Waiting for Superman Not Worth the Wait...

For months I had been on pins and needles (well, not REAL ones!) waiting for this highly-touted movie to come out and save public education by bringing its problems to the table for rational discussion. I was so hopeful! What follows is most of my response to the movie in letter form, which I sent to a very dear old friend, Reiko Sekiguchi Chilcott, in hopes that my concerns would be passed on to co-producer Lesley Chilcott, Reiko's sister-in-law, and perhaps to Davis Guggenheim as well...

After viewing An Inconvenient Truth, and seeing how powerfully it brought the problem of global warming to the American public in a very real way, I had enormous hopes that Waiting for Superman would do the same for American education: Open the eyes of the public to the dire straits in which we now find ourselves. I have to say that, in spite of the excellent intentions I am sure that you and Mr. Guggenheim had, you have missed almost every urgent point.

I was a little nervous when I caught the early promotional programming on television. I watched the Oprah show devoted to introducing the movie, and saw more coverage on Education Nation. I was still very willing to go into the theater with an open mind, although my husband, an incredibly tolerant and intelligent man who has lived with an educator all these years, got up and left the room. His comment was that, unless parents were brought into the discussion as a salient aspect of the problem with American education, he wouldn’t continue to watch. As a California educator for the last 30 years, my main concern with that earliest coverage was that I didn’t see the issue of language being addressed, but I was sure it would come up in the actual movie.

It did not.

But let me get to some things that you got right!

First, let me say that I agree that bad teachers have no place in the classrooms of America. Personally, I have met not one educator in all my years teaching who would champion keeping a bad teacher in a classroom position. No one wants a “bad” teacher in any school. It’s interesting that Mr. Canada admitted that he was not a very “good” teacher those first couple years, but some students must have been subjected to his less-than-stellar performance until he became “a master teacher,” as he now calls himself. Teaching is a job with a ridiculously steep learning curve, and it stays hard despite the valuable experience gained through day-to-day work with students. There is no mention of the fact that the job itself is so challenging that a huge percentage of teachers leave the profession after only five years.

“Bad” teachers---those who simply can not teach, those who have no patience, tolerance, or compassion for children, those who are not willing to master the difficult task of classroom management, and those who have no interest in putting in close to 60-hour weeks on a fairly regular basis should not be in the classroom. But I’d wager to say that if the profession were truly respected and if teachers were paid what society purports we are worth, there might be more potentially “good” teachers banging at the door to be let in to the profession! As it is right now, many positions are left for entire years with a revolving door of substitute teachers because no one wants to take on the enormous load. My own children, whom I have encouraged to consider taking on teaching as a vocation, have said that they wouldn’t work this hard for such a relatively small salary. I say that the rewards are great in ways that can’t be measured with money, but they see me still grading papers at 11 PM, or at school on weekends, up at 5 AM on a daily basis, and they shake their heads. My son rightly says he’d never be able to buy a house in this area on a teacher’s salary. Let’s start, then, by adequately compensating teachers so that the pool of applicants is much deeper. A friend of mine in industry makes close to a half-million dollars each year, and I would have to say, I believe I work harder and my job is far more important, at least in my eyes, given society’s needs and the lives I touch. But she has said my slight salary is my own fault for going into “civil service.”

Yes, of course, I personally know ineffective teachers and some that are burned out, and there should be a much easier way to dismiss them. The “lemon dance” that you included with such mocking disrespect needs to apply to site administrators as well, and those who occupy the district offices. There are individuals in every profession who should not be there, and when a site administrator is absolutely wretched in his or her performance, the district does “the lemon dance,” and teachers, parents, and students suffer alike. What we have here is a problem that is the result of a poor evaluation process. It shouldn’t take a “rubber room” to get an incompetent individual out of any job, and yet, there should be some protection against arbitrary dismissal. I’d love to have been standing behind your Ms. Rhee when she made those life-altering decisions, closing schools, and firing principals and teachers with her balls of steel and her---did you actually say three whole years “experience” in the classroom? In my opinion, no one should be allowed within a stone’s throw of any administrative position without a good ten years in the classroom, yet she was allowed to make changes that would alter the lives and education of thousands of teachers and students? Her educational accomplishments should have been outlined in your film to give her a modicum of credibility.

I am not a huge union supporter, but I will tell you this with all hopes that you will believe me: There are very very bad administrators out there in the position of making the lives of teachers a true and daily living hell with the arbitrary “targeting” of individuals who don’t fall into line, politically. Heaven help the competent teacher who crosses a bad administrator! Suddenly, schedules are changed, extra or unpleasant duty is assigned, and other punitive measures are taken that force the teacher to fall under the thumb or leave. The union provides teachers some protection from this kind of administrator.

In addition, I noted that several times in the film, educators are pictured hugging students or touching their shoulders and backs as they worked. We at SJUSD have been instructed that there is a rigid “no touch” policy because teachers can so easily be accused of inappropriate behavior, and it is up to us to prove that we have been maligned. The union helps protect us from this as well. If you have 150 students each day, and just one chooses to accuse you of misconduct, what recourse is there? “He said, she said” is ridiculous. Most of us will never ever need union intervention, but we usually know someone who has, and we are grateful for the unspoken support, because we all understand that, being in a classroom with sometimes needy or unstable students, we are all at risk. Risk is a necessary part of working with children. The union also helps teachers who are struggling by giving two years of support to help them get their feet. This seems both fair and prudent, given the high cost of teacher turnover.

The teachers’ union therefore plays some important roles. Someone has to watch over districts where administrators tend to guard each other closely to the detriment of the schools. Someone needs to be there to protect teachers who find themselves arbitrarily targeted, for whatever reason.

So, here’s what you got absolutely right: There are bad teachers in the profession, and it should be far easier to get them out.

As for merit pay, or “paying teachers” for exemplary performance, I doubt that you will ever get fair, competent teachers to agree to it for one simple reason: There will never be an even playing field. Most proponents of “merit pay” would love to base the additional salary on how well a teacher is able to bring up test scores. How are you going to compare a high-end school with a lower-end school, socio-economically, where students come to school hungry, upset because parents are incarcerated, or from homes where someone is smoking crack in the evenings instead of helping them with their homework?

I teach alternative education, for students who have made poor choices in the past. My students this academic year are all Hispanic. All except one are from broken homes where they are expected to carry an enormous portion of the childcare responsibilities. All except one are on free lunch. None has a parent who has completed college. Two have come to me as eleventh graders without knowing their times tables. Find an excellent mathematician and have him or her develop a formula that would take all these factors into account, and then teachers might start considering merit pay. The only test scores that mean anything to me are California exit scores, the ones that will allow my students to graduate. I don’t give a damn about whether my students’ national test scores rise or fall; I hope instead to produce honest, confident, cooperative, tolerant, hopeful, and informed students, and send then out into the world, whether on to college or into the work force.

And before I leave the subject of merit pay, may I be allowed to mention the fact that thirty years ago, even before test scores were so high stake, some teachers actually cheated on the tests just so they wouldn’t look bad? I can’t even imagine how much uglier that would get should pay and/or job security be on the line! On top of this concern, how will teachers be eligible for merit pay, if based on test scores, when many educators do not teach subject areas that are mandated for testing. These teachers may enjoy the lack of stress that many of us feel we are under, but they would also be left out if merit pay were awarded for raising standardized test scores.

And a couple other observations…

The concept of home environment, culture, and language were never brought up in your movie. Maybe California is different, but I frequently have students who are many years behind in reading comprehension and general language expression because their primary language is not English. This is especially true of our Hispanic students, because in California, as soon as you leave school, you can easily fall back into your home language. People live their whole lives with relative ease in this state without English; therefore, many parents are not fluent English-speakers. My students have frequently been pulled to translate for their parents in court or to help with shopping. In addition, these frequently uneducated parents can not help their children with homework, and unlike many Asian cultures, which traditionally place enormous value on education and hold their children to extraordinarily high standards in academics, many rural immigrant parents not only have not yet grasped the value of education, but they can not model any kind of college-going behaviors for their children. Give me a classroom full of second-generation Indians or Chinese students in exchange for my Latinos, and watch my test scores go right through the roof! It’s not just the family support (the Chinese and Farsi-speaking families I have worked with often send their children to Saturday school to maintain their language and culture!), but it’s the strong, inherent cultural emphasis on education itself and the demand for success and the resulting family pride that help to push children academically. If you could bottle and sell that kind of attitude, the United States would be kicking Finland’s educational butt!

You can’t fairly and honestly compare today’s world or today’s schools with those of 50 years ago. When I was in elementary school, many of the kids had names like Hernández, Sánchez, Sekiguchi, and Tong, but not one of them spoke anything but English at school.

If I remember correctly, you included a statistic about how we have doubled pupil spending since 1971. Well, that was silly, too…Hasn’t everything doubled---or tripled, or more---since then? I think in 1970, a pack of cigarettes cost about $.40, and today it might run you $6.00 or more. So that little bit of huff-and-puffery was just wrong of you.

And I’m sorry, but that parent who couldn’t get hold of the teacher just wasn’t trying. We are fairly busy, and some are much better communicators than others. But teacher unavailability? We practically live at school, and parents are free to come and see us even during class time if they visit the office first. My students’ parents have magnets for their refrigerators made by me, and they include my school number, my home phone number, and my e mail!

There’s so much more, but…

Well, I had very high hopes that teachers wouldn’t get bashed yet again, and actually, I thought that Waiting for Superman ended up being more of a commercial for privatization (in the guise of charter schools) than anything else. And I have to say this: Had I known what was coming the last ten or fifteen minutes of the film, I would have left earlier or been standing outside with fliers in protest! To have set the audience up by caring so deeply for those children who were pinning their last hope---their very last hope, at the ripe old age of seven!---on a lottery system that “failed” them, and left them, and the audience, in tears, was just incredibly manipulative and embarrassingly mawkish. Good lord! No teacher in her right mind would ever give up on the possibility of every single one of those children getting an excellent public education! This is the United States! We are not quitters! I certainly thought that you led the families and those children astray by so ridiculously placing all of their dreams for a strong education and an incredibly rich future in academics on a colorful bouncing ball that would guarantee their entrance into a charter school! Where’s American gumption? Where’s the belief in America’s children?

I know where it is! It’s in every damn fine public education teacher I’ve ever known!

Respectfully yours,

CEA