I just finished watching Waiting for Superman. I had avoided this movie for a long time because of what I heard about it: that it was very anti-teacher and based many of its arguments on the flawed “banking” method of teaching (http://www.trentu.ca/academic/nativestudies/courses/nast305/banking.htm). These are the two ideas that I struggle with the most. Perhaps because I have never had a bad teacher. Perhaps because I have so many teachers in my family and therefore cannot imagine them working toward anything but their highest potential. Perhaps because I have some serious ethical problems with the standardized testing movement in education today. Nonetheless, at the urging of my dear (and amazing teacher) friend, Katie Greene, I watched Waiting for Superman. Now I see why so many people want to raze public education. I had to face some hard facts about education—facts that I didn’t want to face. I noticed some misconceptions too.
Let’s start with the parents and kids seen in Waiting for Superman. The film follows five families that are trying very hard to get into KIPP schools or specialized charter schools. I agree with the film in that there are far too few spaces for these kids and that vying for a position in one of these prestigious schools via a lottery is unjust. At the same time, I was saddened by the unspoken argument: what about the parents of kids who aren’t involved? What about the parents who didn’t fight to get their kids in this lottery program? Why not follow them? After all, the parents in this movie are not the norm, (otherwise the lottery drawing would be so packed that no one could get in). I’m not saying the parents who don’t fight to get their kids into the best schools are bad. I’m just saddened to know that instead of trying to fix the public school in their area, parents either resign themselves to failing schools or try to run away from it. What filmgoers miss in this movie is what I missed all along. Just because you grew up with active parents, good teachers, and an academically minded community, does not mean everyone does. Just because the parents in this movie have faith that education is a way out, does not mean everyone—or even most people do.
That is the first hard truth I had to face. I didn’t want to admit that schools had failed children. Schools have failed many, many children. Had they not, you wouldn’t hear stories of people graduating with little or no ability to read. There wouldn’t be instances of 12% reading proficiency in a school. It is a hard truth. School—and yes, teachers—had failed. I still don’t think that A Nation at Risk is a good source for policy-making. I have read the report and there are some serious flaws in how it analyzes data. You can find out more here: http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/04/07/richard-rothstein/a-nation-at-risk-twenty-five-years-later/ . Oddly enough though, once you examine NAR (Nation at Risk) you come back to the previous point, that the problems actually lie in “belief that all of the nation’s social problems can be solved by improving schools alone and an accompanying willingness to tolerate failures in other social institutions” (Springer 2004). (http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/Documents/pdf/lpo/Guthrie_Springer_ANAR_2004.pdf ).
The problem with NAR is that the policies that came from it, refused to acknowledge that there must be a myriad of social interventions in order for education to actually provide a way out of cyclic poverty. Poverty cannot be addressed by schools alone. On average children from poverty had 70 percent of the vocabulary of the same aged child in a working-class family and about 45 percent of the vocabulary of a child from a professional family (Payne 2005: A Framework for Understanding Poverty. : wiki can be found here: http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/Framework_for_Understanding_Poverty,_A) .
If schools are agents of social change, then why would we not acknowledge that these students come in with deficits and address them? We cannot (like Waiting for Superman did) ignore the greater social problems of systemic poverty—namely, that communities in poverty require multiple interventions to help them reverse that cycle. So too, we must acknowledge that if communities don’t take a vested interest, public education will not get better. A successful school is surrounded by a network of people who work to see that school succeed, even if some of the people in the community don’t have children going to that school. If a community is unable to do that, then the state should help the entire community to revitalize. So yes, schools failed children, but it wasn’t just schools. We failed children—as a populace. We didn’t provide interventions on a social level for all aspects of their lives including their family lives.
The second hard truth: Testing has a purpose. I don’t like it. It is based on a flawed method of seeking knowledge. It bows to the lowest common denominator of intelligence. I see it as a way of making a permanent underclass; it devalues teaching and learning. The movie depicts “teaching” as opening a kid’s head and pouring information inside. What a frightening thought! I hate this notion—but—I teach high school. I don’t teach lower grades where memorization is important. I know that having a base upon which a student can formulate more abstract thought is necessary. I don’t know that testing in some of the lower grades is necessarily all that bad. It makes me cringe, but I know that a student who comes into a 9th grade Math class without the skills he/she should have learned in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade will not be successful. So how does one ensure that? Portfolio-based systems are too expensive, so testing is a necessary evil. With that in mind, I go back to my previous argument. If we have testing, but the community does not have faith in it, why don’t we change it? I’ll give you a scenario: a student comes to me in 9th grade with reading proficiency far below the 7th grade level. I go back and look at his test scores and notice he failed three out of four sections of the CRCT and the writing section. Why is this student in my class? He is in my class because there is no faith in the tests. A parent has a right to move his/her child on to the next grade level, so does a school. Why would they do this? They don’t feel the test accurately portray the child’s ability. Why not? For educators, it is that we have very little say in how the tests are made. For parents, it is that they often don’t have faith in the education. So the child moves on, and falls further and further behind.
Waiting for Superman accurately portrays this with charts and graphs. It didn’t, however, show the truth. The truth is that these kids—many with whom I have worked—don’t just get forgotten. They are pushed and pulled through remediation courses. Teachers and parents alike shed blood, sweat, and tears over them. In the end, they are not simply a data point moved along a graph, as seen in Waiting for Superman, they are people—people that many adults worked very hard to get through a system.
This leads me to my last hard truth. I am not the center of the universe. Let me rephrase that—teachers are not the center of the universe. I have to put my ego aside for a moment and realize that I cannot force a kid to learn. Disclaimer: I teach high school, so autonomy is important to my students. In lower grades, this may be less so. With that in mind, I give you the hardest scenario every teacher faces. There are students out there that just aren’t interested in school. This could have to do with the fact that the curriculum doesn’t speak to their interest. This could have to do with the rise in distracting technology, video game addiction, lack of faith in the purpose of education, or the transient nature of their living situation. It could be that the child is trying to signal to his/her parent that they are unhappy and the only way to do that—despite having the skills necessary to be successful—is to fail a particular course. I have lost countless hours of sleep to children that I just could not motivate. We respected each other, I appealed to their learning style, I contacted parents, held conferences with social workers, and kept them after school for extra help. Still, they exercised their rights. They chose to fail my course. I have no doubt they learned. In fact, many have come back to tell me they learned a great deal from me. Their grades didn’t reflect it though. Of course their test scores didn’t either, because they just bubbled-in whatever they wanted. After all, they knew they would fail the course anyway. So, while Waiting for Superman paid lip-service to teachers, it also failed to acknowledge the hardest truth. Students are people too. Students are people who are making decisions about their learning. If you don’t allow their failures to count, then you can’t allow their successes to count either. At what point do we allow some of the onus to move from all the adults in the room onto the little person who is trying to learn to be an adult? How do we make them value education, if we don’t put value in their decisions about education?
I’ll tell you how we don’t do that. We cannot say to a student, work hard in school, but I don’t care enough to work hard for your school. We cannot say to a student, your teacher is the number one factor in your success, but don’t respect him/her too much because, you know what they say: “those who do, do, but those who can’t, teach.” We cannot argue that education is the only way to get out of poverty, but we refuse to fund it in an appropriate way. We cannot continue to say to a kid, your education is the most important thing, but I will make excuses for your laziness and your mistakes so that they don’t even matter as decisions for you.
Waiting for Superman made some very good points. Sadly, it missed the most important point. How can we ask a student to work within a system that we don’t respect? How can we ask a generation of students to find success in a system that we simultaneously devalue and require miracles from? So with all due respect, I appreciate the thought, but I—and my students—don’t have time to wait.
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