange for protecting teachers from principals, we’ve exposed students to incompetent teachers who set their education back in the course of a school year.
It would be as if, to eliminate any risk of traffic accidents, we set a national speed limit of 2 miles per hour. The good we would attain from that move would be far outstripped by what we would lose. In education, extensive due process rights for teachers doom children to academic failure.
Where I beg to differ
While I find much to commend in the movie, I do take issue with a few points Guggenheim makes. He suggests that we need fewer school districts and more national, top-down control. To that end, he supports national standards. But some states (Massachusetts) have good standards already, and nationalizing standards is as likely, over time, to lead to bad standards as to good ones. More generally, decentralization limits the damage that can be done by poor decisions.
Guggenheim also suggests that more children need to go to college. More children need to graduate from high school, and more need post-secondary training. Do more need a bachelors degree? I’m not convinced.
There’s one final, unasked question: Why must these good charter schools hold lotteries? Why aren’t there enough of them? It would have been useful, though beyond the scope of the movie, for Guggenheim to ask that question.
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