Schools: The Disaster Movie

[dkf]

http://nymag.com/news/features/67966/

A debate has been raging over why our education system is failing. A new documentary by the director of An Inconvenient Truth throws fuel on the fire.
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By John Heilemann Published Sep 5, 2010 ShareThis

Waiting for "Superman" is a paean to reformers like Washington, D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee (left), while it casts AFT president Randi Weingarten (right), in the words of Variety, as "something of a foaming satanic beast."  
(Photo: Mike McGregor)

The Harlem-based educator and activist Geoffrey Canada first met the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim in 2008, when Canada was in Los Angeles raising money for the Children’s Defense Fund, which he chairs. Guggenheim told Canada that he was making a documentary about the crisis in America’s schools and implored him to be in it. Canada had heard this pitch before, more times than he could count, from a stream of camera-toting do-gooders whose movies were destined to be seen by audiences smaller than the crowd on a rainy night at a Brooklyn Cyclones game. Canada replied to Guggenheim as he had to all the others: with a smile, a nod, and a distracted “Call my office,” which translated to “Buzz off.”

Then Guggenheim mentioned another film he’d made—An Inconvenient Truth—and Canada snapped to attention. “I had absolutely seen it,” Canada recalls, “and I was stunned because it was so powerful that my wife told me we couldn’t burn incandescent bulbs anymore. She didn’t become a zealot; she just realized that was serious and we have to do something.” Canada agreed to be interviewed by Guggenheim, but still had his doubts. “I honestly didn’t think you could make a movie to get people to care about the kids who are most at risk.”

Two years later, Guggenheim’s new film, Waiting for “Superman,” is set to open in New York and Los Angeles on September 24, with a national release soon to follow. It arrives after a triumphal debut at Sundance and months of buzz-building screenings around the country, all designed to foster the impression that Guggenheim has uncorked a kind of sequel: the Inconvenient Truth of education, an eye-opening, debate-defining, socially catalytic cultural artifact.

“Superman” affectingly, movingly traces the stories of five children—all but one of them poor and black or Hispanic—and their parents as they seek to secure a decent education by gaining admission via lottery to high-performing charter schools. At the same time, the film is a withering indictment of the adults—in particular, those at the teachers unions—who have let the public-school system rot, and a paean to reformers such as Canada and Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the Washington, D.C., public schools, who has waged an epic campaign to overhaul the notoriously dysfunctional system over which she presides.

Among leaders of the burgeoning education-reform movement, the degree of anticipation surrounding “Superman” is difficult to overstate. “The movie is going to create a sense of outrage, and a sense of urgency,” says Arne Duncan, Barack Obama’s secretary of Education. New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein concurs. “It’s gonna grab people much deeper than An Inconvenient Truth, because watching ice caps melt doesn’t have the human quality of watching these kids being denied something you know will change their lives,” Klein says. “It grabs at you. It should grab at you. Those kids are dying.”

[madfloridian]

1. Superman and the other pro-charter documentaries. Big big money behind them.

Teachers have to sit and take it as the propaganda against public schools is catapulted.

Tells more about the pro-charter efforts behind Waiting for Superman, The Lottery, and Cartel, and others.

[dkf]

2. Well now I know why this has become a big issue here.

The debate is about to explode.

[YvonneCa]

6. Yes, it is. And when it does...

...it's going to hurt my Dems...without really helping children. That makes me sad. :(

[NoNothing]

3. Teachers should not identify themselves with public schools

Teachers would be the first to point to school board insanity, legislative incompetence, and administrative malfeasance as reasons why some schools underperform, right?

So why is is that almost every time an attack is made on public schools but *not* teachers, teachers act like they themselves are the target? It's like, just because I rail against Walmart, doesn't mean I hold any grudge against the cashier that rings up the merchandise.

[YvonneCa]

7. Because some of us have already witnessed...

...this up close and personal. We don't want to see others go through what we have seen.

[daleanime]

4. Bookmarked for later use.

nt

[madfloridian]

5. More on Geoffrey Canada and his zero tolerance for teachers only.

He does not blame students or parents, only teachers...no matter what the backgrounds they must work with and reach and educate.

Geoffrey Canada: If bad teachers can't be fired, send them to upper middle class schools.

Another "teachers can't be fired" screed.

In the video he says to send bad teachers to upper middle class schools. Also there is a bit about Learn NY which Canada founded with big big bucks from Bill Gates. It is set up to guarantee that mayors control schools in big cities.

From the WP:

Sorry Geoffrey Canada, but failure IS an option, a reality, and even a boon

"Calling for more school choice, Geoffrey Canada, president and CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone, began his March 27 New York Daily News op-ed with the following:

"Visitors to my public charter school often ask how the students feel about the signs on the walls that say: ’Failure is not an option.’ They are surprised to hear that the signs are really for the staff."

There are two ethical problems with declaring that failure is not an option. First of all, failure exists everywhere, chosen or not, and to deny it is to deny reality. Second, without the option of failure, we would have no freedom of will; we would have to succeed at everything, and the success would lose meaning. It makes sense to say that failure should be no one’s automatic destiny, that no one should be set up for failure."

..."If we deny that failure happens, we disregard wars, famines, and other disasters; we wish away low test scores, college rejections, romantic rejections, divorce, addiction, death, injustice, car accidents, lost jobs, misspelled words, stutters, misunderstandings, and our daily mistakes and slippages. Those who take on the slogan “failure is not an option” wittingly or unwittingly paint over their lives and the lives of others, and the result is not only false but flat. Such a paint job can’t hold a candle to humanity."