Fixing our schools
Stop “Waiting for ‘Superman’”
A Prescription to Fix Our Ailing Schools?
“Look, I’m just a storyteller. When I make a film, I never want the film to become a vehicle of social propaganda.” – Norman Jewison
Educating children is emotionally taxing. Their natural curiosity, inherent playfulness and seemingly boundless joie de vivre create an insatiable demand for constant attention in its fullest and most detailed form. Keeping a single child happy and productive necessitates a complex, improvisational pas de deux. Teachers normally lead these interactions, making a series of adjustments subtly synchronized to the variations in attitude and demeanor of children often capricious in attention and temperamental in mood. Even the most masterful educators can quickly reach their limit in patience trying to tame a reluctant solitary learner.
Multiply this number several fold to mimic the practicalities of the typical classroom environment makes the task incredibly difficult. Adding burdensome social, political and institutional impediments challenges teacher and student still further, making the ideal of a nurturing educational environment for all nearly impossible.
“Waiting for ‘Superman,’” a new film by Davis Guggenheim, the Academy Award-winning director of the environmental tour de force “An Inconvenient Truth,” acts as a welcoming guide to what has devolved into a bewildering educational labyrinth. It is clear from his career that Guggenheim is unafraid of tackling challenging fare within the documentary form. As hard as it may be to believe, by producing “‘Superman,’” Guggenheim has chosen subject matter that is potentially more difficult to chronicle and even more polarizing than climate change. He has taken another controversial, complicated system that is deeply influenced by stubborn stakeholders with conflicting agendas as it teeters at the edge of disaster. But instead of building a moral argument for fighting global climate change, Guggenheim focuses on something equally important – chronicling the dire state of the American public education system.
Similar to the battle over climate change, education is an interdependent ecosystem with multiple players and territorial policy makers. The most damaging effects occur in closed-door meetings and the pen still remains mighty. As a result, its subject matter does not naturally lend itself to documentary filmmaking. Given the complexity of public education, with its byzantine layers of bureaucracy, Guggenheim wisely grounds his narrative by focusing on the personal toll it inflicts on five students – Anthony, Bianca, Daisy, Emily and Francisco. Each is a highly sympathetic child who does not deserve to suffer at the hands of an uncaring, monolithic, Leviathan-like system, their lives slowly crushed by its fumbling, ham-fisted grip.
Guggenheim is a master documentarian who incorporates a vast array of statistics, personalities and storylines with minimal costs to pace, intelligibility or emotional resonance. He cooks up a thick gumbo of hard facts and soft tugs at the heartstrings –the simple aspirations of these children are heart wrenching when juxtaposed against the seemingly unavoidable obstacles they face in a system that should facilitate but instead tragically impedes. If you are banished to a failing school, alternatively called “academic sinkholes” or “drop-out factories,” your chances of graduating are incredibly small and future prospects correspondingly dwindle still further. The system is terribly convoluted. There are multiple levels of government, conflicting funding agendas, and inconsistent curricular standards. The challenges are seemingly endless, the bureaucracy stifling to creativity, initiative and efficacy, costs inevitably borne by young innocents who are ill-equipped to pay. Although he is not uniformly effective in communicating the problems plaguing the system, Guggenheim gives sufficient detail to convey its complexities but not too much to overwhelm. Many people have experienced these problems personally while in school, or heard them from others still buckling under the weight of the system, but are unsure of neither their provenance nor gravity.
You can argue with some of Guggenheim’s aesthetic choices like the veritable veneration of the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) and Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) schools respectively. This treatment presents several problems – their clear success does not represent the uneven performance of charters as a whole, their expensiveness may prohibit them from becoming replicable en masse, and children rejected by these schools are left to wither away in places they clearly wanted to flee. The quality education their guardians desperately crave puts the children’s uncertain futures in sharp relief, exacting psychic costs that are undoubtedly real but difficult to measure.
Also, there is at least a touch of irony when a film titled “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” which decries the impact of a solo hero who may never come, focuses on a couple of iconoclastic educational innovators – the irrepressible Geoffrey Canada, President and CEO of the HCZ as well as the steely-willed former Chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools system, Michelle Rhee. Their heroic work caused tectonic shifts in their respective educational communities but may not represent the painful reality of most jurisdictions where massive reform is necessary. You can also question the value of what feels like an easy vilification of teachers unions, and more specifically, the American Federation of Teachers and its president Randi Weingarten. Her already difficult job, protecting the livelihood of teachers who have been historically underpaid and gratuitously exploited, probably became tougher because of this documentary.
But perhaps Guggenheim is selecting a few narrative pressure points to advocate on behalf of a larger, more profound theme. Public education can always use greater funding aimed at improving crucial student outcomes such as increased literacy and numeracy scores. It is somewhat disingenuous to disagree with this as a starting point. And perhaps crafting a story that champions some themes at the expense of arguably equally valid others is a compromise he felt necessary to make.
As a rhetorical device, Guggenheim appeals to the American ethos that helped fashion, for better and worse, the country we find ourselves in today. Perhaps advocating on behalf of the innovation promised by charters and against the inflexibility of unions is the shrewdest opening gambit. To create a narrative counterpoint against these young student protagonists, it appears that something needed to be demonized. And it is relatively easy to do this at the expense of the straw men of teachers unions and bloated faceless bureaucracies, though arguably unfair.
We speak about public policy within an increasingly polarized discursive space where areas of commonality are increasingly rare. An anemic economic recovery in the aftermath of a global recession has added heat to already incendiary and vitriolic public debate – more nuanced recommendations for the future be damned. Perhaps Guggenheim appeals for the innovation which has fueled the US economy and rails against union-mandated collectivism that is antithetical to the rugged spirit of American individualism in the hopes of creating a point of convergence in an increasingly stratified political spectrum. For the sake of the prospective dropouts who will inevitably be left to recover from the social, psychological and financial scars inflicted by a broken education system, let’s hope that Guggenheim’s prescription is correct.
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