Waiting for "Guffman"?

Waiting for "Superman" is clearly a one-sided production. It is produced by persons and groups who have agendas that are pro-corporate, anti-union, and as Diane Ravitch has said, are for the privatization and de-professionalization of education. (Check here for more specific names and information.) To discuss everything that is misleading or just incorrect in this film would take more time than I have, and others have already done it anyway. (Like this.)

Watch closely to see the problem.

Let's get the worst of the snark out of the way up top. Why does the title Waiting for "Superman" utilize both italics and quotation marks around the word "Superman"? In standard English, when I write out the title, I need to italicize the whole thing to indicate this is a title of a larger work, as I have done in the second sentence above. But when you make your own movie poster, you don't need to use italics because it's your work and we already know what the title is. So is the Superman this title indicates one of the many movies or television shows or comic books that go by that name? As in: I'm in line, waiting to get tickets to the movie Superman with Christopher Reeve. The quotation marks can indicate a couple of things. First, quotes indicate speech. As in: I'm waiting for someone to yell out the title of this superhero movie: "Superman!" Or quotes can indicate there's something idiosyncratic about the word or phrase it's setting off. As in: I'm sarcastically waiting around for some guy to save me, some "Superman" (air quotes and eye rolling included). So which is it? How am I supposed to accept what a film tells me if it equivocates on its title?

Seriously, the most bothersome aspect of this movie is the lip service paid to teachers. The director and narrator, Davis Guggenheim, talks about his favorite teacher and how important good teachers are. One DVD extra is basically an ad recruiting for teachers. ("Do something," they implore, as if pledging to see this movie is in and of itself "something.")

Yet, here's how the film characterizes teachers:

Jason Kamras won a national Teacher of the Year award in 2005. But instead of talking about what he's done to become the master teacher that all students need, Guggenheim asks Kamras about the process of teacher evaluation. Kamras describes a complex process for what is certainly a complex task, but Guggenheim is aghast and calls it a game. Kamras hems and haws and doesn't really explain anything. This film about what makes great education makes a teacher of the year look like an idiot.

Where would Lisa Simpson be without her teacher?

Back in 1991 a student brought a hidden camera into a Milwaukee school and caught teachers behaving badly. The superintendent at the time fired several of the teachers in the video, but then had to rehire them with back pay because he violated the contract. This is Guggenheim's excuse to discuss why teacher tenure doesn't allow teachers to ever be fired. The film then uses funny (or just plain satirical) clips from The Simpsons and the Jack Black film School of Rock to back up the claim that schools can't fire teachers who don't care. Not only does it seem like the "Superman" producers don't have any clue as to the context of these clips, but if you haven't seen these shows yourself, what would you think the point was? It's bad and manipulative film making. (Upon retrospect, perhaps the film makers completely understand School of Rock. In the film, Jack Black does, in fact, teach the kids life lessons and changes their lives. It's boiled-down de-professionalization; this proves that anyone can teach, right? Do I underestimate the evil here?)

My point is that Guggenheim uses three-second examples from one random video (the introduction of this video was given by the Milwaukee superintendent himself, saying "They gave a camera to a student..." Who? You know, "They.") taken 20 years ago to show that teachers are lazy, students are out of control, and it's all tenure's fault. Because you just can't fire these awful teachers. But isn't this exactly what tenure and contracts are for? Is it really fair of the superintendent to fire a teacher based on what an out of context student video shows? It makes me extremely wary of what I say and do in my classroom, thinking that, without the protection of tenure contracts, I could be fired for what I may or may not have said or done just because some student claims something. This actually happened in my fair city last year. A teacher was fired because he used the N-word during a lesson about race relations. One student was offended, and the teacher was fired. The teacher taught at a (rather prestigious) private school and was considered a "master teacher." Yet he had no recourse because he had no tenure, no contract ensuring him due process.

So, does "Superman" elaborate on what makes a great teacher, since this is what every student needs and every charter school has them? Of course. There's one scene that explains how KIPP charter school founders Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg got ideas for their groundbreaking teaching practices. A math teacher they knew noticed (and here I quote the narration word for word because I can't really make a joke out of something already so awfully sincere that it's ridiculous to any teacher and should be to anyone with any education at all) "that her kids had trouble learning math terms, but could memorize a rap song. So she turned her multiplication tables into a song. For Levin and Feinberg, it was nothing short of a revelation."

...and pause for effect...

The font of Best Practices.

Ask any teacher. Any teacher at all. Go ahead, do it right now. Ask any teacher if it is a revelation in teaching practices to use rap music to teach their students facts they need to know. (If it wasn't done before, LouAnne Johnson showed a generation of bright-eyed, idealistic teachers how to do this in 1992 with My Posse Don't Do Homework.)

But wait, there's more. After revealing to the world something that no other teacher apparently ever knew, the film shows classrooms of teachers and kids from KIPP charter schools performing rote memorization. In fact, it's call-and-response, like students in the one-room school house in Little House on the Prairie chanting, "In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." I can't deny that KIPP schools might be successful with these practices, but it's utterly ironic that most teachers today are criticized for teaching in this manner. If I were to do this in my classroom, I would lose my tenure like that (Snap!).

This is where real learning occurs.

If the statistics presented in this movie haven't manipulated you enough, the ending is designed to make you so angry at the state of education today that you'll do something crazy, like text a word to some number. (This is what you're asked to do while the credits roll; it's not explained what texting this word to this number will do. It's like someone asking you to follow his blog.) "Superman" tracks five children in their bid for acceptance into charter schools through the required lottery. In the end only one of the five children actually wins the lottery they must endure. The one accepted is the rich, white girl, while the three poor black children and one poor Hispanic girl don't get in. Guggenheim and the producers can't help that and, sure, it's sad that they don't get in.

What's sadder, though, is that they believe, the movie believes, the corporate reformers believe, they all want you to believe that this was the only hope, their Obi Won Kenobe. Now they will be subject to those awful public schools that don't know how to teach because of the unions and tenure and lazy teachers who care less about young minds than cashing their big, fat paychecks. (Now, there's an apropos Simpsons reference.)