Waiting for Superman

While I didn't see the entirety of the documentary "Waiting for Superman", the general message was clear: teachers' unions are bad. Here's an article throwing down on "the myth of charter schools": http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-charter-schools/ . It was my thinking that charter schools succeeded because the parents who were involved enough to care about what school their children went to were the ones involved enough to improve their grades because involved parents typically result in higher grades. However, this would not explain failing charter schools. Even then, what are the tests that test their efficacy? Are the tests flawed or is it the schools? Got me!

I think the problem is deeper and harder solved. Poverty and inequality are deep rooted problems and they show their ill effects in about every part of people's lives. But isn't the point of the movie that good teachers and schools are able to overcome poverty, rather than simply write off those kids to it? There are indeed issues with scale and implementation that the movie didn't cover, but the idea that poverty is the equivalent of educational fate overlooks a number of schools making it work across the country. So what is the problem?

Public schools need much more funding. Educational funding has always been the first to be stripped during recessions. We need barriers of protection between economic fluctuations and the educational budget in order to guarantee the basic privilege of education and, from a pragmatic standpoint, a competent rising workforce. Does this mean our country is the problem? Other countries do well with less or equivalent of what we have. At least, according to tests they do.

This documentary pushes the idea that charter & private schools are the solution to our educational woes. The film is financially supported by advocates of school privatization. However, charters aren't on average any better than regular public schools, and schools that do better than most often are spending more money, so they shouldn't argue that lack of money isn't the problem. Besides, the quality of a school is a smaller factor in educational success than outside-of-school factors like poverty and parental involvement.

This is all assuming that the way we test educational efficacy is right too. What a mess.