This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov. 17, 2010 - I went to see the movie "Waiting for Superman" expecting to be either inspired or outraged. Instead, I was merely annoyed - irritated by simple-minded assertions and gross misstatements of facts - until it hit me: Director Davis Guggenheim must be running a con.
The message of Guggenheim's movie is an education version of a get-rich-quick scheme. Getting a great education should be easy, he says. It is simply a matter of the teacher pouring knowledge into kids' heads. He even has a cartoon of a teacher pulling the tops off of children's heads and pouring something from a pitcher into the empty vessels of student heads while the children sit smiling and passive in their seats. Probably any parent, who has tried to teach a child anything, would recognize the absurdity of the image, but the idea behind most get-rich-quick flimflams are absurdly simple, too.
Guggenheim says that even though getting rich - I mean getting children a great education - is so simple, we're getting deeper in debt - I mean our schools are getting worse. Guggenheim appeals to middle-age pride and the nostalgia that middle-age, middle-class people have for their childhood. American public schools used to be the best in the world, he says, after all, you got a great education at yours, didn't you? Schools were so good, he says, that student performance kept getting better and better, climbing every decade until 1970, when performance flatlined.
He has a cartoon to illustrate that idea, too: a line graph climbing sharply until 1970 when it suddenly flattens out and drifts down.
The reality is different. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there is only one nationally representative assessment of what students know and can do in reading and math and it is called the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress). Those assessments only started in 1971. There aren't any good data to support Guggenheim's claims of rapid improvements in student performance before 1970, and after that the NAEP shows improvements in student reading and math skills in 4th and 8th grades, or among 9-year-olds and 13-year-olds, in each of the last three decades. It shows, for example, that 4th and 8th grade students are successfully working math problems that are about two grade levels above what their counterparts could do 20 years ago. Of the different ages and grade levels tested, only among 17-year-olds have scored stayed steady, and in understanding that the period from 1970 to today takes on added significance.
The 1970s were a time when public education in the U.S. became much more broadly democratic. The decade of the 1970s saw the first federal laws to ban discrimination in educational opportunities on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender or physical handicap. It also was the time of the first state supreme court rulings making it illegal for states to ignore the educational needs of mentally retarded children (federal legislation followed in the 1980s).
Before then, many public schools took it as their mission to sort students. Only the select were allowed to earn a diploma and graduate. Many African-American students, most students with learning disabilities, many women and poor white men, were, in the words of a former St. Louis deputy superintendent, "handed a certificate and shown the door" when they hit age 16. Now we expect high schools to work to help everyone graduate.
Of course, democratization didn't happen everywhere at once and all at the same time. A lot of work remains, but significant strides toward universal high school education were made. The percentage of African-American men who had earned a high school diploma, for example, climbed from 37 percent in 1970 to 87 percent in 2000, and the number who had attended college jumped from 13 percent to 44 percent.
The democratization of high school opportunities, all word of which is absent from Guggenheim's account, means that the scores of 17-year-olds in 1971 still represented what the elite who would go on to become managers and professionals knew. The test scores of 17-year-olds today represent what everyone knows. Put another way, the youth today who are going to end up as retail clerks can read and think mathematically just as well as today's CEOs could when they were 17. Guggenheim's nostalgia is a nostalgia for a more elitist school system.
If you buy the lie that public schools used to work but don't anymore, Guggenheim will tell you that school boards and teachers are responsible for the breakdown, but mostly teachers. The problem was caused by bad teachers, he says, and teacher unions that keep them in place. Apparently, bad teachers are forever, causing innumerable good teachers to wait in vain for a job to open up.
He won't tell you of the problems urban districts have filling job openings. He won't mention that 40-50 percent of teachers quit by the end of their fifth year, or that another 15-20 percent quit by the end of their tenth year.
What he will tell is ... well, conclude for yourself.
He says teachers get lifetime job security, tenure, after only two years, even though in 41 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia tenure takes three years or more. In Illinois, it takes four years; in Missouri it takes five.
Then Guggenheim takes a report by Scott Reeder that says teachers rarely get fired in Illinois and extrapolates that to the rest of the country. But when you ask Reeder, as I did, where his numbers come from, you find out that he never asked any school districts how many teachers they fired in any year. All he counted were the number of teachers who appealed their firings to a state appeals board and lost. He doesn't know how often teachers get fired in Illinois or anywhere else and neither does Guggenheim.
If is is a con, what is Guggenheim selling? Charter schools. He says the way out from bad schools caused by bad teachers and unions is the charter school industry. Twenty percent of traditional public schools are failures, he says, but 20 percent of charter schools are successes. His argument - some public schools are failures, but some charter schools are successes, so charter schools are better - is nonsense. If you wanted to know which was better, you'd have to look at which failed more often than the other, and which succeeded more often, with like groups of children, which is something Guggenheim does not do.
As in many scams, Guggenheim relies on cute children to help make his sale. Even if the children are wrong, we can't really blame them. How are they to know better?
So it is that when a little girl in Guggenheim's film says something that is not true about a charter school (the KIPP Academy) - "they won't let you fail" - we can't blame her, but we can blame the director who used her. California KIPP Academies are famous for the high rate at which students leave their schools without finishing.
Defenders of the schools say the same thing happens in public schools, but, through a little girl, Guggenheim is making the claim that KIPP schools are different, that students don't fail to finish KIPP as students fail to finish public schools. Neither is the 'they don't allow failure' line true of another charter school that Guggenheim touts, the Promise Academy, which expelled all the students in its first batch of 9th graders because their test scores weren't high enough.
A heart-tugging look at children who, Guggenheim says, are doomed to failure unless they can win lotteries to get into charter schools provides the cover for this apparent scam. The climax of the film is a selection of scenes where the children wait in auditoriums to hear if they will get picked to win the supposed prize of a seat in a charter school, although it is hard to imagine why parents would subject their children to that experience without urging from the director.
Guggenheim is right in that the promise of a quality education for all in America remains unfulfilled. His film takes advantage of people's desire to deliver on that promise, but his "solution" would have us back away from the promise, not move forward.
Peter Downs was a member of the elected St. Louis School Board. This article was originally sent by the author to his own list.