What Waiting for Superman left out...

Beverly Falk, October 15, 2010
  • The movie Waiting for Superman, offers a much-welcomed opportunity to bring attention to the need for quality education for all children in our nation, especially those who come from historically under-resourced, low-income communities. Its heartbreaking portrayal of five families' desperate quest for a safe, caring, effective school is, hopefully, a wake-up call to all concerned citizens about the urgency of school improvement efforts.
  • What the film doesn't do, however, is present critical information and understandings developed through decades of experience and research. It frames the issues in such a simplistic way, that it does little to help viewers understand the complexities of the realities involved. I offer the following points of discussion in an effort to fill in the gaps of what Waiting for Superman has left out:.
  • The film makes the point that the quality of a teacher is a critical factor impacting students' learning. There is much research to support this claim. However, it places the blame for the problems of schools almost entirely on incompetent teachers and the inability of schools to get rid of them. While no one disputes that incompetent teachers should not be allowed to continue teaching, everything we know from research and experience tells us that firing teachers and closing schools is not what creates high-quality schooling. A look at the countries whose educational systems are noted for their educational success reveals that what is best for kids is a school system that emphasizes meaningful support for their teachers. In Finland, Singapore, and the other countries where students perform highly on international assessments, teachers and administrators are provided with many supports: highly-qualified candidates are recruited to the field; their preparation is heavily subsidized; they receive extensive mentoring during their induction years, they are provided with multiple ongoing learning opportunities once they are situated in the field; and they are supported by administrators who establish and maintain a relentless focus on student learning, high expectations, continuous improvement, and a safe, nurturing school community. These high-performing schools and systems are distinguished not by their efforts to punish bad practices but, instead, by their commitment to establishing an infrastructure that ensures schools have access to well-prepared teachers who have the knowledge to do their best work, stay in the field, and get the results their students deserve.
  • The movie demonizes teacher unions as being responsible for making it almost impossible to get rid of "bad" teachers. Certainly there are union procedures that need to be reviewed and modified to provide a better balance between protecting teachers and the children they teach. But evidence from around the world points unequivocally to unions' important role in school improvement efforts. Teacher unions have had an historic role in this country in advancing the struggles for quality education and in providing much-needed supports to teachers. In every city that has achieved significant improvement in public education, the teachers' union has been a partner, not an adversary. All the high-performing countries, as well as states in the U.S. with the best student performance, are those with strong teachers' unions.
  • Although the director of Waiting for Superman says he's not 'pro' or 'anti' anything and that all he wants is for all kids to get access to "great schools," the film does not show one great public school or public school teacher; it only contrasts public school "failure factories" with successful charter schools. But there is little evidence to support this portrayal. All studies conducted about the differences between the performance of charter and regular public schools have yielded no evidence to support claims that charter schools as a group perform better than public schools. (A study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, for example, found that only 17 percent of charter schools do a better job than the comparable local public school, while more than a third do "significantly worse.") The truth is that there are excellent charter and public schools and ineffective charter and public schools. Charter vs. public is not the issue; good teaching is what matters most. There are shining examples of good teaching and schooling throughout our country. We need to find, support and build on these as a strategy for building strong systems of schooling for all children.
  • The film's focus on teacher quality as a critical component in producing good outcomes for kids makes the assumption that what kids learn and are able to do as a result of their schooling is represented well by our standardized testing system. However, many prominent educators and assessment experts argue that existing standardized tests are limited in their capacity to measure important knowledge and skills. In a recently-released report from the Economic Policy Institute, they caution that using students' test scores as the chief marker of teacher quality will have dysfunctional effects: 1) by encouraging a narrowing of the curriculum to "teach to the test" - focusing instruction on the areas that will be tested; 2) by emphasizing lower-order skills that appear in tests at the expense of high-order skills that are best learned and assessed through rich performance-oriented experiences – the ways in which students learn best; 3) by misidentifying teachers — labeling many good teachers as poor and many poor teachers as good — because test scores can be influenced by so many other factors besides good teaching; and 4) by creating disincentives for teachers to teach children who are from high-need communities, who have diverse or special abilities and needs – all of whom traditionally score lower on tests than their more affluent and conventionally-proficient peers.
  • Waiting for Superman's framing of the problem as too many bad teachers protected by unions, along with its promotion of charter schools as the solution to school improvement, distracts us from what is, perhaps, the biggest threat to student achievement: the inequities of our society and their effect on children's learning. We cannot do away with the achievement gap in our society without addressing our society's opportunity gap. Did you know that the United States leads the developed world in the proportion of children in poverty, with more than 23% of our students below the poverty level? Schooling for all cannot effectively improve without a concomitant focus on providing opportunities – jobs, health care, housing, etc. – for all our citizenry. When children live in poverty, when their parents have no jobs, they are more likely to experience greater geographic disruption, greater hunger and malnutrition, greater stress, and poorer health – all of which contribute to academic difficulties and discipline problems that depress student achievement. It is folly to think that the achievement gap for children of poverty can be fully addressed without dealing with these problems. Of course schools should work on ways to improve teaching and to remove educators who are ineffective. But action is also needed to remedy the conditions that set so many children up for failure. School leaders and policy makers need also to consider what initiatives they can take in partnership with others, to create a comprehensive system to improve children's opportunities to come to school in good health and to have enriched experiences in their early childhood and out-of-school time.
  • The problems of schooling are complex. A serious commitment to the future of our nation's children cannot be made without embedding school improvement efforts in broader efforts of economic and social reform and without putting into place a well-designed state and national infrastructure to ensure system-wide supports for recruiting, preparing, and supporting a strong, equitably-distributed teaching force. These issues were not raised in Waiting for Superman. Real improvement, however, will come with nothing less.

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