Balancing “Superman”

I watched Waiting for Superman this weekend (read America’s Raymond A. Schroth’s review here), and found the film a thought provoking couple hours in which the director Davis Guggenheim examines the darker side of American public education, a system where so many children are failed by schools that simply do not work. Superman follows a few individual children through mostly inner city schools and their families’ attempts to win lotteries for them to attend much more successful charter schools. The odds are stacked against the children, both because the graduation and literacy rates of their cohorts are astonishingly low, and because the number of available spaces at the charter schools is dwarfed by the number of families applying.

Guggenheim offers several reasons why schools are failing, including an outmoded notion of what schools are charged with doing, preparing students for both work and college, rather than educating all for post-secondary education; lazy teachers who take advantage of generous tenure agreements in their contracts; lowered expectations for poor and working class children; and the overwhelming sense that reform is out of grasp when examining raw data that causes many to simply throw up their hands in despair. What do all these problems have in common, according to Guggenheim? The nefarious teachers unions that seek only to protect the interests of their members at any cost, including the education of children.

Surely, there is plenty of blame to go around for our failing schools, and unions must own up to their contribution. But Guggenheim seems to lump too much of it on the unions and their leadership. So it was interesting to read an article from Saturday’s New York Times, profiling one particular villain from Superman, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten. In the film, Weingarten is portrayed as the ultimate enemy, opposed to all good faith reform as she blindly supports all her teachers, even the slothful, shiftless ones who read newspapers during classes and who refuse to teach. The Times presents a much more nuanced picture, highlighting examples where Weingarten bucked her membership and endorsed reform-oriented contracts, including the one with education reform’s hero, outgoing D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee. Independent education-reform watchdogs are quoted in the article offering praise to Weingarten for her willingness to adapt to the current climate.

Does this single article get the teachers unions off the hook? Of course not. My own experience, and those anecdotes related to me by the many educators in my family, tells me that unions do protect bad teachers. Yet no one wants them removed more than good teachers, whose own jobs become that much more difficult when working alongside indolent and ineffective educators. But Superman does a disservice to reform by casting teachers unions as wholly scary and obstructionist, as they will continue to be major players in the reform movement. When there are beacons of hope shining from the unions, no matter how infrequent those may seem, they should be celebrated and lauded, rather than ignored and sent to the cutting room floor. Superman brings the conversation of education reform to a much wider audience, but we will be wise to stop a lynch-mob mentality against unions in its tracks, and instead seek out a more balanced picture, one that highlights the reformers on all sides who want only the best for America’s schools and children.