Waiting for Superman is Charming, Emotional, and Misguided: Part One (Why Shredding Teachers' Unions Isn't the Solution, as the Film Leads One to Believe)

Waiting for Superman, directed by Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth), will be the most talked-about movie in American when it comes out September 24. It’s the big-ticket, mass-media, crossover-audience education movie we’ve been waiting for. And it sends audiences home full of passion, indignation, and outrage.

The problem is that the movie pushes a purely anti-union, pro-charter school ideology that won’t improve our school system en masse. The big takeaways from Waiting for Superman are: charter schools are saviors, unions are villains. Much of Guggenheim’s ammunition intended to drive the discourse is dated or inaccurate.

The movie follows five lovable children and their families who feel— quite justifiably, as the filmmaker goes to lengths to show—that their local public school is a doomed option as they pin their hopes on admission by lottery to charter schools. The segments featuring the students are poignant and powerful, and the film’s final act is dedicated almost entirely to them.  You badly want these deserving kids to attend schools that will unlock their potential. Any denial or obstruction of that feels criminal.

Indeed, who is denying these kids— and their millions of vulnerable, unheralded counterparts— a great education? One leaves Waiting for Superman believing teachers’ unions the biggest culprit. The film blames unions of educators for putting adults’ interests consistently over students’ needs, a practice that has allegedly protected legions of deadbeat teachers and wasted billions of precious education dollars. This makes for compelling movie-watching, but it’s totally off-base.

Waiting for Superman also deploys images of New York City’s infamous Kafka-esque “rubber rooms” as evidence that teachers’ unions waste money and protect losers. This is problematic for two huge reasons:

Reason #1:  The rubber room cases are dragged out so outrageously long— years, for many— because New York City, not the union, hired so few hearing officers. This is a head-scratcher; one may conjecture that the city didn't mind keeping this bureaucratic abomination going in order to shovel righteous indignation on its perennial rival, and to score anti-union hit pieces like Steven Brill’s widely read New Yorker article from last year.

Buried in a 2007 Village Voice exposé on rubber rooms, reporter Mara Altman dropped this shocker:

"The length of the process depends on the complexity of allegations and case," DOE spokeswoman Melody Meyer says. "Some investigations take days, others take months."

There are currently only 18 hearing officers handling misconduct cases. Each officer is contracted to meet only five times a month. The backlog of cases is immense.

"We have been saying for years that we want these people out of these places much more quickly," UFT president Randi Weingarten says. "There is no reason for them to be sitting six months or longer without charges being filed."

Hearing officers are chosen jointly by the DOE and the UFT, but are paid for by the New York State Education Department. With New York City officers making up to $1,900 a day, it's a lucrative part-time job, which some critics say leads these officers to overly compromising opinions.

Reason #2: Rubber rooms are gone. They all closed, effective this past Monday. The city and the union reached an agreement to get rid of them for the betterment of all. Getting stirred up about them while watching this film moves us backwards, not forwards.

Another uppercut the film levels against unions sprang the Washington Teachers Union’s (WTU) blocking of D.C. School Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s first proposal for radically overhauling the District’s contract with teachers. I’ve got two huge problems here as well:

Problem #1: Guggenheim portrays Rhee as a valiant crusaders who can only look on, heartbroken, as a raucous union meeting scuttles her vital plan. Actually, Rhee’s green vs. red track system was problematic in many ways. For one thing, it deified test scores, an educationally counterproductive practice that teachers have known for years to be dangerous. Rhee may be a self-styled “reformer,” but that doesn’t mean she should have been immediately embraced as a benevolent dictator.

Problem #2: The WTU and Michelle Rhee agreed on a contract. It was passed unanimously by the DC City Council yesterday, the last hurdle before adoption. A vigorous, protracted, often nasty debate happened, and eventually, both sides came to an agreement. The union didn’t ruin everything, despite what Waiting for Superman leads one to believe. Getting upset about the early part of the negotiation process shown in the film helps nobody to move forward and attack today and tomorrow's issues in classrooms. 

The film also claims that tenure protections make it virtually impossible to fire bad teachers. That’s an out-of-date assertion. In January 2010, the AFT partnered with Kenneth Feinberg (Special Master for the TARP Executive Compensation and September 11 Victims Compensation Fund) to present a fair-minded and comprehensive overhaul of teacher evaluations. The plan improves accountability and will remove teachers who can’t pull their weight. 

Unions are the most available and politically expedient scapegoat for explaining why so many American schools are underperforming. But blaming them, as Waiting for Superman does, avoids the heart of the matter and distorts the discourse on the best way forward to take on very real and very urgent injustices in American public schools.

I’ll have more to say on the heart of the matter, and Waiting for Superman’s portrayal of charter schools, in my next post.

Comments

[Mike Warner]

Thank you for sharing the other side. For every complex problem there is a solution that is clear, simple and wrong.

[Violet]

Very clear points, Dan. Thanks for thinking this one through and sharing. I agree that the union is an quick and easy scapegoat. I'm very interested in your thoughts about the heart of the problem. To me, there is a lack of real vision in the leadership of American education. Ed. policy (like the union) is very reactionary, and not using a lot of creativity or real knowledge of how children learn and how teachers make that happen on the part of those making major decisions, which is a big problem when the problems are so complex and urgent.

[Susan Graham]

How ironic that the public is being "educated" about public education with inaccurate information, unbalanced perspective, and overblown emotionalism. Charters may be part of the solution, but they are neither scalable nor sustainable as a long term answer. A blanket scapegoating of our public schools and their teachers is a destructive distraction that allows other stakeholders to distance themselves from ownership and responsibility.

[Jason]

Seems this is a can't see the forrest for the trees moment. In latching onto specific flaws, you've missed the point. There may be outdated issues shown in the film, it is a film after all, not a news report just cobbled together yesterday, however this has no bearing on the overall point that it tries to make: that while adults screw about over contracts and which sort of evaluation teachers are comfortable with (how a teacher can complain that a test that shows 'Johnny can't read or add' isn't a reflection on their performance is beyond me- I guess there are plenty of excuses), how many students went thru the system in these years and suffered for it? The point of the film, as I understand it, is to remind us that this a personal and social crisis so that something actually happens. The window of opportunity to help our children is always on a small, short timescale, and every obstacle that we adults take more time to consider means thousands of students continuing to fall behind and fail. Adults, not just unions but parents, teachers administrators, all of us are a part of the problem, and have been for decades. And the movie does make the point that we already know enough about how to make our kids learn but we just don't do it. All kids can learn basic skills. But every year more kids continue to fall behind because the adults who are responsible for them aren't doing what must to be done. Enough with excuses. It's about time.

[Mary]

@ Jason

The urgency you speak of is precisely what is being hijacked by the neo-reformers to implement radical changes that not only haven't been proven to work but also create such a mess in our schools that teachers and schools spend inordinate amounts of time deciphering and troubleshooting them INSTEAD of teaching. How many hours have I sat through meetings analyzing district data (as mandated by NCLB) when I could have been analyzing data from my own classroom? How many staff meetings have been spent problem-solving harebrained state and federal mandates when we could have been problem-solving the needs of our own students?

What I'm gathering from re-reading your post is that the solution is for teachers to accept these top-down reforms that were not developed by educators (Arne Duncan was never a teacher and he's running the show) and if we resist reforms we know don't work and undermine our ability to do our jobs, it's our fault for holding up the show. Am I correct?

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