An Inconvenient Superman: Davis Guggenheim's New Film
Hijacks School Reform

by Rick Ayers

The Huffington Post

September 17, 2010

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rick-ayers-/an-inconvenient-superman-_b_716420.html

Davis Guggenheim's 2010 film Waiting for Superman is a slick
marketing piece full of half-truths and distortions. The
film suggests the problems in education are the fault of
teachers and teacher unions alone, and it asserts that the
solution to those problems is a greater focus on top-down
instruction driven by test scores. It rejects the
inconvenient truth that our schools are being starved of
funds and other necessary resources, and instead opts for an
era of privatization and market-driven school change. Its
focus effectively suppresses a more complex and nuanced
discussion of what it might actually take to leave no child
behind, such as a living wage, a full-employment economy,
the de-militarization of our schools, and an education based
on the democratic ideal that the fullest development of each
is the condition for the full development of all. The film
is positioned to become a leading voice in framing the
debate on school reform, much like Guggenheim's An
Inconvenient Truth did for the discussion of global warming,
and that's heartbreaking.

I'm not categorically opposed to charter schools; they can
and often do allow a group of creative and innovative
teachers, parents, and communities to build schools that
work for their kids and are free of the deadening
bureaucracy of most districts. These schools can be
catalysts for even larger changes. But there are really two
main opposing positions in the "charter movement" -- it's
not really a movement, by the way, but rather a diverse
range of different projects. On one side are those who hope
to use the charter option to operate effective small schools
that are autonomous from districts. On the other side are
the corporate powerhouses and the ideological opponents of
all things public who see this as a chance to break the
teacher's unions and to privatize education. Superman is a
shill for the latter. Caring, thoughtful teachers are
working hard in both types of schools. But their efforts are
being framed and defined, even undermined, by powerful
forces that have seized the mantle of "reform."

The film dismisses with a side comment the inconvenient
truth that our schools are criminally underfunded. Money's
not the answer, it glibly declares. Nor does it suggest that
students would have better outcomes if their communities had
jobs, health care, decent housing, and a living wage.
Particularly dishonest is the fact that Guggenheim never
mentions the tens of millions of dollars of private money
that has poured into the Harlem Children's Zone, the model
and superman we are relentlessly instructed to aspire to.
Those funds create full family services and a state of the
art school. In a sleight of hand, the film magically shifts
focus, turning to "bad teaching" as the problem in the poor
schools while ignoring these millions of dollars that make
people clamor to get into the Promise Academy. As a friend
of mine said, "Well, at least now we know what it costs."

It is so sad to see hundreds of families lined up at these
essentially private schools with a public charter cover,
praying to get in. Who wouldn't want to get in? Families are
paraded in front of the cameras as they wait for an
admission lottery in an auditorium where the winners' names
are pulled from a hat and read aloud, while the losing
families trudge out in tears with cameras looming in their
faces.

After dismissing funding as a factor, Superman rolls out the
drum-beat of attacks on teachers as the first and really the
only problem. Except for a few patronizing pats on the head
for educators, the film describes school failure as boiling
down to bad teachers. Relying on old clichés that single out
the handful of loser teachers anyone could dig up, Waiting
for Superman asserts that the unions are the boogey man. In
his perfect world, there would be no unions -- we could
drive teacher wages even lower, run schools like little
corporations, and race to the bottom just as we have in the
manufacturing sector. Imagining that the profit motive works
best, the privatizers propose merit pay for teachers whose
students test well. Such a scheme would only lead to adult
cheating (which has already started), to well-connected
teachers packing their classes with privileged kids, and to
an undermining of the very essence of effective schools --
collaboration between teachers, generous community building
with students.

It is interesting to note that Arne Duncan, as well as the
Obama kids, attended the University of Chicago Lab Schools -
where teachers had small classes, good pay, and, yes, a
union. Students did not concentrate on rote learning and
mindless drill and skill or test prep. They were offered in
part an exploratory, questioning curriculum. But apparently
the masses need to have sweatshop schools. Waiting for
Superman sets up AFT president Randi Weingarten as its Darth
Vader -- accompanying her appearance on the screen with dire
background music. They tell us that the teachers unions have
put $50 million into election campaigns over the last ten
years, essentially buying politicians. Actually, this number
is a pittance compared to what corporations and the rich
throw in. It is less than Meg Whitman spent of her own money
in one run for governor of California. But the film
carefully avoids interviewing Diane Ravitch, the lead
organizer of the Education Trust and No Child Left Behind
efforts who has been lately writing and speaking about her
realization that these reforms have had a disastrous effect
on schools and teaching and learning.

When African American and Chicano Latino families in the
1960's were demanding quality education and access to the
resources of the best schools, they were also rejecting the
myths about blackness meaning culturally deprived. Today
that social revolution has been effectively set back.
Schools are more segregated today than before Brown v. Board
of Education in 1954; nothing is said about that. Black and
Brown students are being suspended and expelled, searched
and criminalized; not a word. In place of a movement for
transforming power relationships in our society, privatizers
and corporate managers step up to define the problem --
proposing a revolution that is anything but revolutionary.

A strong project of education transformation would recognize
the funds of knowledge urban students come to school with;
it would honor the literacy and language practices of the
community. It would support a curriculum of questioning, as
students examine their world and imagine ways to make it
better. It would put front and center the need to build
learning communities, to motivate students to want to learn
and believe there was something worth learning. It would
create an engaged learning experience for all students, not
just the handful who learn to endure boredom and insult in
hopes of high income later. In the hands of these so-called
reformers, though, the only goal is to train urban students
to be obedient followers; they never propose a project that
transforms and empowers communities, only holding out the
promise for a few exceptional students to escape the ghetto.
You can see white middle class audience members sighing,
comforted to know that everyone really wants to be like us;
that everyone who is not like us is tragic. The film bubbles
over with terms like escape and rescue, promoting a liberal
charity mentality that is never in solidarity the local
community, only regards it as something dysfunctional that
needs to be controlled.

In addition, Waiting for Superman promotes the idea that we
are in a dire war for US dominance in the world. The poster
advertising the film shows a nightmarish battlefield in
stark grey, then a little white girl sitting at a desk is
dropped in the midst of it. The text: "The fate of our
country won't be decided on a battlefield. It will be
determined in a classroom." This is a common theme of the
so-called reformers: we are at war with India and China and
we have to out-math them and crush them so that we can
remain rich and they can stay in the sweatshops. But really,
who declared this war? When did I as a teacher sign up as an
officer in this war? And when did that 4th grade girl become
a soldier in it? I have nothing against the Chinese, the
Indians, or anyone else in the world -- I wish them well.
Instead of this Global Social Darwinist fantasy, perhaps we
should be helping kids imagine a world of global
cooperation, sustainable economies, and equity

Waiting for Superman accepts a theory of learning that is
embarrassing in its stupidity. In one of its many little
cartoon segments, it purports to show how kids learn. The
top of a child's head is cut open and a jumble of factoids
is poured in. Ouch! Oh, and then the evil teacher union and
regulations stop this productive pouring project. The film-
makers betray no understanding of how people actually learn,
the active and agentive participation of students in the
learning process. They ignore the social construction of
knowledge, the difference between deep learning and rote
memorization. The film unquestioningly bows down to
standardized tests as the measure of student knowledge,
school success. Such a testing regime bullies aside deeper
learning, authentic assessment, portfolio and project based
learning. Yes, deeper learning like this is difficult to
measure with simple numbers -- but we can't let the desire
for simple numbers simplify the educational project.
Extensive research has demonstrated definitively that
standardized testing reproduces inequities, marginalizes
English Language Learners and those who do not grow up
speaking a middle class vernacular, dumbs down the
curriculum, and misinform policy. It is the wisdom of the
misinformed, accepted against educational evidence and
research. Never mind, they declare: we will define the
future of education anyway.

Sadly, the narrow and blinkered reasoning in Waiting for
Superman is behind the No Child Left Behind disaster
rebranded as Race to the Top. Don't believe the hype. We can
and we must do education, and educational change, much
differently. We could develop an economy that supported
communities which were well-resourced and democratic. We can
right now create pathways in which all kids have a
reasonable prospect of an honorable, interesting job in
their future. And if democracy and the future society
concern us at all, we can and we must create schools which
unleash students' creativity, imagination, and initiative.

[Rick Ayers is an Adjunct Professor in education at
University of San Francisco and teaches at UC Berkeley. He
is a PhD candidate in the Language, Literacy, and Culture
program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education. He
received his Masters in Education at Mills College (1997)
and taught at Berkeley High School from 1995 to 2006. He has
worked as a Master Teacher for KQED Education Department, on
the Teacher Advisory Board for Youth Speaks, as a teacher
trainer for the Bay Area Writing Project, as a fellow at the
Institute on Media and American Democracy, Harvard
University, and as a core team member of the Diversity
Project.

Rick is co-editor of the series Between Teacher and Text
(Teachers College Press) and of the book Zero Tolerance:
Resisting the drive for punishment, A handbook for parents,
students, educators and citizens (2001, New Press). He is
co-author (with Amy Crawford) of Great Books for High School
Kids: A Teacher's Guide to Books That Can Change Teens'
Lives (2004, Beacon Press), author of Studs Terkel's
Working, a Teaching Guide (2000, New Press) and co-creator
(with students) of the Berkeley High Slang Dictionary (self
published 2000, North Atlantic Book published, 2003.) He is
the author of numerous articles including "Both Sides of the
Mic: Community Literacies in the Age of Hip Hop" in The
Handbook of Research on Teaching Literacy through the
Communicative and Visual Arts, "La Silent, What is To Be
Done? Profile of a Chicana student in trouble," in Democracy
and Education, blogs on Huffingtonpost.com, and writes book
reviews in the San Francisco Chronicle and Teachers College
Record.]

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