photo: Old Shoe Woman/ BY-NC-SA

What will school look like for your kids?  Probably very different than it does today.

The documentary, “Waiting for Superman,” is about how our school system needs to change. Immediately.  According to the movie's website, Director Davis Guggenheim, "follows a handful of promising kids through a system that inhibits, rather than encourages academic growth." He then takes a look at, "innovative approaches taken by education reformers and charter schools that have - in reshaping the culture - refused to leave their students behind." 

According to an op-ed by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, “The film’s core thesis is that for too long our public school system was built to serve adults, not kids. For too long we underpaid and undervalued our teachers and compensated them instead by giving them union perks. Over decades, though, those perks accumulated to prevent reform in too many districts. The best ones are now reforming, and the worst are facing challenges from charters.”

Charter schools are privately run schools, and are not subject to state rules and regulations. The documentary trailer makes it clear that the community has no faith in a public school education.  “Waiting for Superman," according to Friedman's description, "follows five kids and their parents who aspire to obtain a decent public education but have to enter a bingo-like lottery to get into a good charter school, because their home schools are miserable failures.”  

The movie, which comes out on September 24, has sparked lots of debate. How do we fix education and improve our failing public schools?

Here are some perspectives from some stakeholders in the education system. 

24-year-old Catherine Vanier teaches 7th grade science in Richmond, CA.

The documentary makes it appear as though charter schools are the only option to save education, when in reality, charter schools are as equally likely to fail as regular public schools. I agree 100 percent that the students from the film should have the opportunity to receive an education, but I do not agree with abandoning public schools. They need help. If we keep telling everyone that the teachers who teach in the public schools are horrible, then the good teachers will leave because their efforts are never acknowledged. We are scaring away the teachers who are good enough to find other jobs. No one wants to continue to teach in an environment where they are constantly abused, neglected and taken for granted. We need to support the public schools, not alienate them.  

Vanier comments on the likeliness of charter schools to fail, which is echoed by Diane Ravitch, former Assistant to the U.S. Secretary of Education. Ravitch writes, "Charters vary widely in quality. Some are excellent, some are abysmal, most are somewhere in between. The only major national evaluation of the charter sector was carried out by economist Margaret Raymond at Stanford University. Her study was funded by the staunchly procharter Walton Family Foundation, among others; yet she found that only 17 percent of charters outperformed a matched public school. The other 83 percent were either no better, or they were worse."

25-year-old John Stefanic, teaches 8th grade English and Social Studies in San Jose, CA.

Charter schools provide a great service for motivated parents and students.  Charters allow a kid to jump aboard a well oiled machine and start working at a maddening pace to catch up (or stay ahead) with the high-performing schools.

But charters (the ones that work-- many don't) rely on this presupposition that you have to fight like hell to get in.  And the parents that are willing to fight like hell for a spot are going to make sure their kids do their work anyway, charter or not.  The problems I face in my school are with parents that don't get it.  In my first and second year, I gave them the benefit of doubt.  I said, "They don't speak English and they don't understand what their kids need to be successful in American schools."  Now, I don't have that viewpoint.  That lack of understanding manifests itself as a lack of caring.  None of those parents are down here demanding a translator so that they can meet with the teachers of their failing students.  None of them know their parental rights.  None of them bother to call the school with an updated phone number.  None bother to make sure their truant kid shows up.  I'm talking about a small percentage of my overall population, but that small percentage of kids routinely destroy a whole class.

Why are charters successful?  They separate the wheat from the chaff.  They have behavior contracts.  If you screw up?  Go somewhere else.  Go back to public school.  That's a huge carrot for a parent who is involved in their child's education.  And those kids, as a result, don't screw up.  

Charters can fire bad teachers!  Why can't we do this?  Most public teachers are tenure-protected!  They are way behind the times.  Our "professional development" is a joke and does not fix these problems.  Charters get pick of the litter and they pour the money into higher salaries and smaller class sizes, not useless curriculum and shitty training.

I am a firm believer in public school education, but I think parental involvement continues to be the #1 influencer and charters have it in spades.  Give me some of those involved charter parents, let me cherry pick the kids with quality parents, kick our “goofball” kids out to somewhere else, and watch my test scores soar.

As for me...

I was educated in public schools my entire life.  They were economically, ethnically, and linguistically diverse. I never thought twice about where I was or what I was learning.  Likewise, I cannot imagine wanting a non-public education for my future children.  But charters are taking our country by storm - and my teaching experience gave me some insight as to why.

From the perspective of someone very young, very inexperienced and new to the whole teaching-game, it’s hard to feel like I can see the big picture.  But I think I have seen one extreme.  The school where I taught was in its fourth year of program improvement - which meant if our scores did not go up, we were at risk of being taken over by the state (our administration and some staff would be replaced).

I taught 8th grade English for two years in San Francisco, and we LOVED our students.  We still managed to laugh about student X who kicked in the glass door, and student Y who stole a teacher’s laptop, and student Z who cheated on a test and then told the principal you just hadn’t taught them any of the material.  

I came to realize however, that this is the kind of love that hurts kids. This is the kind of love that excuses students from being their best, and gets in the way of expecting them to achieve. The worst part, is this love is the only thing that united our staff, school, and community.  It's the only thing we agreed upon.  We did NOT agree on testing, best practices, teacher evaluations, school culture, priorities, policies, or behavior contracts. This is where charters have an edge.  They are united by one vision: one functional, practical vision that includes all of these things, in addition to loving their students. Not to say that some public schools haven't figured this out, but ours certainly had not.

Loving students does not mean we've done our job, and it does not bring test scores up. And that’s the only way we were going to get out of program improvement.  Many teachers at our school viewed standardized tests as a pain in the @ss.  If you were one of the few teachers that DID plan your instruction with the tests in mind, you were written off as having no creativity, or no real love for teaching.  

I think this attitude comes from being afraid of test-score data. Charters have another edge here - they are not afraid of data.  In the school where I taught, people were terrified of data, possibly because it was only used to punish.  For example, Michelle Rhee, the superintendent of schools in Washington, D.C. is using data to fire teachers. School districts use data to pull away funding.  We have to eliminate the culture of punishment and instill a culture of improvement.  We can’t be afraid of data, because data helps us know where we are, and how far we have to go.  

However, teachers and teacher unions do have a right to resist being judged on data.  Just like David Leonhardt writes in the Times, data shows an incomplete picture of a teachers’ abilities.  Anyone would hate to be judged on only one aspect of their work.  It’s like a ballerina being judged solely on the number of turns she does, without taking into account her musicality, her expression, or the height of her jumps. But as a country, we have decided that test score data IS an important part of how we measure success. So teachers have to embrace that. 

The "Waiting for Superman" trailer says, “When you see a great teacher you are seeing a work of art.”  I don’t think anyone would disagree.  We have to let teachers know how much we appreciate their hard work, recognize them for ALL that they do (test scores and all else), and create a culture of teacher improvement instead of punishment and failure.