Waiting for Superman

On our way out of the Loews Lincoln Center theater in New York yesterday after watching Waiting for Superman, my 10-year-old son, Jack, made this unprompted observation: "That was really two movies," he said. "One about the kids trying to get into schools, and another about evil teacher unions." I thought he noticed something important about this film, and in this review I'll try to explain why the first of these movies is a searing call for social justice, while the second ultimately falls prey to the same lack of rigor it decries.

Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, director of An Inconvenient Truth, illuminates the troubles of America's education system through the stories of five kids: Anthony, who lost his father to drugs and is mired in the awful Washington, DC system, Daisy, an LA fifth grader who wants to be a surgeon, Francisco, whose family sees school as the way out of the Bronx, Bianca, a Harlem student being failed by the local parochial school, and Emily, a middle-class kid whose suburban school may track her out of college prep. All five pin their hopes on lotteries to gain entry into nearby charter schools where things will be better. Without spoilers, I will just say that the odds against all five kids in a documentary coming up winners are high.

And from the very opening frames, where we watch Anthony painfully work percentages, this is a film about odds. We are constantly reminded with subtitles as we see the outstanding charter schools — and make no mistake, they are exemplary — how many applications there are for each slot. We are presented with the grim statistics on the "dropout factories" concentrated in the inner cities, where a large percentage fail to graduate, and of those, even fewer are prepared for college.

Guggenheim interviews Robert Balfanz, co-director of the Everyone Graduates Center and a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, who identified the nation's 2,000 dropout factories, high schools that graduate 60% or fewer of entering freshmen. "He sees a pattern," Guggenheim narrates, "Failing elementary and middle schools feeding poorly educated students into the local high school where they last one or two years."

In the past 40 years, one high school in LA has failed to graduate 40,000 kids. "They're fifteen-year-old dropouts," says the principal. "They aren't going to be writing screenplays." It should come as no surprise that education theorists have begun to ask whether troubled communities produce poor outcomes in school or if it is the failed schools that are producing these troubled communities.

The final sequence, watching these kids, from what are incontestably bad schools, sitting at their lotteries, hugging their parents, crossing their fingers, and, in some cases, going home empty handed is so sad that it makes me tear up just remembering it. No parent can watch this film and not cry. If you can watch these children and not commit to fight this inequity, you have no heart. There is no excuse in our America for this. It is a social justice issue, full stop.

But as Guggenheim lauds the work of charters, and education visionaries like Geoffrey Canada and his Harlem Children's Zone, his "other" movie falls into the trap of looking for easy solutions. While Canada notes that his school's success depends on full-lifecycle involvement (he launched a "Baby Academy" and promises parents to stand with kids through the end of college), the film offers explanations for failure and prescriptions for cure that are substantially less holistic.

"It should be simple," says Guggenheim, as a cute animation shows a perky teacher opening children's heads and pouring in alphabet soup. "A teacher in a schoolhouse, filling her students with knowledge and sending them on their way. But we've made it complicated." What makes it complicated, in this film, are bureaucracy and unions.

Let's start with the insulting and discredited notion of education as a wise teacher pouring content into the blank slate of children's minds. We have known, since Dewey and Vygotsky, that learning is a transactional process. Even the word, education, comes from a Latin root meaning "to draw out," a deeply interactive metaphor. Guggenheim has no excuse for starting from such a flawed premise.

And of course, bureaucracy is an easy target. The "14,000 autonomous school boards making school governance a tangled mess of conflicting regulations and mixed agendas" become a numinous villain, literally described as "the blob, like something out of a horror movie." Washington, D.C. Superintendent Michelle Rhee shares her convictions about the creeping bureaucracy and its fundamental failure. "The central office," says Rhee, "Proceeds to screw everything up." By implication, the solution is charter schools, unfettered by red tape. (I will leave the typical consequences of deregulation as an exercise for the student. Parallels with the financial industry, particularly if they involve alphabet soup and trephination, receive extra points under my rubric.)

But the film reserves its harshest criticism for teacher unions. Where Rhee is depicted as a hypercompetent administrator, juggling no less than two smart phones and a laptop as she bustles from meeting to meeting, working long hours, and yet still finding the time to whisper to a student as she observes a class, asking how he likes his teacher, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten is shown in a political context, standing before what is likely a union meeting, amplified and projected. Like the many shots in the film of student's feet — notice, as you watch it, the subtle reinforcement of this motif of plodding along — the visual cues associated with these two figures are part of the filmmaker's art.

No question, there are legitimate questions about some contract terms. In the clip you will have seen on "Oprah," union contracts are blamed for the "dance of the lemons," where charmingly animated Milwaukee principals, stuck with teachers they are unable to fire, dance to the "Blue Danube" as they cycle them from school to school. And it is contractually specified grievance procedures that keep hundreds of New York City teachers sitting in "rubber rooms" for up to three years as they await administrative resolution, at a cost of $100M a year.

I think we can agree that the combination of due process rights and bureaucracy makes public education more sluggish than the private sector in responding to low-performing staff. And we can agree that the most important goal is a great teacher in every classroom. But I truly wish that Guggenheim had asked the next question. Assume, as one of his interviewees asserts, that if we could eliminate the 10% of "worst" teachers, we could bring our nation's education system up to the best in the world. If unions were no obstacle, and you could wave a magic wand and fire all those people, where would the new teachers come from, and what would guarantee the distribution of their skill levels would be any different from those they replace?

If we're truly after root causes — and not just convenient truths — we have to ask why we are not doing a better job attracting, developing, and retaining truly great teachers. One possible answer: While countries with world-class systems recruit all their teachers from the top third of college graduates, in America, that number is only 14%, according to research cited in a New York Magazine story about the film: "The report makes clear that in the countries with the best schools, teacher quality is a national priority: Educators are paid competitively; education schools are highly selective; jobs are guaranteed for those credentialed; and professional development is ample and subsidized. In America, none of that holds true."

Since unions have, at best, limited input on some of those factors, why should the failure of the entire system be laid at their feet?

As Newark Mayor Cory Booker noted in the second of the two hours Oprah devoted to the film this past week, creating villains helps absolve us of blame. "When you blame somebody, you almost try to forgive yourself of any responsibility. 'It's not my fault, it's the dirty unions!'" said Booker. "But that will never solve this problem. We must find a way to get everybody to the table."

I would go a step further: creating villains enables us to justify our actions. If unions are the villain, it becomes our moral obligation to attack them. My fear is that in the same way that Inconvenient Truth inspired millions to meaningful (if incremental) action, that among those seeking quick fixes — or political points — a knee-jerk attack on unions becomes the equivalent of swapping in compact fluorescent light bulbs. And Guggenheim indicts "regular" schools with such a broad brush that possibilities for innovation and renewal there may be overlooked.

But these concerns aside, this film has clearly sparked a long-overdue dialogue. There is no question that change is needed, and no question that real change will mean sacrifice on everyone's part. At its best, Waiting for Superman deploys its considerable storytelling skills to build the case for that shared sacrifice. It is impossible to look at the faces of those children, clutching now-worthless lottery numbers, and accept the status quo.

Resources:
Waiting for Superman web site
New York Magazine, Schools: The Disaster Movie
The Nation, Grading 'Waiting for Superman'

Full disclosure: My wife is a teacher (in Massachusetts) and a union member, and I taught at the college level for seven years.