New documentaries take strong steps to undermine the "Blame the Teachers" mentality of Davis Guggenheim's superficial take on education system ills.
By Megan Driscoll, AlterNet
Posted on November 16, 2010
In light of the success of Davis Guggenheim’s documentary, Waiting for Superman, many education experts have come out with vehement criticism against the film’s assertion that teachers, and the unions that protect them, are the primary cause of the public education crisis. Now, Guggenheim’s fellow filmmakers are beginning to do the same.
Vicky Abeles rejects Superman’s allegation in her new film, Race to Nowhere. Instead of placing blame on educators, Abeles suggests that the current failures of the education system are largely due to the excessive pressures students and teachers alike endure on a daily basis, primarily as a result of Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” policy.
Inspired to make Race to Nowhere after observing the detrimental effects that extreme academic burdens were having on her own children, Abeles’ picture portrays a number of students who exhibits signs of emotional distress under the confines of NCLB. Abeles highlights the consequences of a test score-driven system – one that Superman emphasizes as a solution – featuring students who feel overwhelmed by the intense academic expectations imposed upon them and begin to manifest their stress both emotionally and physically. One teacher interviewed in the film remarks, “You have a system that is trying to further roboticize students, mechanize them if you will, to be these academic competitors, these producers. The very nature of it in itself is very dehumanizing,” while a frustrated student exclaims, “Everyone expects us to be superheroes.”
While Abeles’ depiction of the consequences NCLB has on American youth is certainly compelling, it is her portrayal of exhausted teachers that proves to be her strongest case against Superman’s claims.
Race to Nowhere, currently screening in schools and theaters across the country, examines the effects NCLB has had on educators and public schools since its inception in 2001. The education policy, which measures success and determines funding almost entirely based on standardized test results, leaves little room for teachers to develop alternative instruction methods that may better appeal to individual students. Rather, educators are left “literally just drowning in content” they are obligated to teach in order to ensure that adequate scores are achieved and necessary financial support is provided. Numerous teachers throughout Abeles’ film express frustration with the pressures they endure to follow the rigid curriculum. “Do it or you don’t have a job,” says one teacher. “It’s gotten harder and harder to feel like I can teach the things I believe in, versus be a yes-man.”
Vanessa Roth reiterates the prevalence of undervalued educators in her upcoming documentary that exists as part of The Teacher Salary Project, a campaign spearheaded by Dave Eggers and NÃnive Calegari to advocate for higher wages for teachers across the country. The Project, set to premier May 3, 2011, is comprised of Roth’s film, as well as an interactive online resource and a national outreach campaign, all of which collectively seek to educate and empower citizens on both the local and national level on the fight for sustainable wages for educators.
Eggers and Calegari, who co-authored the 2005 book, Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers, joined with Roth to produce and create a film that emphasizes the struggles educators face in a system that fails to recognize their significant role in shaping American youth. Contrary to Guggenheim’s contention against today’s teachers, Calegari stresses that, “The main reason that American public schools are failing is because we, as a country, haven’t taken the teaching profession seriously.” The Project, like Race to Nowhere, asserts that current U.S. education policy has resulted in schools that are gravely underfunded and educators who are too often forced to survive on unsustainable salaries or abandon their professions altogether. As noted on The Teacher Salary Project’s Web site, 50 percent of the nation’s best teachers are forced to take on second jobs in order to be able to actually afford teaching.
Calegari continues on the subject, contending, “Research has proven that the quality of a students’ teacher has the greatest impact on a students’ future success.” These findings, however, suggest a grim future, when 46 percent of public school teachers leave the profession within the first five years of being in the classroom.
So what methods of reform are needed?
Contrary to Superman’s not-so-subtle urging for the dismantling of teacher unions, The Teacher Salary Project team advocates for the increase of teacher wages. “Raising effective teachers’ salaries, and keeping them in the classroom, is the most important thing we can do to preserve our democracy,” Calegari argues, “We need to create an overwhelming movement that says to everyone that teachers need to have a new day. A day with a seriously prestigious profession, that is wildly competitive, with strong and inspiring leadership, meaningful development, and legitimate financial rewards and incentives.”
Abeles urges for similar changes in Race to Nowhere, where she emphasizes the need for a more personalized curriculum that permits teachers flexibility in the classroom and encourages more creative approaches, such as project-based learning. Moreover, Race to Nowhere suggests that a reevaluation of our capitalistic focus on creating an academically competitive youth is essential. Abeles’ film suggests that America’s incessant dependence on test results to measure knowledge and achievement is rapidly destroying students’ overall health and eagerness to learn. Thus, the call for a greater emphasis on more uniquely tailored methods of teaching will serve to benefit both educators and the students they instruct.
In other words, the two projects suggest, Guggenheim gets it utterly wrong – it is about the funding, it is about sustainable-living wages, and it is about providing students with a customized, challenging curriculum that does not equate them or their teachers to a group of homogenous androids.
Collectively, the films serve to illustrate the true complexity of today’s education crisis. Both show that placing blame on educators and their unions is not only a gross oversimplification of the current circumstances, but in fact is a disservice to those teachers who make substantial financial sacrifices with very little return.
With 2010 being deemed the year of education films and Superman at the forefront, make sure to watch these alternatives that offer a different perspective on the call for education reform.
Showing posts with label Bush "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB). Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bush "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB). Show all posts
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Obama Amplifies Bush Education Policy
This is How a Tipping Point Feels
By Anthony Cody on August 15, 2010
We are accustomed to discussing education issues as if they were a realm of their own, with Arne Duncan (and maybe Bill Gates) as the biggest players. We debate policies like merit pay and charter schools, and sometimes reference the influence of economic and social factors, but we sometimes lose sight of the larger political context that is driving these policies.
Things are getting ready to shift.
It is said that education policy is like a pendulum. It tends to swing from one extreme to another. In the 1970s, when the progressive social movements peaked, we had the rise of desegregation, whole language instruction and constructivism, with a great emphasis on student-centered instruction. The past decade the pendulum has swung way back to the other extreme, with the rise of test-driven accountability and pre-digested curriculum.
How educational leaders have responded to this is very instructive. Diane Ravitch is a fascinating case study. She genuinely believed that we could drive improvement in our schools through tough standards and high-stakes tests, and actively promoted these methods. As the decade unfolded and evidence accumulated that this was not working as intended, the honest historian in her forced a change of stance, and she has become a sharp critic. She is a bellwether.
It is a fascinating, frustrating and exciting time, this tipping point we are approaching. The broader political setting is hugely important. We are two years into an administration that made fantastic promises to an America hungry for change. "We are the people we have been waiting for." Obama and his electioneers tapped into every hopeful beat of our hearts. We would bring the troops home from Iraq, close Guantanamo, stop the phone tapping, rein in corporate greed, and inspire the world with a more humane foreign policy.
In education, we were told we would enter a new era of "mutual responsibility," stop spending the year preparing for bubble tests, and stop blaming teachers for all the problems in our schools. We thought we would have a leader smart enough to understand that slogans and profiteers will not be our saviors, and that local leadership at the school and community level is the wellspring of school improvement.
But here we are, approaching the two year mark. At first, we were dismayed, when cruel practices of NCLB were extended. Did they not understand what they were doing? Could they not see this was not consistent with our shared vision? So we wrote, we organized on Facebook, we lobbied, and we spoke by phone with the Secretary himself. It has become clear they know exactly what they are doing, and nothing we say matters.
Teachers are not alone in this feeling. The chance to rein in corporate salaries has been squandered, and companies who received billions in bailout funds have showered their executives with billions in bonuses. The hedge fund managers - heavy investors in charter schools, by the way, have invested in politicians as well, and our system remains rigged in their favor. The war in Iraq, which Obama pledged to end this summer, drags on endlessly, and Afghanistan may well do to the American empire the same thing it did to the Soviets. A mixed blessing, perhaps, but a colossal waste of lives and resources.
Diane Ravitch is gaining company. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, not a radical by any means, just filed a column that describes the situation this way:
Milbank points out what many of us have been saying for months.
One must assume that Obama has made a Clintonesque political calculation. Faced with tremendous pressure from an alliance of corporate-sponsored education reform organizations and their allies in the media, Obama chose the easy way. He appointed an education secretary who would advance their agenda, apparently assuming that this was a battle he did not need, given all his other troubles.
But those of us working in the schools are not concerned about political calculations. We are trying to make sense of a society that has abandoned those in poverty in every meaningful dimension, and dropped even the pretense of desegregating our schools, and yet expects teachers to close the achievement gap all by ourselves.
Some of us are pendulum-pushers, and some are pendulum-riders. A curious thing has happened as we approach this tipping point. Even as evidence accumulates and is documented by honest scholars such as Ravitch, the "education reformers" are becoming more desperate to shore up their collapsing project. They are very smart, and have incredible resources at their disposal. Even in the midst of an economic crisis, they have marshaled billions of dollars to purchase people's energy. The Race to the Top was ingenious, and so well-timed, as to put maximum pressure on states struggling with impossible revenue shortfalls. So now we have new projects within the education reform effort. There is money for the "new and better" assessments that will solve all the problems we had before with those "bad" assessments. There is money for teacher pay, so long as it is tied to test scores. Those who buy this (or are bought) increasingly insist this trend is irreversible, and "resistance is futile," as a certain queen once asserted.
Those of us who have a name as teacher leaders may even be offered opportunities on these projects, and may have to do some soul searching and investigation, to be sure we can live with the results that our work may yield.
We who are pendulum pushers are hanging on, holding our ground, and continuing to push back. The time has come for the pendulum to start moving the other way.
With an actual pendulum, it is gravity that eventually wins out over the momentum of the device. In the case of education policy, as with corporate banditry and endless war, we cannot wait for the laws of physics to do the job. We need to be pushing, slowing the swing, and pushing it towards a new direction. As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in The Tipping Point, there are moments when ideas catch hold and begin to spread almost like a virus. There is some combination of outrage and hope that crystallizes into social change. I hope these ideas are infectious. It is about time for this pendulum to swing.
By Anthony Cody on August 15, 2010
We are accustomed to discussing education issues as if they were a realm of their own, with Arne Duncan (and maybe Bill Gates) as the biggest players. We debate policies like merit pay and charter schools, and sometimes reference the influence of economic and social factors, but we sometimes lose sight of the larger political context that is driving these policies.
Things are getting ready to shift.
It is said that education policy is like a pendulum. It tends to swing from one extreme to another. In the 1970s, when the progressive social movements peaked, we had the rise of desegregation, whole language instruction and constructivism, with a great emphasis on student-centered instruction. The past decade the pendulum has swung way back to the other extreme, with the rise of test-driven accountability and pre-digested curriculum.
How educational leaders have responded to this is very instructive. Diane Ravitch is a fascinating case study. She genuinely believed that we could drive improvement in our schools through tough standards and high-stakes tests, and actively promoted these methods. As the decade unfolded and evidence accumulated that this was not working as intended, the honest historian in her forced a change of stance, and she has become a sharp critic. She is a bellwether.
It is a fascinating, frustrating and exciting time, this tipping point we are approaching. The broader political setting is hugely important. We are two years into an administration that made fantastic promises to an America hungry for change. "We are the people we have been waiting for." Obama and his electioneers tapped into every hopeful beat of our hearts. We would bring the troops home from Iraq, close Guantanamo, stop the phone tapping, rein in corporate greed, and inspire the world with a more humane foreign policy.
In education, we were told we would enter a new era of "mutual responsibility," stop spending the year preparing for bubble tests, and stop blaming teachers for all the problems in our schools. We thought we would have a leader smart enough to understand that slogans and profiteers will not be our saviors, and that local leadership at the school and community level is the wellspring of school improvement.
But here we are, approaching the two year mark. At first, we were dismayed, when cruel practices of NCLB were extended. Did they not understand what they were doing? Could they not see this was not consistent with our shared vision? So we wrote, we organized on Facebook, we lobbied, and we spoke by phone with the Secretary himself. It has become clear they know exactly what they are doing, and nothing we say matters.
Teachers are not alone in this feeling. The chance to rein in corporate salaries has been squandered, and companies who received billions in bailout funds have showered their executives with billions in bonuses. The hedge fund managers - heavy investors in charter schools, by the way, have invested in politicians as well, and our system remains rigged in their favor. The war in Iraq, which Obama pledged to end this summer, drags on endlessly, and Afghanistan may well do to the American empire the same thing it did to the Soviets. A mixed blessing, perhaps, but a colossal waste of lives and resources.
Diane Ravitch is gaining company. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, not a radical by any means, just filed a column that describes the situation this way:
...if Duncan really wants to stop the biggest bully in America's schools right now, he'll have to confront his boss, President Obama. In federal education policy, the president and his education secretary have been the neighborhood toughs -- bullying teachers, civil rights groups, even Obama's revered community organizers.
Milbank points out what many of us have been saying for months.
Obama has taken the worst aspect of Bush's No Child Left Behind education law -- an obsession with testing -- and amplified it.
Obama has expanded the importance of standardized testing to determine how much teachers will be paid, which educators will be fired and which schools will be closed -- despite evidence that such practices are harmful. In the process, he's offended just about all the liberals involved in or advocating for education without gaining much support from conservatives.
One must assume that Obama has made a Clintonesque political calculation. Faced with tremendous pressure from an alliance of corporate-sponsored education reform organizations and their allies in the media, Obama chose the easy way. He appointed an education secretary who would advance their agenda, apparently assuming that this was a battle he did not need, given all his other troubles.
But those of us working in the schools are not concerned about political calculations. We are trying to make sense of a society that has abandoned those in poverty in every meaningful dimension, and dropped even the pretense of desegregating our schools, and yet expects teachers to close the achievement gap all by ourselves.
Some of us are pendulum-pushers, and some are pendulum-riders. A curious thing has happened as we approach this tipping point. Even as evidence accumulates and is documented by honest scholars such as Ravitch, the "education reformers" are becoming more desperate to shore up their collapsing project. They are very smart, and have incredible resources at their disposal. Even in the midst of an economic crisis, they have marshaled billions of dollars to purchase people's energy. The Race to the Top was ingenious, and so well-timed, as to put maximum pressure on states struggling with impossible revenue shortfalls. So now we have new projects within the education reform effort. There is money for the "new and better" assessments that will solve all the problems we had before with those "bad" assessments. There is money for teacher pay, so long as it is tied to test scores. Those who buy this (or are bought) increasingly insist this trend is irreversible, and "resistance is futile," as a certain queen once asserted.
Those of us who have a name as teacher leaders may even be offered opportunities on these projects, and may have to do some soul searching and investigation, to be sure we can live with the results that our work may yield.
We who are pendulum pushers are hanging on, holding our ground, and continuing to push back. The time has come for the pendulum to start moving the other way.
With an actual pendulum, it is gravity that eventually wins out over the momentum of the device. In the case of education policy, as with corporate banditry and endless war, we cannot wait for the laws of physics to do the job. We need to be pushing, slowing the swing, and pushing it towards a new direction. As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in The Tipping Point, there are moments when ideas catch hold and begin to spread almost like a virus. There is some combination of outrage and hope that crystallizes into social change. I hope these ideas are infectious. It is about time for this pendulum to swing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)