Saving Our Schools: Superman or Real Solutions?

Is director Davis Guggenheim right or is there a less complicated way to progress our schools?


Is America prepared to settle for a fantastic education - for the few? That’s the issue at the core of the documentary from director Davis Guggenheim, Waiting for Superman.

The movie is selective as well as fragmentary, which shouldn't be shocking. A cottage industry has risen around pundits who've minor substantive understanding about public education, yet express their opinion over the subject nonetheless. For instance, one of the chief shortcomings of this film: that Guggenheim selected to add in footage of a flawed educator in a Milwaukee classroom as well as the rubber room in New York, but opted to not incorporate footage of thriving public schools in which uncounted and unheralded instructors are doing extraordinary things each day to teach our children. This imbalance may suit Guggenheim's narrow and selective narrative, but it does not tell the complete and textured narrative of what is actually going on in American schools.

The movie brings consideration on the kids who are being failed by our education system and deprived of the sort of education that will open doors for them all through their lives. Despite Guggenheim's undeniably best intentions, the picture falls short by casting two outliers in starring roles - the "bad" educator as bad guy and charter schools as heroes all set to save the day. The dilemma is that these caricatures tend to be more fictional than realistic.

Are there inferior teachers? Obviously there are, just like there are bad accountants, and lawyers, and picture reviewers. I wish there weren't any bad instructors. But American Federation of Teachers is in the forefront of developing and implementing ways to improve teacher quality, and to deal effectively and efficiently with breakdowns when they occur.

In fact, union-led instructor support and evaluation programs (in which new and struggling teachers are trained and evaluated by more practiced peers) have been shown to be far stricter on poorly performing instructors than those conducted by administrators.

No instructor - myself included - wants instructors in the classroom who don't belong there. Those knowledgeable about education understand the need for instructor quality, but they do not buy into the simplistic notion that an outbreak of "bad instructors" is bringing down an otherwise thriving enterprise of education.

And tenure should never be misconstrued being a "job for life." Teachers and teachers unions are right to preserve a good, objective standard by which teachers need to be judged. But due process must not disintegrate into glacial process, and educators who - at the end of a fair, efficient process - are deemed unfit for the profession should be dismissed. Administrators also must fulfill their responsibilities: to support, properly evaluate and, when necessary, make tough decisions concerning the instructors entrusted to teach our kids.

I can litter a cutting room floor with all the bits and pieces this picture got wrong. For example, New York City's rubber room has been closed, after years of union-led efforts to slam the door on this practice.

For argument's sake, let's say a miracle happened overnight and our current, completely insufficient evaluation system instructor effectiveness suddenly became adequate or, better yet, accurate. Say administrators identified instructors who simply didn't make the grade, and removed them from their classrooms. What then?

Who wants to manage the more difficult (but less sexy) and absolutely necessary (but unexciting) realities, for instance the fact that teachers need equipment, resources and assistance to do their jobs well? It's therapeutic to say "fire the inferior educators," but it does not do much to improve schools. The simple, unsexy fact is that the best way to improve educator quality is to do a better job of developing and supporting the educators to whom we entrust our children's educations. But some seem to buy into the world according- to-Superman philosophy of education reform - that the "best performing schools" are the boutique schools that enjoy extra resources and are more selective in choosing their student populations. I mean no disrespect to the many well-intentioned people who set out to provide a good education to students that have been denied that right. But most of them fall short, as well as those who defy the odds touch only a minuscule percentage of children.

The chance for an incredible public education should come not by accident, not even by choice, but by right.

We all agree that right is being denied to too many kids. But, in the end, no solution is as measurable, as reachable or as responsible as a fantastic neighborhood school. I've seen such success stories in real life. In schools everywhere from New York City to Albuquerque, N.M., from St. Paul, Minn., to Philadelphia, and from Los Angeles County to Baltimore, children are defying the odds. The solutions aren't the stuff of action flicks - supports for disadvantaged kids, extra help for those who start or fall behind, high expectations for all children and challenging coursework - but they achieve the desired results.

Picture a sequel to Waiting for Superman, released a few years from today. Would we rather stick with the Hollywood model of providing an escape plan - sometimes superior, quite often inferior - to a handful of students? Or provide a plan in which we had summoned the determination to perform the hard, but effective and far-reaching, work to create significant adjustments to whole school systems, providing all children with the best possible option - an extremely effective neighborhood school? 90 percent of American students - nearly 50 million kids - focus on our public schools. Revolution in a single classroom, a single school, or even a single school system isn’t enough.

We are not able to delay. And we can't place our hopes on Superman, or on some mythical solution or silver bullet. We can't depend on anything other than replicable, scalable, effective ways to grant all children the education they deserve.


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