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Books by Diane
Ravitch
Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform
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The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What
Students Learn
The English Reader: What Every Literate Person Needs to
Know /
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The Myth of Charter Schools
By Diane Ravitch
Ordinarily,
documentaries about education attract little attention,
and seldom, if ever, reach neighborhood movie theaters.
Davis Guggenheim's
Waiting for "Superman" is different. It arrived
in late September with the biggest publicity splash I
have ever seen for a documentary. Not only was it the
subject of major stories in Time and New York,
but it was featured twice on The Oprah Winfrey Show and
was the centerpiece of several days of programming by
NBC, including an interview with President Obama.
Two other films
expounding the same arguments—The
Lottery and
The Cartel—were released in the late spring, but
they received far less attention than Guggenheim's film.
His reputation as the director of the Academy
Award-winning
An Inconvenient Truth, about global warming,
contributed to the anticipation surrounding
Waiting for "Superman," but the media frenzy
suggested something more.
Guggenheim presents the popularized version of an
account of American public education that is promoted by
some of the nation's most powerful figures and
institutions.
The message of
these films has become alarmingly familiar: American
public education is a failed enterprise. The problem is
not money. Public schools already spend too much. Test
scores are low because there are so many bad teachers,
whose jobs are protected by powerful unions. Students
drop out because the schools fail them, but they could
accomplish practically anything if they were saved from
bad teachers. They would get higher test scores if
schools could fire more bad teachers and pay more to
good ones. The only hope for the future of our society,
especially for poor black and Hispanic children, is
escape from public schools, especially to charter
schools, which are mostly funded by the government but
controlled by private organizations, many of them
operating to make a profit.
The Cartel maintains that we must not only
create more charter schools, but provide vouchers so
that children can flee incompetent public schools and
attend private schools. There, we are led to believe,
teachers will be caring and highly skilled (unlike the
lazy dullards in public schools); the schools will have
high expectations and test scores will soar; and all
children will succeed academically, regardless of their
circumstances.
The Lottery echoes the main story line of
Waiting for "Superman" it is about children who
are desperate to avoid the New York City public schools
and eager to win a spot in a shiny new charter school in
Harlem.
For many people,
these arguments require a willing suspension of
disbelief. Most Americans graduated from public schools,
and most went from school to college or the workplace
without thinking that their school had limited their
life chances. There was a time—which now seems
distant—when most people assumed that students'
performance in school was largely determined by their
own efforts and by the circumstances and support of
their family, not by their teachers. There were good
teachers and mediocre teachers, even bad teachers, but
in the end, most public schools offered ample
opportunity for education to those willing to pursue it.
The annual Gallup poll about education shows that
Americans are overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the
quality of the nation's schools, but 77 percent of
public school parents award their own child's public
school a grade of A or B, the highest level of approval
since the question was first asked in 1985.
Waiting for "Superman" and the other films
appeal to a broad apprehension that the nation is
falling behind in global competition. If the economy is
a shambles, if poverty persists for significant segments
of the population, if American kids are not as serious
about their studies as their peers in other nations, the
schools must be to blame. At last we have the culprit on
which we can pin our anger, our palpable sense that
something is very wrong with our society, that we are on
the wrong track, and that America is losing the race for
global dominance. It is not globalization or
deindustrialization or poverty or our coarse popular
culture or predatory financial practices that bear
responsibility: it's the public schools, their teachers,
and their unions.
The inspiration for
Waiting for "Superman" began, Guggenheim
explains, as he drove his own children to a private
school, past the neighborhood schools with low test
scores. He wondered about the fate of the children whose
families did not have the choice of schools available to
his own children. What was the quality of their
education? He was sure it must be terrible. The press
release for the film says that he wondered, "How
heartsick and worried did their parents feel as they
dropped their kids off this morning?"
Guggenheim is a graduate of
Sidwell Friends, the elite private school in
Washington, D.C., where President Obama's daughters are
enrolled. The public schools that he passed by each
morning must have seemed as hopeless and dreadful to him
as the public schools in Washington that his own parents
had shunned.
Waiting for "Superman" tells the story of
five children who enter a lottery to win a coveted place
in a charter school. Four of them seek to escape the
public schools; one was asked to leave a Catholic school
because her mother couldn't afford the tuition. Four of
the children are black or Hispanic and live in gritty
neighborhoods, while the one white child lives in a
leafy suburb. We come to know each of these children and
their families; we learn about their dreams for the
future; we see that they are lovable; and we identify
with them. By the end of the film, we are rooting for
them as the day of the lottery approaches.
In each of the
schools to which they have applied, the odds against
them are large. Anthony, a fifth-grader in Washington,
D.C., applies to the
SEED charter
boarding school, where there are sixty-one
applicants for twenty-four places. Francisco is a
first-grade student in the Bronx whose mother (a social
worker with a graduate degree) is desperate to get him
out of the New York City public schools and into a
charter school; she applies to
Harlem Success
Academy where he is one of 792 applicants for forty
places. Bianca is the kindergarten student in Harlem
whose mother cannot afford Catholic school tuition; she
enters the lottery at another
Harlem Success Academy, as one of 767 students
competing for thirty-five openings. Daisy is a
fifth-grade student in East Los Angeles whose parents
hope she can win a spot at
KIPP LA PREP, where
135 students have applied for ten places. Emily is an
eighth-grade student in Silicon Valley, where the local
high school has gorgeous facilities, high graduation
rates, and impressive test scores, but her family
worries that she will be assigned to a slow track
because of her low test scores; so they enter the
lottery for Summit
Preparatory Charter High School, where she is one of
455 students competing for 110 places.
The stars of the
film are
Geoffrey Canada, the CEO of the Harlem Children's
Zone, which provides a broad variety of social services
to families and children and runs two charter schools;
Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the Washington, D.C.,
public school system, who closed schools, fired teachers
and principals, and gained a national reputation for her
tough policies;
David Levin and Michael Feinberg, who have built a
network of nearly one hundred high-performing
KIPP charter
schools over the past sixteen years; and
Randi Weingarten, president of the
American Federation of Teachers, who is cast in the
role of chief villain. Other charter school leaders,
like
Steve Barr of the Green Dot chain in Los Angeles, do
star turns, as does
Bill
Gates of Microsoft, whose foundation has invested
many millions of dollars in expanding the number of
charter schools. No successful public school teacher or
principal or superintendent appears in the film; indeed
there is no mention of any successful public school,
only the incessant drumbeat on the theme of public
school failure.
The situation is
dire, the film warns us. We must act. But what must we
do? The message of the film is clear. Public schools are
bad, privately managed charter schools are good. Parents
clamor to get their children out of the public schools
in New York City (despite the claims by
Mayor Michael Bloomberg that the city's schools are
better than ever) and into the charters (the mayor also
plans to double the number of charters, to help more
families escape from the public schools that he
controls). If we could fire the bottom 5 to 10 percent
of the lowest-performing teachers every year, says
Hoover Institution economist Eric Hanushek in the
film, our national test scores would soon approach the
top of international rankings in mathematics and
science.
Some fact-checking
is in order, and the place to start is with the film's
quiet acknowledgment that only one in five charter
schools is able to get the "amazing results" that it
celebrates. Nothing more is said about this astonishing
statistic. It is drawn from a national study of charter
schools by
Stanford economist Margaret Raymond (the wife of
Hanushek). Known as the CREDO study, it evaluated
student progress on math tests in half the nation's five
thousand charter schools and concluded that 17 percent
were superior to a matched traditional public school; 37
percent were worse than the public school; and the
remaining 46 percent had academic gains no different
from that of a similar public school. The proportion of
charters that get amazing results is far smaller than 17
percent. Why did
Davis Guggenheim pay no attention to the charter
schools that are run by incompetent leaders or
corporations mainly concerned to make money? Why
propound to an unknowing public the myth that charter
schools are the answer to our educational woes, when the
filmmaker knows that there are twice as many failing
charters as there are successful ones? Why not give an
honest accounting?
The propagandistic
nature of
Waiting for "Superman" is revealed by
Guggenheim's complete indifference to the wide
variation among charter schools. There are excellent
charter schools, just as there are excellent public
schools. Why did he not also inquire into the charter
chains that are mired in unsavory real estate deals, or
take his camera to the charters where most students are
getting lower scores than those in the neighborhood
public schools? Why did he not report on the charter
principals who have been indicted for embezzlement, or
the charters that blur the line between church and
state? Why did he not look into the charter schools
whose leaders are paid $300,000-$400,000 a year to
oversee small numbers of schools and students?
Guggenheim seems to believe that teachers alone can
overcome the effects of student poverty, even though
there are countless studies that demonstrate the link
between income and test scores. He shows us footage of
the pilot
Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier, to the
amazement of people who said it couldn't be done. Since
Yeager broke the sound barrier, we should be prepared to
believe that able teachers are all it takes to overcome
the disadvantages of poverty, homelessness, joblessness,
poor nutrition, absent parents, etc.
The movie asserts a
central thesis in today's school reform discussion: the
idea that teachers are the most important factor
determining student achievement. But this proposition is
false.
Hanushek has released studies showing that teacher
quality accounts for about 7.5-10 percent of student
test score gains. Several other high-quality analyses
echo this finding, and while estimates vary a bit, there
is a relative consensus: teachers statistically account
for around 10-20 percent of achievement outcomes.
Teachers are the most important factor within schools.
But the same body
of research shows that nonschool factors matter even
more than teachers. According to
University of Washington economist Dan Goldhaber,
about 60 percent of achievement is explained by
nonschool factors, such as family income. So while
teachers are the most important factor within schools,
their effects pale in comparison with those of students'
backgrounds, families, and other factors beyond the
control of schools and teachers.
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Teachers can have a
profound effect on students, but it would be
foolish to believe that teachers alone can
undo the damage caused by poverty and its
associated burdens.
Guggenheim skirts the issue of poverty by showing
only families that are intact and dedicated to helping
their children succeed. One of the children he follows
is raised by a doting grandmother; two have single
mothers who are relentless in seeking better education
for them; two of them live with a mother and father.
Nothing is said about children whose families are not
available, for whatever reason, to support them, or
about children who are homeless, or children with
special needs. Nor is there any reference to the many
charter schools that enroll disproportionately small
numbers of children who are English-language learners or
have disabilities. |
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The film never
acknowledges that charter schools were created mainly at
the instigation of
Albert Shanker, the president of the
American Federation of Teachers from 1974 to 1997.
Shanker had the idea in 1988 that a group of public
school teachers would ask their colleagues for
permission to create a small school that would focus on
the neediest students, those who had dropped out and
those who were disengaged from school and likely to drop
out. He sold the idea as a way to open schools that
would collaborate with public schools and help motivate
disengaged students. In 1993, Shanker turned against the
charter school idea when he realized that for-profit
organizations saw it as a business opportunity and were
advancing an agenda of school privatization.
Michelle Rhee gained her teaching experience in
Baltimore as an employee of
Education Alternatives, Inc., one of the first of
the for-profit operations.
Today, charter
schools are promoted not as ways to collaborate with
public schools but as competitors that will force them
to get better or go out of business. In fact, they have
become the force for privatization that Shanker feared.
Because of the high-stakes testing regime created by
President George W. Bush's
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, charter
schools compete to get higher test scores than regular
public schools and thus have an incentive to avoid
students who might pull down their scores. Under NCLB,
low-performing schools may be closed, while
high-performing ones may get bonuses. Some charter
schools "counsel out" or expel students just before
state testing day. Some have high attrition rates,
especially among lower-performing students.
Perhaps the
greatest distortion in this film is its
misrepresentation of data about student academic
performance. The film claims that 70 percent of
eighth-grade students cannot read at grade level. This
is flatly wrong.
Guggenheim here relies on numbers drawn from the
federally sponsored
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
I served as a member of the governing board for the
national tests for seven years, and I know how
misleading Guggenheim's figures are. NAEP doesn't
measure performance in terms of grade-level achievement.
The highest level of performance, "advanced," is
equivalent to an A+, representing the highest possible
academic performance. The next level, "proficient," is
equivalent to an A or a very strong B. The next level is
"basic," which probably translates into a C grade. The
film assumes that any student below proficient is "below
grade level." But it would be far more fitting to worry
about students who are "below basic," who are 25 percent
of the national sample, not 70 percent.
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Guggenheim didn't bother to take a close look at the
heroes of his documentary.
Geoffrey Canada is justly celebrated for the
creation of the
Harlem Children's Zone, which not only runs two
charter schools but surrounds children and their
families with a broad array of social and medical
services. Canada has a board of wealthy philanthropists
and a very successful fund-raising apparatus.
With
assets of more than $200 million, his organization has
no shortage of funds.
Canada himself is currently paid $400,000 annually.
For
Guggenheim to praise Canada while also claiming that
public schools don't need any more money is bizarre.
Canada's charter schools get better results than
nearby public schools serving impoverished students. If
all inner-city schools had the same resources as his,
they might get the same good results.
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But contrary to the
myth that
Guggenheim propounds about "amazing results," even
Geoffrey Canada's schools have many students who are
not proficient. On the 2010 state tests, 60 percent of
the fourth-grade students in one of his charter schools
were not proficient in reading, nor were 50 percent in
the other. It should be noted—and Guggenheim didn't note
it—that Canada kicked out his entire first class of
middle school students when they didn't get good enough
test scores to satisfy his board of trustees. This sad
event was documented by
Paul
Tough in his laudatory account of Canada's
Harlem Children's Zone,
Whatever It Takes (2009). Contrary to
Guggenheim's mythology, even the best-funded charters,
with the finest services, can't completely negate the
effects of poverty.
Guggenheim ignored other clues that might have
gotten in the way of a good story. While blasting the
teachers' unions, he points to
Finland as a nation whose educational system the US
should emulate, not bothering to explain that it has a
completely unionized teaching force. His documentary
showers praise on testing and accountability, yet he
does not acknowledge that
Finland seldom tests its students. Any Finnish
educator will say that Finland improved its public
education system not by privatizing its schools or
constantly testing its students, but by investing in the
preparation, support, and retention of excellent
teachers. It achieved its present eminence not by
systematically firing 5-10 percent of its teachers, but
by patiently building for the future.
Finland has a national curriculum, which is not
restricted to the basic skills of reading and math, but
includes the arts, sciences, history, foreign languages,
and other subjects that are essential to a good, rounded
education. Finland also strengthened its social welfare
programs for children and families.
Guggenheim simply ignores the realities of the
Finnish system.
In any school
reform proposal, the question of "scalability" always
arises. Can reforms be reproduced on a broad scale? The
fact that one school produces amazing results is not in
itself a demonstration that every other school can do
the same. For example, Guggenheim holds up
Locke High School in Los Angeles, part of the Green
Dot charter chain, as a success story but does not tell
the whole story. With an infusion of $15 million of
mostly private funding, Green Dot produced a safer,
cleaner campus, but no more than tiny improvements in
its students' abysmal test scores. According to the
Los Angeles Times, the percentage of its students
proficient in English rose from 13.7 percent in 2009 to
14.9 percent in 2010, while in math the proportion of
proficient students grew from 4 percent to 6.7 percent.
What can be learned from this small progress? Becoming a
charter is no guarantee that a school serving a tough
neighborhood will produce educational miracles.
Another highly
praised school that is featured in the film is the
SEED charter
boarding school in Washington, D.C. SEED seems to
deserve all the praise that it receives from Guggenheim,
CBS's 60 Minutes, and elsewhere. It has
remarkable rates of graduation and college acceptance.
But SEED spends $35,000 per student, as compared to
average current spending for public schools of about one
third that amount. Is our society prepared to open
boarding schools for tens of thousands of inner-city
students and pay what it costs to copy the SEED model?
Those who claim that better education for the neediest
students won't require more money cannot use SEED to
support their argument.
Guggenheim seems to
demand that public schools start firing "bad" teachers
so they can get the great results that one of every five
charter schools gets. But he never explains how
difficult it is to identify "bad" teachers. If one looks
only at test scores, teachers in affluent suburbs get
higher ones. If one uses student gains or losses as a
general measure, then those who teach the neediest
children—English-language learners, troubled students,
autistic students—will see the smallest gains, and
teachers will have an incentive to avoid districts and
classes with large numbers of the neediest students.
Ultimately the job
of hiring teachers, evaluating them, and deciding who
should stay and who should go falls to administrators.
We should be taking a close look at those who award due
process rights (the accurate term for "tenure") to too
many incompetent teachers. The best way to ensure that
there are no bad or ineffective teachers in our public
schools is to insist that we have principals and
supervisors who are knowledgeable and experienced
educators. Yet there is currently a vogue to recruit and
train principals who have little or no education
experience. (The George W. Bush Institute just announced
its intention to train 50,000 new principals in the next
decade and to recruit noneducators for this sensitive
post.)
Waiting for "Superman" is the most important
public-relations coup that the critics of public
education have made so far. Their power is not to be
underestimated. For years, right-wing critics demanded
vouchers and got nowhere. Now, many of them are watching
in amazement as their ineffectual attacks on "government
schools" and their advocacy of privately managed schools
with public funding have become the received wisdom
among liberal elites. Despite their uneven record,
charter schools have the enthusiastic endorsement of the
Obama administration, the
Gates Foundation, the
Broad
Foundation, and the Dell Foundation. In recent months,
The New York Times has published three stories
about how charter schools have become the favorite cause
of hedge fund executives. According to the Times,
when Andrew Cuomo wanted to tap into Wall Street money
for his gubernatorial campaign, he had to meet with the
executive director of
Democrats for Education Reform (DFER),
a pro-charter group.
Dominated by hedge
fund managers who control billions of dollars,
DFER has
contributed heavily to political candidates for local
and state offices who pledge to promote charter schools.
(Its efforts to unseat incumbents in three predominantly
black State Senate districts in New York City came to
nothing; none of its hand-picked candidates received as
much as 30 percent of the vote in the primary elections,
even with the full-throated endorsement of the city's
tabloids.) Despite the loss of local elections and the
defeat of Washington, D.C.
Mayor Adrian Fenty (who had
appointed the controversial schools chancellor
Michelle
Rhee), the combined clout of these groups, plus the
enormous power of the federal government and the
uncritical support of the major media, presents a
serious challenge to the viability and future of public
education.
It bears mentioning
that nations with high-performing school systems—whether
Korea, Singapore, Finland, or Japan—have succeeded not
by privatizing their schools or closing those with low
scores, but by strengthening the education profession.
They also have less poverty than we do. Fewer than
5
percent of children in Finland live in poverty, as
compared to 20 percent in the United States. Those who
insist that poverty doesn't matter, that only teachers
matter, prefer to ignore such contrasts.
If we are serious
about improving our schools, we will take steps to
improve our teacher force, as Finland and other nations
have done. That would mean better screening to select
the best candidates, higher salaries, better support and
mentoring systems, and better working conditions.
Guggenheim complains that only one in 2,500 teachers
loses his or her teaching certificate, but fails to
mention that 50 percent of those who enter teaching
leave within five years, mostly because of poor working
conditions, lack of adequate resources, and the stress
of dealing with difficult children and disrespectful
parents. Some who leave "fire themselves"; others were
fired before they got tenure. We should also insist that
only highly experienced teachers become principals (the
"head teacher" in the school), not retired businessmen
and military personnel. Every school should have a
curriculum that includes a full range of studies, not
just basic skills. And if we really are intent on school
improvement, we must reduce the appalling rates of child
poverty that impede success in school and in life.
There is a clash of
ideas occurring in education right now between those who
believe that public education is not only a fundamental
right but a vital public service, akin to the public
provision of police, fire protection, parks, and public
libraries, and those who believe that the private sector
is always superior to the public sector.
Waiting for "Superman" is a powerful weapon
on behalf of those championing the "free market" and
privatization. It raises important questions, but all of
the answers it offers require a transfer of public funds
to the private sector. The stock market crash of 2008
should suffice to remind us that the managers of the
private sector do not have a monopoly on success.
Public education is
one of the cornerstones of American democracy. The
public schools must accept everyone who appears at their
doors, no matter their race, language, economic status,
or disability. Like the huddled masses who arrived from
Europe in years gone by, immigrants from across the
world today turn to the public schools to learn what
they need to know to become part of this society. The
schools should be far better than they are now, but
privatizing them is no solution.
In the final
moments of Waiting for
Waiting for "Superman" the children and their
parents assemble in auditoriums in New York City,
Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Silicon Valley,
waiting nervously to see if they will win the lottery.
As the camera pans the room, you see tears rolling down
the cheeks of children and adults alike, all their hopes
focused on a listing of numbers or names. Many people
react to the scene with their own tears, sad for the
children who lose. I had a different reaction. First, I
thought to myself that the charter operators were
cynically using children as political pawns in their own
campaign to promote their cause. (Gail Collins in The
New York Times had a similar reaction and wondered
why they couldn't just send the families a letter in the
mail instead of subjecting them to public rejection.)
Second, I felt an immense sense of gratitude to the
much-maligned American public education system, where no
one has to win a lottery to gain admission.
Diane Ravitch
is a historian of education at New York University. She
is a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings
Institution in Washington, D.C. She lives in Brooklyn,
New York. She has written many books and articles about
American education, including:
Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform
,
(Simon & Schuster, 2000);
The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What
Students Learn (Knopf, 2003);
The English Reader: What Every Literate Person Needs to
Know (Oxford, 2006), which she edited with her son
Michael Ravitch.
7 November 2010
© 2010
The New York Review of Books
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Why I Changed
My Mind About School Reform—The
current emphasis on accountability has
created a punitive atmosphere in the
schools. The Obama administration seems to
think that schools will improve if we fire
teachers and close schools. They do not
recognize that schools are often the anchor
of their communities, representing values,
traditions and ideals that have persevered
across decades. They also fail to recognize
that the best predictor of low academic
performance is poverty—not bad teachers.
What we need is not a marketplace, but a
coherent curriculum that prepares all
students. And our government should commit
to providing a good school in every
neighborhood in the nation, just as we
strive to provide a good fire company in
every community.On our present course, we
are disrupting communities, dumbing down our
schools, giving students false reports of
their progress, and creating a private
sector that will undermine public education
without improving it.
Most significantly, we
are not producing a generation of students
who are more knowledgable, and better
prepared for the responsibilities of
citizenship. That is why I changed my mind
about the current direction of school
reform.
—Wall
Street Journal |
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Privatizing Education: The Neoliberal Project
Black Education and Afro-Pessimism /
The Collapse of Urban Public
Schooling
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Waiting For Superman | Trailer
/
The Cartel Trailer
/
The Cartel—Local Spending
The Cartel—Corruption in Public Schools /
The Cartel—New Jersey Charter Schools /
The
Lottery Official Trailer
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60 Minutes—The Harlem Children's Zone
DVD
(May 14, 2006)
The
Harlem Children's Zone—a 60-square-block in
Central Harlem—educator and activist
Geoffrey Canada is determined to prove that
poor children from poor neighborhoods can
succeed if they and their parents are given
social, medical, and educational support.
The "Zone", serves nearly 10,000 children,
providing them with after-school programs
such as tutoring, karate and music. Ed
Bradley spends some time in the "Zone" with
Geoffrey Canada.
For
children to do well, their families have to
do well. And for families to do well, their
community must do well. That is why HCZ
works to strengthen families as well as
empowering them to have a positive impact on
their children's development. HCZ also works
to reweave the social fabric of Harlem,
which has been torn apart by crime, drugs
and decades of poverty. |
The two fundamental
principles of The Zone Project are to help kids in a
sustained way, starting as early in their lives as
possible, and to create a critical mass of adults around
them who understand what it takes to help children
succeed. The HCZ Project began as a one-block pilot in
the 1990s, then following a 10-year business plan, it
expanded to 24 blocks, then 60 blocks, then ultimately
97 blocks.
The budget for the
HCZ Project for fiscal year 2010 is over $48 million,
costing an average of $5,000 per child. Like all HCZ
programs, those of the HCZ Project are provided to
children and families absolutely free of charge, which
is made possible by the support of people like you.—HCZproject
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Waiting for "Superman"
Directed by Davis
Guggenheim
In a
documentary sure to get parents and teachers
talking—and arguing—An
Inconvenient Truth director
Davis Guggenheim offers an eye-opening
overview of America's ailing educational
system. Geoffrey Canada, founder of the
Harlem Children's Zone, serves as his
primary speaker. As a kid in the Bronx,
Canada learned that Superman didn't exist,
which broke his heart, but also inspired him
to help other underprivileged children.
Aside from Canada and Washington, DC, school
chancellor Michelle Rhee, Guggenheim
profiles Anthony, Francisco, Bianca, Daisy,
and Emily, engaging young people without
access to institutions adequate to their
needs (Guggenheim concentrates on the inner
city). Bianca's single mother, for instance,
sends her daughter to a private facility in
New York, but that ends when she can no
longer afford the tuition. The five families
choose the charter school option, but not
every child will win the lottery, since
applicants outnumber spaces (in Bianca's
case, 767 apply for 35 slots). Guggenheim
also questions teachers' unions, which
sometimes act against the best interests of
students.—Kathleen
C. Fennessy Amazon.com |
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Concerns about accuracy and
motives of
Waiting for "Superman"
"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."—Rick
Ayers, Adjunct Professor in Education at the
University of San Francisco
Author and
Professor Rick Ayers lambasted the accuracy of the film,
describing it as "a slick marketing piece full of
half-truths and distortions." In Ayers' view, the
"corporate powerhouses and the ideological opponents of
all things public" have employed the film to "break the
teacher's unions and to privatize education", while
driving teachers wages even lower and running "schools
like little corporations." Ayers also critiqued the
film's promotion of a greater focus on "top-down
instruction driven by test scores," positing that
extensive research has demonstrated that
standardized testing "dumbs down the curriculum" and
"reproduces inequities", while marginalizing "English
language learners and those who do not grow up speaking
a middle class vernacular." Lastly, Ayers contends that
"schools are more segregated today than before
Brown v. Board of Education in 1954," and thus
criticized the film for not mentioning that in his view,
"black and brown students are being suspended, expelled,
searched, and criminalized."
Diane Ravitch, Research Professor of Education at
New York University and a nonresident senior fellow
at the
Brookings Institution, similarly criticizes the
accuracy of the film. Ravitch notes that a study by
Stanford University economist Margaret Raymond of
5000 charter schools found that only 17% are superior in
math test performance to a matched public school,
casting doubt on the film's claim that privately managed
charter schools are the solution to bad public schools.
Ravitch writes that many charter schools also perform
badly, are involved in “unsavory real estate deals” and
expel low-performing students before testing days to
ensure high test scores. The most substantial distortion
in the film, according to Ravitch, is the film's claim
that 70 percent of eighth-grade students cannot read at
grade level, a misrepresentation of data from the
National Assessment of Educational Progress. Ravitch
served as a board member with the NAEP and notes that
“the NAEP doesn’t measure performance in terms of
grade-level achievement” as claimed in the film, but
only as “advanced,” “proficient” and “basic.” The film
assumes that any student below proficient is “below
grade level,” but this claim is not supported by the
NAEP data.—Wikipedia
Ravitch analyzes
the impact of choice on public schools, attempts to
quantify quality teaching, and describes the data wars
with advocates for charter and traditional public
schools. Ravitch also critiques the continued reliance
on a corporate model for school reform and the continued
failure of such efforts to emphasize curriculum.
Conceding that there is no single solution, Ravitch
concludes by advocating for strong educational values
and revival of strong neighborhood public schools. For
readers on all sides of the school-reform debate, this
is a very important book.—Vanessa
Bush , Booklist
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|
Whatever It Takes
Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and
America
By
Paul Tough
What
would it take? That was the question that
Geoffrey Canada found himself asking. What
would it take to change the lives of poor
children—not one by one, through heroic
interventions and occasional miracles, but
in big numbers, and in a way that could be
replicated nationwide? The question led him
to create the Harlem Children's Zone, a
ninety-seven-block laboratory in central
Harlem where he is testing new and sometimes
controversial ideas about poverty in
America. His conclusion: if you want poor
kids to be able to compete with their
middle-class peers, you need to change
everything in their lives—their schools,
their neighborhoods, even the child-rearing
practices of their parents. Whatever It
Takes is a tour de force of reporting,
an inspired portrait not only of Geoffrey
Canada but also of the parents and children
in Harlem who are struggling to better their
lives, often against great odds. Carefully
researched and deeply affecting, this is a
dispatch from inside the most daring and
potentially transformative social experiment
of our time.
Paul Tough is an editor at the New York Times
Magazine and one of America's foremost writers on
poverty, education, and the achievement gap. His
reporting on Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's
Zone originally appeared as a Times Magazine
cover story. He lives with his wife in New York City. |
 |
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