Waiting for "Superman" film ignores inconvenient truths
The reality of the US education system.
By Gary Zadkovich
The latest attack on public education and the teaching profession is coming soon to Australian cinemas.
Called Waiting for "Superman", it trades on the reputation of its maker, Davis Guggenheim, director of the Academy Award winning film An Inconvenient Truth, to push the neo-liberal ideology of privatisation, choice and the market.
The film depicts the experiences of five students and their families in the United States and invites viewers to share their quest for a better education. The central premise is that public schools are failing the nation's children, and desperate parents and students are waiting for a Superman to arrive to save them.
The 'heroes' of this film are those who promote and run the privatised public schools known as charter schools. It's a familiar mantra - the world would be so much the better if only we could privatise it. Attending the local public school is bad. Choosing a private alternative is good. Or to be more precise in the context of this film, winning a lottery ticket to a charter school is good.
Despite the promotion of the film by influential corporate and media players, including the Gates Foundation, the Oprah Winfrey Show and Time magazine, and the endorsement of charter schools by the Obama administration, the propagandist hype doesn't match the reality.
Diane Ravitch, renowned education professor and former US assistant secretary of education, described it thus in a film review published by New York Times (November 11, 2010):
"The message of these films [Waiting for "Superman", The Lottery and The Cartel] 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 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 organisations, many of them operating to make a profit."
Despite the appeal to empathise with its central characters as they strive to achieve a better education in the harshness of the American school marketplace, the film ironically does what it attributes to public schooling. It fails.
Waiting for the facts
The film portrays charter schools as the answer. But it fails to reveal that a study of student progress in maths tests in 2500 charter schools concluded that 17 per cent achieved higher results than matched public schools, 37 per cent achieved lower results and 46 per cent achieved the same. (CREDO study by Stanford economist Margaret Raymond, as cited by Ravitch)
A lack of teacher quality is blamed for poor educational achievement. Yet Ravitch cites studies showing that "teachers statistically account for around 10-20 per cent 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."
Guggenheim chooses to ignore the inconvenient truth of the dominant effect of socio-economic status on educational achievement.
Like Prime Minister Gillard has done in her adoption of the New York model, the film comes up with the wrong answers to the question of how educational outcomes can be improved. Guggenheim at least acknowledges the success of Finnish schooling, but ignores what makes it so.
Ms Ravitch wrote:
"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."
On a wave of hype and promotion, Waiting for "Superman" sparked controversy and debate in the United States. It may do something similar here.
But it won't deflect us from ensuring quality public education remains a human right for all children, not some consumer choice lottery prize.
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