Teacher Unions: A Resource, and Critique of "Superman"

(1)

[Moderator's note: See the current issue of Rethinking
Schools magazine for a number of articles on teacher
unions, including rank-and-file teacher union success
in Chicago and the latest fromm the DC school system:
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/index.shtml]

(2)

What `Superman' Got Wrong, Point by Point
by Rick Ayers
Washington Post blog
September 27, 2010

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/what-superman-got-wrong-point.html

While the education film "Waiting For Superman" has 
moving profiles of students struggling to succeed under
difficult circumstances, it puts forward a sometimes
misleading and other times dishonest account of the
roots of the problem and possible solutions.

The amped-up rhetoric of crisis and failure everywhere
is being used to promote business-model reforms that
are destabilizing even in successful schools and
districts. A panel at NBC's Education Nation Summit,
taking place in New York today and tomorrow, was
originally titled "Does Education Need a Katrina?" Such
disgraceful rhetoric undermines reasonable debate.

Let's examine these issues, one by one:

*Waiting for Superman says that lack of money is not
the problem in education.
Yet the exclusive charter schools featured in the film
receive large private subsidies. Two-thirds of Geoffrey
Canada's Harlem Children's Zone funding comes from
private sources, effectively making the charter school
he runs in the zone a highly resourced private school.
Promise Academy is in many ways an excellent school,
but it is dishonest for the filmmakers to say nothing
about the funds it took to create it and the extensive
social supports including free medical care and
counseling provided by the zone.

In New Jersey, where court decisions mandated similar
programs, such as high quality pre-kindergarten classes
and extended school days and social services in the
poorest urban districts, achievement and graduation
rates increased while gaps started to close. But public
funding for those programs is now being cut and
progress is being eroded. Money matters! Of course,
money will not solve all problems (because the problems
are more systemic than the resources of any given
school) - but the off-handed rejection of a discussion
of resources is misleading.

*Waiting for Superman implies that standardized testing
is a reasonable way to assess student progress.
The debate of "how to raise test scores" strangles and
distorts strong education. Most test score differences
stubbornly continue to reflect parental income and
neighborhood/zip codes, not what schools do. As
opportunity, health and family wealth increase, so do
test scores.
This is not the fault of schools but the inaccuracy,
and the internal bias, in the tests themselves.

Moreover, the tests are too narrow (on only certain
subjects with only certain measurement tools). When
schools focus exclusively on boosting scores on
standardized tests, they reduce teachers to test-prep
clerks, ignore important subject areas and critical
thinking skills, dumb down the curriculum and leave
children less prepared for the future. We need much
more authentic assessment to know if schools are doing
well and to help them improve.

*Waiting for Superman ignores overall problems of
poverty.
Schools must be made into sites of opportunity, not
places for the rejection and failure of millions of
African American, Chicano Latino, Native American, and
immigrant students. But schools and teachers take the
blame for huge social inequities in housing, health
care, and income.

Income disparities between the richest and poorest in
U.S.society have reached record levels between 1970 and
today. Poor communities suffer extensive traumas and
dislocations. Homelessness, the exploitation of
immigrants, and the closing of community health and
counseling clinics, are all factors that penetrate our
school communities. Solutions that punish schools
without addressing these conditions only increase the
marginalization of poor children.

*Waiting for Superman says teachers' unions are the
problem.
Of course unions need to be improved - more
transparent, more accountable, more democratic and
participatory - but before teachers unionized, the
disparity in pay between men and women was disgraceful
and the arbitrary power of school boards to dismiss
teachers or raise class size without any resistance was
endemic.

Unions have historically played leading roles in
improving public education, and most nations with
strong public educational systems have strong teacher
unions.

According to this piece in The Nation, "In the Finnish
education system, much cited in the film as the best in
the world, teachers are - gasp! - unionized and granted
tenure, and families benefit from a cradle-to-grave
social welfare system that includes universal daycare,
preschool and health care, all of which are proven to
help children achieve better results in school."

In fact, even student teachers have a union in Finland
and, overall, nearly 90% of the Finnish labor force is
unionized.

The demonization of unions ignores the real evidence.

*Waiting for Superman says teacher education is
useless.
The movie touts the benefits of fast track and direct
entry to teaching programs such as Teach for America,
but the country with the highest achieving students,
Finland, also has highly educated teachers.

A 1970 reform of Finland's education system mandated
that all teachers above the kindergarten level have at
least a master's degree. Today that country's students
have the highest math and science literacy, as measured
by the Program for International Student Assessment
(PISA), of all the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries.

*Waiting for Superman decries tenure as a drag on
teacher improvement.
Tenured teachers cannot be fired without due process
and a good reason: they can't be fired because the boss
wants to hire his cousin, or because the teacher is gay
(or black or.), or because they take an unpopular
position on a public issue outside of school.

A recent survey found that most principals agreed that
they had the authority to fire a teacher if they needed
to take such action. It is interesting to note that
when teachers are evaluated through a union-sanctioned
peer process, more teachers are put into retraining
programs and dismissed than through administration-only
review programs. Overwhelmingly teachers want students
to have outstanding and positive experiences in
schools.

*Waiting for Superman says charter schools allow choice
and better educational innovation.
Charters were first proposed by the teachers' unions to
allow committed parents and teachers to create schools
that were free of administrative bureaucracy and open
to experimentation and innovation, and some excellent
charters have set examples. But thousands of hustlers
and snake oil salesmen have also jumped in.

While teacher unions are vilified in the film, there is
no mention of charter corruption or profiteering. A
recent national study by CREDO, The Center for Research
on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, concludes
that only 17% of charter schools have better test
scores than traditional public schools, 46% had gains
that were no different than their public counterparts,
and 37% were significantly worse.

While a better measure of school success is needed,
even by their own measure, the project has not
succeeded. A recent Mathematica Policy Research study
came to similar conclusions. And the Education Report,
"The Evaluation of Charter School Impacts, concludes,
"On average, charter middle schools that hold lotteries
are neither more nor less successful than traditional
public schools in improving student achievement,
behavior, and school progress."

Some fantastic education is happening in charter
schools, especially those initiated by communities and
led by teachers and community members. But the use of
charters as a battering ram for those who would
outsource and privatize education in the name of
"reform" is sheer political opportunism.

*Waiting for Superman glorifies lotteries for admission
to highly selective and subsidized charter schools as
evidence of the need for more of them.
If we understand education as a civil right, even a
human right as defined by the U.N. Convention on the
Rights of the Child, we know it can't be distributed by
a lottery.

We must guarantee all students access to high quality
early education, highly effective teachers, college and
work-preparatory curricula and equitable instructional
resources like good school libraries and small classes.
A right without a clear map of what that right protects
is an empty statement.

It is not a sustainable public policy to allow more and
more public school funding to be diverted to privately
subsidized charters while public schools become the
schools of last resort for children with the greatest
educational needs. In Waiting for Superman, families
are cruelly 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 - in what amounts
to family and child abuse.

*Waiting for Superman says competition is the best way
to improve learning.
Too many people involved in education policy are
dazzled by the idea of "market forces" improving
schools. By setting up systems of competition, Social
Darwinist struggles between students, between teachers,
and between schools, these education policy wonks are
distorting the educational process.

Teachers will be motivated to gather the most promising
students, to hide curriculum strategies from peers, and
to cheat; principals have already been caught cheating
in a desperate attempt to boost test scores. And
children are worn out in a sink-or-swim atmosphere that
threatens them with dire life outcomes if they are not
climbing to the top of the heap.

In spite of the many millions of dollars poured into
expounding the theory of paying teachers for higher
student test scores (sometimes mislabeled as `merit
pay'), a new study by Vanderbilt University's National
Center on Performance Incentives found that the use of
merit pay for teachers in the Nashville school district
produced no difference even according to their measure,
test outcomes for students.

*Waiting for Superman says good teachers are key to
successful education. We agree. But Waiting for
Superman only contributes to the teacher-bashing
culture which discourages talented college graduates
from considering teaching and drives people out of the
profession.

According to the Department of Education, the country
will need 1.6 million new teachers in the next five
years. Retention of talented teachers is one key. Good
teaching is about making connections to students, about
connecting what they learn to the world in which they
live, and this only happens if teachers have history
and roots in the communities where they teach.

But a recent report by the nonprofit National
Commission on Teaching and America's Future says that
"approximately a third of America's new teachers leave
teaching sometime during their first three years of
teaching; almost half leave during the first five
years. In many cases, keeping our schools supplied with
qualified teachers is comparable to trying to fill a
bucket with a huge hole in the bottom."

Check out the reasons teachers are being driven out in
Katy Farber's book, "Why Great Teachers Quit: And How
We Might Stop the Exodus," (Corwin Press).

*Waiting for Superman says "we're not producing large
numbers of scientists and doctors in this country
anymore. . . This means we are not only less educated,
but also less economically competitive."

But Business Week (10/28/09) reported that "U.S.
colleges and universities are graduating as many
scientists and engineers as ever," yet "the highest
performing students are choosing careers in other
fields." In particular, the study found, "many of the
top students have been lured to careers in finance and
consulting." It's the market, and the
disproportionately high salaries paid to finance
specialists, that is misdirecting human resources, not
schools.

*Waiting for Superman promotes a nutty theory of
learning which claims that teaching is a matter of
pouring information into children's heads.
In one of its many little cartoon segments, the film
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 a lack of understanding of how
people actually learn, the active and engaged
participation of students in the learning process. They
ignore the social construction of knowledge, the
difference between deep learning and rote memorization.

The movie would have done a service by showing us what
excellent teaching looks like, and addressing the
valuable role that teacher education plays in preparing
educators to practice the kind of targeted teaching
that reaches all students. It should have let teachers'
voices be heard.

*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 gray, with a little white girl
sitting at a desk 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? Instead of
this new educational Cold War, perhaps we should be
helping kids imagine a world of global cooperation,
sustainable economies, and equity.

*Waiting for Superman says federal "Race to the Top"
education funds are being focused to support students
who are not being served in other ways.
According to a study by the Lawyers Committee for Civil
Rights under Law, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational
Fund, Inc., and others, Race to the Top funds are
benefiting affluent or well-to-do, white, and "abled"
students. So the outcome of No Child Left Behind and
Race to the Top has been more funding for schools that
are doing well and more discipline and narrow test-
preparation for the poorest schools.

*Waiting for Superman suggests that teacher improvement
is a matter of increased control and discipline over
teachers.
Dan Brown, a teacher in the SEED charter school
featured in the film, points out that successful
schools involve teachers in strong collegial
conversations. Teachers need to be accountable to a
strong educational plan, without being terrorized. Good
teachers, which is the vast majority of them, are
seeking this kind of support from their leaders.

*Waiting for Superman proposes a reform "solution" that
exploits the feminization of the field of teaching; it
proposes that teachers just need a few good men with
hedge funds (plus D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee
with a broom) to come to the rescue.
Teaching has been historically devalued - teachers are
less well compensated and have less control of their
working conditions than other professionals - because
of its associations with women.

For example, 97% of preschool and kindergarten teachers
are women, and this is also the least well-compensated
sector of teaching; in 2009, the lowest 10% earned
$30,970 to $34,280; the top 10% earned $75,190 to
$80,970. () By comparison the top 25 hedge fund
managers took in $25 billion in 2009, enough to hire
658,000 new teachers.

--

Waiting for Superman could and should have been an
inspiring call for improvement in education, a call we
desperately need to mobilize behind.

That's why it is so shocking that the message was
hijacked by a narrow agenda that undermines strong
education. It is stuck in a framework that says that
reform and leadership means doing things, like firing a
bunch of people (Rhee) or "turning around" schools
(Education Secretary Arne Duncan) despite the fact that
there's no research to suggest that these would have
worked, and there's now evidence to show that they
haven't.

Reform must be guided by community empowerment and
strong evidence, not by ideological warriors or
romanticized images of leaders acting like they're
doing something, anything. Waiting for Superman has
ignored deep historical and systemic problems in
education such as segregation, property-tax based
funding formulas, centralized textbook production, lack
of local autonomy and shared governance, de-
professionalization, inadequate special education
supports, differential discipline patterns, and the
list goes on and on.

People seeing Waiting for Superman should be mobilized
to improve education. They just need to be willing to
think outside of the narrow box that the film-makers
have constructed to define what needs to be done.

Thanks for ideas and some content from many teacher
publications, and especially from Monty Neill, Jim Horn
Lisa Guisbond, Stan Karp, Erica Meiners, Kevin
Kumashiro, Ilene Abrams, Bill Ayers, and Therese Quinn.

Rick Ayers is a former high school teacher, founder of
Communication Arts and Sciences small school at
Berkeley High School, and currently adjunct professor
in teacher education at the University of San
Francisco. He is the co-author, with his brother
William Ayers, of the forthcoming "Teaching the Taboo"
from Teachers College Press.

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