This
summer while I was staying with a friend of mine in the hills north of Montpelier, Vermont we got into a discussion
about what it feels like to hear public schools and teachers critiqued. My friend Tom, a veteran high school history
teacher of at least twelve years, who happens to also be the president of his National Education Association union local,
remarked: “I don’t know of any other
profession that is criticized by anyone who has ever sat in a desk (as a
student) and feels they have the right and credibility to criticize teachers.”
I
agreed with Tom. While lawyers and
doctors are frequently the subject of derision at dinner tables and bars around
the country, in stark contrast to critiques of
teachers, the purveyors of said derision rarely ever think they can
either join the profession and/or do better than the people they are critiquing—much
less a public oversight body, such as a school board, and put their ideas, “knowledge,”
and “skills” to use improving the practice of law and medicine—despite often
having no professional training or
content area knowledge. Somehow former
students, most being years, if not decades, out of a contemporary public school
classroom, feel they know better. . .and this, among many factors, is contributing to a general decline in respect of
teachers and our profession—a profession that educates and trains most of our
population for work and life, therefore maintaining a reasonably stable society
in America.
This
brings me to another former student, and current parent of students enrolled in
private school, who feels he can do better, by making a film entitled Waiting for Superman, that being its
director Davis Guggenheim. Guggenheim
begins the film by telling us some of his personal motivation to investigate
why our schools are “failing,” deciding with his wife to put his children in
private school in order to avoid having them have to enter a lottery for the
“best” public schools in their city.
Guggenheim makes his first mistake here (though this seems entirely
premeditated) by not delving into how politicians and bureaucrats in the
Department of Education, with the help of academics, are defining “failure” by
standardized test scores, required by law as of the first term of the “Bush II”
regime in the No Child Left Behind legislation of 2001. Throughout the entirety of “Superman”
Guggenheim never significantly investigates, or challenges, the belief that
standardized test scores, such as the Measure of Student Progress (MSP) and
High School Proficiency Examination (HSPE) in Washington State, whose
proponents claim they provide accurate measurements of what middle and high
school students, respectively, have learned during their academic years.
As
many of you who either follow education issues, work in public education, or
who have students enrolled in public schools know, the claim that standardized
tests provide us with accurate assessments of student learning is extremely
controversial. I won’t take the time to
elaborate on research data that supports this (You can look it up yourself.),
but suffice to say we have very current research data obtained from prominent
education researchers at major universities and colleges that shows that
standardized tests are unfairly biased against students of color and working
class/poor students, kids who aren’t good at taking tests, or who suffer from
test anxiety, and are not an effective measurement of real deep learning and
skills. It turns out that filling in the
right circle or answering a writing/problem prompt in forty minutes to two
hours (if you have a diagnosed disability and an Individual Education Plan, or
IEP) provides a merely superficial snapshot at that moment of your career,
year, month, week, day, and hour as a public school student learner. Because of this, a majority of public school
teachers, and our unions, our professional and labor organizations, are against
standardized testing.
But
Guggenheim does not report any of the afore-mentioned information in his
film. Instead, he toes the Department of
Education’s line that tests are the major measure of learning, and all but
completely cuts out classroom teachers, and our unions’, voices out of his
film. This fact comprises the second portion of my critique of his film as, in
the words of Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis recently on the
internationally acclaimed progressive news and investigative reporting program Democracy Now!: “We
are trying to have people understand that when people come together to deal
with problems of education, the people that are actually working in the schools
need to be heard.”
While
Guggenheim’s film does feature brief sound bites from both Randi Weingarten,
the President of the American Federation
of Teachers, one of my past employers, whom I served as an organizer of
teaching hospital staff and community college faculty, and Dennis Van Roekel,
the current President of my national union and professional association, the National Education Association, they are
never given an extended period of time in the film, and are instead intentionally
overshadowed by critics. Among these critics Guggenheim prominently features Michelle
Rhee, former Chancellor of Washington D.C. public schools, and an avowed
opponent of teachers’ unions, who sought to break the teachers union in D.C.
schools during her three year stint in office, and former public school
administrators and teachers, now working in charter and private schools.
All
of the voices that Guggenheim includes in his film have some thought-provoking,
interesting, if not important, things to say in the dialogue about our public
schools, but I can’t ignore that he obviously and intentionally leaves out the
voices of public school faculty, staff, and administrators. . . the people that
work with, and for, the next generation five, six, or seven days a week, for
eight, ten, even twelve hours a day, for relatively little money, and some decent
benefits—doing it because they care about kids, and want this next generation
to do better than our own.
If
you want to know why students aren’t learning in public schools—ask a teacher,
or a school staff person, or even a building principal. . . don’t just rely on
one more film by someone with an axe to grind against teachers and our unions
and professional organizations. Ask us
and we’ll tell you that our government, and society, simply doesn’t fully fund
public education, so we never have the resources that we need to be successful: more teachers for smaller class sizes, more
specialists and support staff to assist students with special needs, more
curricula supplies and access to current technology, more professional
development opportunities to aid, support, and motivate us to become the best
we can be and stay current with our skills, less emphasis on testing so that we
can focus on creating learning environments that support relationship building
and deep learning for, and with our students, and—shockingly—maybe even more time
in class during the school day and a longer school year.
Our
unions and professional associations are
not to blame for students not learning.
We organized teachers unions to defend everyone’s right to a free,
quality public education in this country—not to get rich and have good health
care. But to be able to do the work in
an effective and quality manner, we have to be part of the dialogue, and have
access to the resources that are essential to do our jobs well--to teach kids
so they’re ready for the very real, harsh, and competitive, world that we are
leaving them in this country. And
yes—part of what we need to be effective and have the support to work the
grueling hours the job requires is a dignified salary and benefits that allow
us to see a future for ourselves, and our families, in this profession. But our politicians and bureaucrats don’t
spend enough time talking to us, and really listening (along with kids and
parents), as well as actually spending time in public schools during the school
day. They simply do not understand what
it is that we do, how challenging it is, without taking into account the latest
mandates they have served us--and how important it is to the children and adolescents
we teach and the communities we serve.
This
is also apparent in Guggenheim’s film which, at its worst, seemingly disregards
public schools and writes them off as a failed experiment, and at its best
keeps people thinking and talking about education, kids, and our country’s
future. The latter is what we need,
versus a write-off that does nothing to help kids, their families, and our
communities. We also need to understand
the essential services that teachers and school staff provides our society, and
the best way to do this is to ask good questions of the people doing the work,
listen to us when we answer you, which we want to do, and visit your
communities schools with an open mind, clear vision, and warm heart. Then go back to your state capitals and Washington
and give us the resources and policy changes that we need to effectively do the
job our communities hired us to do:
teach the next generation the skills they need to survive, solve the
problems they’ll inherit, be effective citizens, and make their communities and
lands better places.
