Solidarity Growing As the War on Teachers Escalates

Mark Naison, professor of African and African American Studies at Fordham University in New York, blogs at With A Brooklyn Accent.

By Mark Naison

All over the nation, teachers are under attack. Politicians of both parties, in every state, have blamed teachers and their unions for the nation’s low standing on international tests and our nation’s inability to create the educated labor force our economy needs.

Mass firings of teachers in so-called failing schools have taken place in municipalities throughout the nation and some states have made a public ritual of humiliating teachers. In Los Angeles and New York, teacher ratings based on student standardized test scores — said by many to be inaccurate — have been published by the press. As a result, great teachers have been labeled as incompetent and some are leaving the profession. A new study showed that teachers’ job satisfaction has plummeted in recent years.

Big budget films such as Bad Teacher and the documentary Waiting for Superman popularize the idea that public school teachers prevent poor children of color from getting a good education, while corporate funded organizations perpetuate the idea that the only way for children to excel is if their teachers lose their job security and bargaining rights.

Why has this campaign attracted such strong bipartisan support and why has the public failed to speak out loudly against it?

Attacks on teachers have occurred in the midst of a broad-based attack on the bargaining rights and benefits of all public workers — but even by that standard, teachers have been singled out.

In New York State, where teacher evaluations were just released to the press, the state Legislature just passed — and the governor signed — a bill that exempted police and firefighters from having their evaluations released to the public. What better symbolizes the way teachers have become “fair game” for public demonization?

There are huge profits to be made in the testing industry, in educational technologies that replace teachers, and in constructing and managing charter schools, so it is not hard to see why some people in the corporate world would benefit from attacking public education and teachers unions.

But why are so many parents and the general public buying into this campaign? Certainly politicians wouldn’t be voting to take away teachers’ rights if they didn’t think it would get votes.

Let’s look at the way many in America’s shrinking middle class and battered working class view the teachers in their midst.

Large numbers of people are losing their jobs and homes, earning sub-standard wages and taking in their children who can’t find jobs. All the while, they see teachers, 80 percent of them women, who make better salaries than they do, have better health plans and pensions, and get two or three months off in the summer!

Many say to themselves: “Who do teachers think they are? Why should they live so well on my tax dollars when I can barely keep my head above water? At the very least, they should feel some of the insecurity I feel every day and face the kind of performance assessments workers in the private sector deal with all the time.”

That is the same sentiment that America’s unionized blue collar workers faced in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s and ‘90’s when big corporations started closing factories and slashing wages and benefits. The non-unionized work force in big industrial states refused to rally to the defense of their unionized counterparts, and industrial unions lost battles to maintain their wage and benefit levels that allowed them to live a middle-class life style or prevent plants from relocating.

That posture is short-sighted for two reasons.

First the same policies that create an insecure, deeply resentful teaching force will end up harming children.

Not only will excessive standardized tests — now used to evaluate teachers — make children hate school, but the whole test-based accountability movement has served to narrow the curriculum and turn many classrooms into test-prep factories. Parents are discovering that their children are not only unhappy at school but not well prepared for higher education or challenging careers.

There is another more insidious consequence of the attack on teaching. Every time you undermine the job security, working conditions, and wages of one group of workers, it makes it easier for employers to undermine them for all workers. This is why, during the Depression, many unemployed people organized in support of workers on strike, even though anybody with a job in that era was relatively privileged. They believed in the concept of solidarity — the idea that working people could only progress if they did so together, and if one group of workers improved their conditions, it would ultimately improve conditions for all.

That kind of solidarity, for the most part, is gone now. If American workers are ever going to regain their fair share of national income and win back respect on and off the jobs, it is something they are going to have to re-learn. The Occupy Movement has brought back the idea of solidarity with its image of “the 99 percent fighting the 1 Percent,” but this idea has not yet spread fast enough to stop the war on teachers.

There are, though, signs of hope. In Chicago and New York, Occupy groups are uniting with teachers, parents and students to fight school closings; in New York, parents groups have rallied to the defense of teachers stigmatized by the publication of outrageously inaccurate teacher ratings; in Florida, a pernicious “parent trigger” law favoring charter schools was just defeated in the legislature with a big push from parents.

These actions are, hopefully, just the beginning of a transformation of public consciousness that will lead to an end of the war on teachers.

Waiting for Superman: The Neighborhood Party Version

If you thought the stakes were high for getting education reform right in this country, you just need to have a look, Mister, at the new animation offered up by the Gates-funded producers of the not-going-the-Oscars propaganda film, Waiting for Superman.  The achievement gap? Excellence? Equity?  Just small potatoes!

The Oligarchs who funded the WfS docu-ganda piece are now urging parents who didn’t see it on the big screen to buy a DVD and host a house party.  And to whet your appetite, ladies and gentlemen, they have put together an animated ad that proceeds with fear of impending world disaster where nervousness about the disaster of schools left off with the first round of advertisements.

The clip opens with the familiar ticking time bomb piano keys and a cascade of animated images swirling, ducking, and then disappearing into the emergence of a new set, all accompanied by the semi-strangulated staccato little girl 20-something voice of one of those Ivy League (soon to be Junior League) white missionary types who punch their clocks at a KIPP for a couple of years before moving on to one of Wall Street’s vulture philanthropy firms.

The clip quickly moves to focus, for several milliseconds, on the crisis that the U. S. has sunk to 20^th in high school graduation rates among Western nations.  (Sad, but at least we are moved up to #1 in childhood poverty rates, and none of the OECD nations can touch us there).  But poverty, according to the Oligarchs who paid for this ad, can only be fixed with, that’s right, see the movie to find out.

But then the infantile Ayn Rand voice gives it away:  the key to solving poverty, plus all these problems—health care, economy, national security, discrimination, poverty, water pollution, unemployment, immigration, climate change, energy, and don’t forget pandemics—“rests on solving one thing first—education.”

But you still have to see the movie to find out that it is education via corporate charter schools run by CEOs that offers THE WAY.  But there is more.  Call your neighbors, get down the popcorn popper, order your DVD, and invite over a teacher to ridicule.  It’s gonna be bigger than the Superbowl, or even the Academy Awards!

More Superlies from "Superman"

Posted by Valerie Strauss:
By Caroline Grannan

“Woodside is a great school." -- Emily Jones

The movie “Waiting for Superman” tells the stories of five students around the country who are desperate to escape their “failing” public schools and get into the shining charters that are portrayed as their only chance of success – or at least that’s the tale the movie tells.

One of those stories takes place in my neck of the woods, here in the San Francisco Bay Area. The one white middle-class student among the five kids in the movie is Emily Jones, who lives on the suburban San Francisco Peninsula.

The story that Waiting for Superman tells is that Emily is desperate to escape her district public high school, Woodside High, because she’s a bright student who “doesn’t test well,” and due to Woodside’s antiquated and harmful tracking policies, she’ll be tracked into lower-level classes that will doom her to mediocrity.


She grasps at (as the movie shows it) her only hope – Summit Prep Charter, which does the opposite of tracking, requiring all its students to take six AP courses during high school.

Well, that story is false. Here’s the proof. On this video clip, John Fensterwald of the Silicon Valley Education Foundation interviews Emily.

The part in the movie illustrating how the horror of tracking sent her fleeing to Summit Prep features a graphic showing students on a conveyor belt, with the select few being elevated to higher-level classes and the rest being dropped onto a march to oblivion.

Yet in the video interview, Emily chats freely with John for five minutes and mentions a number of reasons for wanting to go to Summit instead of Woodside – but never mentions or even alludes to tracking. Just after minute five, Fensterwald brings up tracking. Emily comments on tracking only after Fensterwald prompts her.

And in fact, here’s what Emily says about Woodside High: “Woodside is a great school. I really liked it and I really wanted to go there before I saw Summit.”

That’s not what Waiting for Superman portrays. If the movie misled viewers with a false story about Emily, the line “fool me twice, shame on me” applies – we can’t believe anything it shows us.

Meanwhile, parents at Woodside High have created a huge banner and posted it across the front of the school:
“Woodside High School teachers – Man, You’re Super! Thank you for teaching ALL the students in our community!”

White Billionaire Boys' Club to Save Poor People of Color with Apartheid Schooling?

Email notice from Rethinking Schools:

In the article “Ultimate $uperpower: Supersized dollars drive Waiting for Superman agenda,” investigative journalist Barbara Miner looks at the money behind the movie, its promoters and those who will benefit from the movie.  She writes, “In education, as in so many other aspects of society, money is being used to squeeze out democracy.” After examining the role of hedge funds, foundations and other players, she asks, “Should the American people put their faith in a white billionaires boys club to lead the revolution on behalf of poor people of color?”

To view the article and/or to obtain a downloadable PDF go to:

http://www.notwaitingforsuperman.org/Articles/20101020-MinerUltimateSuperpower

Bill Gates, the West Coast Promo Man

Ever wonder who is paying for all those glowing WfS op-eds and for those children in front of the movie houses with their clipboards?  From the Gates Foundation website:

Participant Media, LLC

Date: August 2010

Purpose: to execute a social action campaign that will complement Paramount’s marketing campaign of Waiting for Superman

Amount: $2,000,000

Term: 7 months

Topic: Advocacy & Public Policy

Region Served: North America, Global

Program: United States

Grantee Location: Beverly Hills, California

Grantee Web site: http://www.participantmedia.com

Rick Ayers on WfS at Democracy Now

From Democracy Now:

Waiting for Superman, a new documentary by filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, has caused a stir in the education world for its sweeping endorsement of the charter school movement and attack on teachers unions. President Obama has endorsed the film, describing it as "heartbreaking" and "powerful," but some teachers have called for a boycott of the film for its portrayal of teachers and the teachers union. We speak to Rick Ayers, founder of the Communication Arts and Sciences program at Berkeley High School and adjunct professor in teacher education at the University of San Francisco.

The Rewards of Leafleting

I joined some folks from Citizens for Public Education and FairTest who have been out leafleting in West Newton and Brookline, where previews are being held this week in advance of the nationwide release tomorrow, I think, of Waiting for Superman.  Many of the attendees are the well-heeled, but there are many teachers attending, too.  And many are grateful for an summary of the main facts to go along with the misleading melodrama in abundance in the film. 

Please do use the materials below to craft your own "free facts," which I smile and offer moviegoers.  Make the paper colorful, and make your group colorful, too.

The Real Facts About Waiting for Superman, prepared by Mass. Citizens for Public Schools and FairTest - available as a flyer in pdf and in text below so you can adapt it for your own use.
 

The Facts About Waiting for Superman

Waiting for Superman may be good melodrama, but the movie fails the test of accuracy, and its purported solutions will not improve education.

We agree: Too many young people, mostly low-income, do not graduate from high school or get a strong education. The questions are why, and what can be done about it. Waiting for Superman and its unprecedented hype risk leading us dangerously astray from real solutions to real problems by making a number of misleading or factually incorrect claims in a number of important areas:

Public school quality: The most recent Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup poll found that 77% of Americans would give the public school their oldest child attends an A or a B. Does this suggest our public schools are failing across the board, as WFS says? In international comparisons, most of our middle class schools do well. Under resourced schools that serve low-income kids who are disproportionately African American, Latino, or recent immigrants, do far less well. However, they face challenges that schools, alone, can never address adequately.  Improving schools is part of the solution - but the changes must help all children obtain a high-quality education.

Poverty: Poverty matters a lot – and the movie shows that it does, even while trying to tell us it does not. The Harlem Children’s Zone spends heavily to provide services to needy children and their families, services the government does not provide. Two-thirds of HCZ funding is private, not public – making it like a well-funded private school. Who will pay for these services for all the children who need them?

Unions: States with the most unionized teachers do better than states with weaker or fewer unions, and countries with strong educational systems mostly have strong teacher unions. WSF’s demonization of unions ignores the real evidence.

Tenure: Tenure says you cannot be fired without due process and a good reason: you can’t be fired because the boss wants to hire his cousin, or because you are gay (or black or…), or because you take an unpopular position on a public issue outside of school. A recent survey found that most principals agreed they could fire if they needed to. While WSF may have its own opinions on the value of tenure, it may not have its own facts.

Charter schools: Charter schools get public money but are run by private groups, which means there is less public oversight. The most extensive national study found that 46% of charters did about the same as regular public schools, 37% did worse, and only 17% did better. Meanwhile, charters routinely accept fewer students with disabilities and fewer English language learners. Since charters only serve 4% of the nation’s K-12 students, they represent a distraction and a drain from the focused work needed to renew quality schools for all children. They are not a solution.

Using standardized tests like MCAS to evaluate teachers: The National Research Council and many other researchers say that evaluating teachers based on student test scores is inaccurate and unfair. Several reports found that some 20-25% of teachers in the bottom groups one year are in the top groups the next - and vice versa. This is because many more things affect student learning or teacher's rankings than just the teacher's own efforts.

Using standardized tests to tell us if schools are successful: Most test score differences are not due to what schools do, but to the kids’ ZIP codes. As opportunity, health and family wealth increase, so do test scores. When schools focus on boosting scores on tests like MCAS, they ignore important subject areas and teach to the test, leaving children less prepared for the future. We need a lot more than test scores to know if schools are doing well and to help schools improve.

How students learn: Most people know what science confirmed years ago: learning is an active process. Pouring disconnected information into kids’ heads, as the movie shows, has no lasting value, and it does not educate students for citizenship, college, lifelong learning or employment. Why didn’t the movie show us what excellent teaching looks like?

Competition: There is no evidence for the claim that competition will improve education. Teachers competing against each other will endanger cooperation among teachers and reduce their ability to help children most in need. 

Since No Child Left Behind, the rate of school improvement has declined!  This film pushes for another generation of failed reforms.

Don’t wait for Superman. Take the time to inform yourself, to find out the real stories from teachers, parents and principals.  Get the real facts on which to base your opinion, and consider how you can make a difference by doing what is right and good for children, not what “Superman” tells you to do.
Citizens for Public Schools and FairTest

For more information and genuine ways to improve schools, see http://www.citizensforpublicschools.org and http://www.fairtest.org.

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Write Rachel

My letter to Rachel Maddow, the best chance on Microsoft-NBC to get someone on screen to counter the media blitzkrieg from the oligarchs.  Please copy this one, or write your own today to Rachel@msnbc.com:

Dear Rachel:

During this week's wall to wall promotion of "Waiting for Superman" and the corporate solutions emanating from that film (the ones by Gates, the Waltons, and the rest of the "Billionaire Boys Club" (Ravitch, 2010)), I and millions of others are waiting, instead, for some coverage of the public educators' and parents' position regarding the agenda of total compliance charters, evaluations based on test scores, end of tenure, constant testing, etc.

We know that we can't count on 99% of reporters to know shit from shinola about ed issues, but we know, too, that you are very savvy and have a very savvy staff.  Can you please schedule one (just one) guest this week to counter the Microsoft-NBC message?  Some potential guests?  Diane Ravitch, David Berliner, Rick Ayers, Monty Neill, Deborah Meier, Linda Darling-Hammond, Henry Giroux.  I have a long list of possibilities.

For a primer on the WfS film, see points here at Common Dreams.org by Rick Ayers.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/27-10

For a primer on the bigger issue of present-day deform, Ravitch's book, Death and Life of the Great American School System. . .  Ravitch remains a conservative, but she is aghast at what she sees today as reform. Her blog at Ed Week:

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/

Thank you very much.

Waiting for Superman Point by Point

Published by Valerie Strauss at WaPo, reprinted at Common Dreams.org:

What ‘Superman’ got wrong, point by point

by Rick Ayers

While the education film Waiting For Superman has moving profiles of students struggling to succeed under difficult circumstances, it puts forward a sometimes misleading and other times dishonest account of the roots of the problem and possible solutions.

The amped-up rhetoric of crisis and failure everywhere is being used to promote business-model reforms that are destabilizing even in successful schools and districts. A panel at NBC’s Education Nation Summit, taking place in New York today and tomorrow, was originally titled "Does Education Need a Katrina?" Such disgraceful rhetoric undermines reasonable debate.

Let’s examine these issues, one by one:

*Waiting for Superman says that lack of money is not the problem in education.
Yet the exclusive charter schools featured in the film receive large private subsidies. Two-thirds of Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone funding comes from private sources, effectively making the charter school he runs in the zone a highly resourced private school. Promise Academy is in many ways an excellent school, but it is dishonest for the filmmakers to say nothing about the funds it took to create it and the extensive social supports including free medical care and counseling provided by the zone.

In New Jersey, where court decisions mandated similar programs, such as high quality pre-kindergarten classes and extended school days and social services in the poorest urban districts, achievement and graduation rates increased while gaps started to close. But public funding for those programs is now being cut and progress is being eroded. Money matters! Of course, money will not solve all problems (because the problems are more systemic than the resources of any given school) – but the off-handed rejection of a discussion of resources is misleading.

*Waiting for Superman implies that standardized testing is a reasonable way to assess student progress.
The debate of “how to raise test scores” strangles and distorts strong education. Most test score differences stubbornly continue to reflect parental income and neighborhood/zip codes, not what schools do. As opportunity, health and family wealth increase, so do test scores.

This is not the fault of schools but the inaccuracy, and the internal bias, in the tests themselves.
Moreover, the tests are too narrow (on only certain subjects with only certain measurement tools). When schools focus exclusively on boosting scores on standardized tests, they reduce teachers to test-prep clerks, ignore important subject areas and critical thinking skills, dumb down the curriculum and leave children less prepared for the future. We need much more authentic assessment to know if schools are doing well and to help them improve.

*Waiting for Superman ignores overall problems of poverty.
Schools must be made into sites of opportunity, not places for the rejection and failure of millions of African American, Chicano Latino, Native American, and immigrant students. But schools and teachers take the blame for huge social inequities in housing, health care, and income.

Income disparities between the richest and poorest in U.S.society have reached record levels between 1970 and today. Poor communities suffer extensive traumas and dislocations. Homelessness, the exploitation of immigrants, and the closing of community health and counseling clinics, are all factors that penetrate our school communities. Solutions that punish schools without addressing these conditions only increase the marginalization of poor children.

*Waiting for Superman says teachers’ unions are the problem.
Of course unions need to be improved – more transparent, more accountable, more democratic and participatory – but before teachers unionized, the disparity in pay between men and women was disgraceful and the arbitrary power of school boards to dismiss teachers or raise class size without any resistance was endemic.

Unions have historically played leading roles in improving public education, and most nations with strong public educational systems have strong teacher unions.

According to this piece in The Nation, "In the Finnish education system, much cited in the film as the best in the world, teachers are – gasp! – unionized and granted tenure, and families benefit from a cradle-to-grave social welfare system that includes universal daycare, preschool and health care, all of which are proven to help children achieve better results in school."

In fact, even student teachers have a union in Finland and, overall, nearly 90% of the Finnish labor force is unionized.
The demonization of unions ignores the real evidence.

*Waiting for Superman says teacher education is useless.
The movie touts the benefits of fast track and direct entry to teaching programs such as Teach for America, but the country with the highest achieving students, Finland, also has highly educated teachers.

A 1970 reform of Finland’s education system mandated that all teachers above the kindergarten level have at least a master’s degree. Today that country’s students have the highest math and science literacy, as measured by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), of all the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries.

*Waiting for Superman decries tenure as a drag on teacher improvement.
Tenured teachers cannot be fired without due process and a good reason: they can’t be fired because the boss wants to hire his cousin, or because the teacher is gay (or black or…), or because they take an unpopular position on a public issue outside of school.

A recent survey found that most principals agreed that they had the authority to fire a teacher if they needed to take such action. It is interesting to note that when teachers are evaluated through a union-sanctioned peer process, more teachers are put into retraining programs and dismissed than through administration-only review programs. Overwhelmingly teachers want students to have outstanding and positive experiences in schools.

*Waiting for Superman says charter schools allow choice and better educational innovation.
Charters were first proposed by the teachers’ unions to allow committed parents and teachers to create schools that were free of administrative bureaucracy and open to experimentation and innovation, and some excellent charters have set examples. But thousands of hustlers and snake oil salesmen have also jumped in.

While teacher unions are vilified in the film, there is no mention of charter corruption or profiteering. A recent national study by CREDO, The Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, concludes that only 17% of charter schools have better test scores than traditional public schools, 46% had gains that were no different than their public counterparts, and 37% were significantly worse.

While a better measure of school success is needed, even by their own measure, the project has not succeeded. A recent Mathematica Policy Research study came to similar conclusions. And the Education Report, "The Evaluation of Charter School Impacts, concludes, “On average, charter middle schools that hold lotteries are neither more nor less successful than traditional public schools in improving student achievement, behavior, and school progress.”

Some fantastic education is happening in charter schools, especially those initiated by communities and led by teachers and community members. But the use of charters as a battering ram for those who would outsource and privatize education in the name of “reform” is sheer political opportunism.

*Waiting for Superman glorifies lotteries for admission to highly selective and subsidized charter schools as evidence of the need for more of them.
If we understand education as a civil right, even a human right as defined by the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, we know it can’t be distributed by a lottery.

We must guarantee all students access to high quality early education, highly effective teachers, college and work-preparatory curricula and equitable instructional resources like good school libraries and small classes. A right without a clear map of what that right protects is an empty statement.

It is not a sustainable public policy to allow more and more public school funding to be diverted to privately subsidized charters while public schools become the schools of last resort for children with the greatest educational needs. In Waiting for Superman, families are cruelly paraded in front of the cameras as they wait for an admission lottery in an auditorium where the winners’ names are pulled from a hat and read aloud, while the losing families trudge out in tears with cameras looming in their faces – in what amounts to family and child abuse.

*Waiting for Superman says competition is the best way to improve learning.
Too many people involved in education policy are dazzled by the idea of “market forces” improving schools. By setting up systems of competition, Social Darwinist struggles between students, between teachers, and between schools, these education policy wonks are distorting the educational process.

Teachers will be motivated to gather the most promising students, to hide curriculum strategies from peers, and to cheat; principals have already been caught cheating in a desperate attempt to boost test scores. And children are worn out in a sink-or-swim atmosphere that threatens them with dire life outcomes if they are not climbing to the top of the heap.

In spite of the many millions of dollars poured into expounding the theory of paying teachers for higher student test scores (sometimes mislabeled as ‘merit pay’), a new study by Vanderbilt University’s National Center on Performance Incentives found that the use of merit pay for teachers in the Nashville school district produced no difference even according to their measure, test outcomes for students.

*Waiting for Superman says good teachers are key to successful education. We agree. But Waiting for Superman only contributes to the teacher-bashing culture which discourages talented college graduates from considering teaching and drives people out of the profession.
According to the Department of Education, the country will need 1.6 million new teachers in the next five years. Retention of talented teachers is one key. Good teaching is about making connections to students, about connecting what they learn to the world in which they live, and this only happens if teachers have history and roots in the communities where they teach.

But a recent report by the nonprofit National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future says that “approximately a third of America’s new teachers leave teaching sometime during their first three years of teaching; almost half leave during the first five years. In many cases, keeping our schools supplied with qualified teachers is comparable to trying to fill a bucket with a huge hole in the bottom.”

Check out the reasons teachers are being driven out in Katy Farber’s book, "Why Great Teachers Quit: And How We Might Stop the Exodus," (Corwin Press).

*Waiting for Superman says “we’re not producing large numbers of scientists and doctors in this country anymore. . . This means we are not only less educated, but also less economically competitive.”
But Business Week (10/28/09) reported that “U.S. colleges and universities are graduating as many scientists and engineers as ever,” yet “the highest performing students are choosing careers in other fields.” In particular, the study found, “many of the top students have been lured to careers in finance and consulting.” It’s the market, and the disproportionately high salaries paid to finance specialists, that is misdirecting human resources, not schools.

*Waiting for Superman promotes a nutty theory of learning which claims that teaching is a matter of pouring information into children’s heads.
In one of its many little cartoon segments, the film purports to show how kids learn. The top of a child’s head is cut open and a jumble of factoids is poured in. Ouch! Oh, and then the evil teacher union and regulations stop this productive pouring project.

The film-makers betray a lack of understanding of how people actually learn, the active and engaged participation of students in the learning process. They ignore the social construction of knowledge, the difference between deep learning and rote memorization.

The movie would have done a service by showing us what excellent teaching looks like, and addressing the valuable role that teacher education plays in preparing educators to practice the kind of targeted teaching that reaches all students. It should have let teachers’ voices be heard.

*Waiting for Superman promotes the idea that we are in a dire war for US dominance in the world.
The poster advertising the film shows a nightmarish battlefield in stark gray, with a little white girl sitting at a desk in the midst of it. The text: “The fate of our country won’t be decided on a battlefield. It will be determined in a classroom.”

This is a common theme of the so-called reformers: We are at war with India and China and we have to out-math them and crush them so that we can remain rich and they can stay in the sweatshops.

But really, who declared this war? When did I as a teacher sign up as an officer in this war? And when did that 4th grade girl become a soldier in it? Instead of this new educational Cold War, perhaps we should be helping kids imagine a world of global cooperation, sustainable economies, and equity.

*Waiting for Superman says federal “Race to the Top” education funds are being focused to support students who are not being served in other ways.
According to a study by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., and others, Race to the Top funds are benefiting affluent or well-to-do, white, and “abled” students. So the outcome of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top has been more funding for schools that are doing well and more discipline and narrow test-preparation for the poorest schools.

*Waiting for Superman suggests that teacher improvement is a matter of increased control and discipline over teachers.
Dan Brown, a teacher in the SEED charter school featured in the film, points out that successful schools involve teachers in strong collegial conversations. Teachers need to be accountable to a strong educational plan, without being terrorized. Good teachers, which is the vast majority of them, are seeking this kind of support from their leaders.

*Waiting for Superman proposes a reform “solution” that exploits the feminization of the field of teaching; it proposes that teachers just need a few good men with hedge funds (plus D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee with a broom) to come to the rescue.
Teaching has been historically devalued – teachers are less well compensated and have less control of their working conditions than other professionals – because of its associations with women.

For example, 97% of preschool and kindergarten teachers are women, and this is also the least well-compensated sector of teaching; in 2009, the lowest 10% earned $30,970 to $34,280; the top 10% earned $75,190 to $80,970. () By comparison the top 25 hedge fund managers took in $25 billion in 2009, enough to hire 658,000 new teachers.
--
Waiting for Superman could and should have been an inspiring call for improvement in education, a call we desperately need to mobilize behind.

That’s why it is so shocking that the message was hijacked by a narrow agenda that undermines strong education. It is stuck in a framework that says that reform and leadership means doing things, like firing a bunch of people (Rhee) or “turning around” schools (Education Secretary Arne Duncan) despite the fact that there’s no research to suggest that these would have worked, and there’s now evidence to show that they haven’t.

Reform must be guided by community empowerment and strong evidence, not by ideological warriors or romanticized images of leaders acting like they’re doing something, anything. Waiting for Superman has ignored deep historical and systemic problems in education such as segregation, property-tax based funding formulas, centralized textbook production, lack of local autonomy and shared governance, de-professionalization, inadequate special education supports, differential discipline patterns, and the list goes on and on.

People seeing Waiting for Superman should be mobilized to improve education. They just need to be willing to think outside of the narrow box that the film-makers have constructed to define what needs to be done.

Thanks for ideas and some content from many teacher publications, and especially from Monty Neill, Jim Horn Lisa Guisbond, Stan Karp, Erica Meiners, Kevin Kumashiro, Ilene Abrams, Bill Ayers, and Therese Quinn.

New "Superman" Coalition

It's hardly a secret that Waiting for "Superman" is a major PR effort by corporate reformers, philanthrocapitalists, and reformy types.  Here are two updates:

1.  The Broad Foundation gave $500,000 for advocacy related to WfS.  The foundation also gave $50k for promotions related to Madeleine Sackler's schlockumentary, "The Lottery," which I've seen (and it's terrible).

2.  Education Reform Now, the 501c3 arm of Hedge Funds Democrats for Education Reform, is managing a new marketing campaign, "Done Waiting."  An earlier EdWeek article mentioned ERN and the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools was putting together a campaign audaciously called "We Are Superman" - is this the fruits of their (anti-union) labor?

The Broad Foundation is a "National Partner" in the "Done Waiting" campaign.  Other sponsors include: EEP, Center for Education Reform, GreatSchools, Charter School Growth Fund, Education Breakthrough Network, and the (Milton and Rose Friedman) Foundation for Educational Choice.

Rhee Moves Toward Becoming the Sarah Palin for Corporate Education Deform

Will she be viciously tweeting away and snarling and snapping on Facebook to usher in the corporate Millenium and the second coming of Eugenics in America? Will she neglect her husband's need to have her as a full-time defender against ongoing financial and sexual misconduct charges?  Maybe Oprah will bring Mich on for a second hour to explore these possibilities, but yesterday it was all Superman promo and no talk of her unequivocal rejection and repudiation by DC voters last week.

We must thank Anthony Cody for watching the whole thing yesterday, which spawned this at Living in Dialogue:

From Wikipedia:

Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position.

As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda, in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience. Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus possibly lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or uses loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the attitude toward the subject in the target audience to further a political agenda. Propaganda can be used as a form of political warfare.

I have not seen "Waiting for Superman," but in the one hour infomercial offered by Oprah yesterday, I got a pretty good taste, and I think I may avoid the heartburn it is likely to cause. Oprah's guests were Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates, and the movie's producer, Davis Guggenheim. Guggenheim described his motivation for making the film as being from the guilt he felt driving his children to their presumably elite private school, passing by neighborhood schools along the way. So he has made a film that characterizes all those schools as hopelessly broken, and offers charters as the main hope.

And why are these schools so hopeless? Because they have bad teachers that are impossible to fire, that's why. Michele Rhee describes teacher tenure as "a job for life." Oprah says "After two years you have a job for life and you can't be fired! Who does that?"

Davis Guggenheim, the movie's producer, intones "Everybody gets it. It's automatic. You show up for two years, you got tenure."

That is a flat-out lie. In my district, which is known for a strong union, teachers do not get tenure unless their principal wants them to. Many teachers are released at the end of their first or second year. Tenure is by no means automatic. And there are indeed ways to get rid of tenured teachers, who do not have "jobs for life," but rather have rights to due process. We do need to improve our evaluation systems, and I have written some suggestions here. But this is a lie, and it should not have been presented without a challenge.

How is it the most of the rich countries supposedly beating the pants off us academically also happen to have strong unions for teachers? And that the states within this country that perform worst are often those with the weakest unions? But according to Bill Gates, all we need to do to move to the head of the pack internationally is get rid of the bad teachers. Never mind the fact that we lead the world in children in poverty, with more than 23% of our students below the poverty level.

Then we meet Emily. Emily was the face of the child who would have been on the low track if she had stayed in her neighborhood public school. But Emily managed to escape her fate by going to Summit Prep Charter School.
Oprah asks, "If you had gone to your neighborhood high school, what would have happened?" Emily replies,

"The thing is, I'm very smart and intellectual, but I don't test well. If I had gone to my neighborhood school I would have been put in the low classes with the teachers who, you know, they have their tenure, so they're protected, but they're not really excited to teach you. I'd be with the kids who wouldn't be willing to learn. I feel like being in that environment I'd be on the road to failure, and it breaks my heart, and I'd hate to have to go to a school where everyone else wouldn't learn."

Oprah: "You articulated that so well!"

Oh dear.

Yes, students are tracked. But Emily has escaped to a track that is simply at a different site, and left behind her peers who are apparently unwilling to learn, and her teachers who have lost the will to teach them.

Charter schools are currently educating 3% of the nation's students, and unfortunately, the results we have seen thus far do not indicate they are doing significantly better than regular public schools, at least according to the test scores. (see a fuller discussion of charters here.)

If our schools are going to be improved, it is going to be through the work of people willing to invest in them, even in the ones with children who seem less willing to learn. We need the sort of resources that go into the schools to which Mr. Guggenheim sends his children. We need better evaluation practices NOT based on test scores, because then students like Emily, who doesn't test well, will not find herself to be the reason her teacher did not get a satisfactory evaluation.

This is the face of propaganda. Artfully presented to tug at our heartstrings, to manipulate our sympathies for these poor children, and arouse our anger towards those bad teachers and their unions that prevent them from being held accountable.

Unfortunately there is every indication that NBC's Education Nation intends to serve us up a heaping plateful of similarly one-sided pro-charter, pro-testing, anti-union propaganda. (their Facebook page has now apparently blocked me from leaving comments there, by the way.) I hope teachers make their presence known and share our belief in our schools, in our students and in our peers. There is late word that they have now invited recent national Teacher of the Year Anthony Mullen, who has some experience speaking truth to power. It should be an interesting event.

Oprah promises to have real teachers on her show this Friday, September 24. Will she include the voices of the many of us who question the agenda set by Rhee and Gates?

What do you think? Is this propaganda? How can we get our perspectives heard?

Pledge to See a Movie During This National Emergency

Jim Horn

If you are a teacher with 28 children in your class this Fall, four of them live in poverty.

On Thursday the Census Bureau released a report showing that 1 of 7 Americans now lives in poverty.  That’s 44,000,000 people who, if they live in a family of four, have a family income that is less than $22,000 per year.  If it were not for unemployment benefits, another 3,300,000 would be included in the poverty figures.  Even with such impressive numbers that exceed the levels of poverty for when President Johnson declared the War on Poverty in the 1960s, higher numbers of people are without health insurance, which now stands at over 50,000,000 for the first time since records have been kept. 

What has been the national political response?  The Republicans have not mentioned it, preferring instead to continue to hammer their talking points on maintaining the Bush tax cuts for those making more than $250,000 per year.  The Democrats are more interested in the middle class who vote, with the President on Friday making the case from the Rose Garden for middle class tax cuts without mentioning the historic poverty report released the day before.  In a Washington Post story on Thursday that asked a pundit from each political party what should be done in the face of this accelerating devastation, the Republican urged poor people to make sure they get married, and the Democrat urged the continuation of the surviving patchwork of social welfare programs that are already entirely swamped by the deluge of the poor.

Without comment on poverty reports, however, wealth continues to accumulate for those with the wealth to make it happen.  We know this not from any disclosures from the privileged, but from the public disclosures by large investors such as university endowments and retirement funds.  Last week brought news that Columbia University has recouped much of what was lost in the most recent Wall Street debacle, with a 17 percent return this year on investments that remain undisclosed.  We can only imagine the astronomical returns that the hedge fund gamblers are bringing in for the casino capitalists of Wall Street if a university endowment is able to collect 17% on its investment. 

On the other coast in California, a Bay Citizen story published by the New York Times reports that a review of the University of California shareholder voting records show a pattern of disregard for UC’s long-standing investment policy “to promote human rights, environmental sustainability and efforts to fight discrimination.”  It is as if the acrid whiff of economic collapse has placed conscience and moral argument on the losing side of a zero sum game, a sentiment expressed in remarks by a UC Davis law professor who argues that UC must keep in mind the “ultimate beneficiaries:” “Do they want to be socially responsible or do they want to have retirement money when they retire?”

There are those among us, however, who feel as though they will have their cake and will eat it, too, and have more cake as a result.  And thus we see the great outpouring of interest and even tears among the wealthy and well-heeled lining up for the new documentary feature on the un-caped crusaders of the corporate education reform movement depicted in “Waiting for Superman,” a film amply funded by philanthro-capitalists, those irrepressible investors who do well by doing good from their unique capacity to spot a business opportunity where the rest of us just see the cancerous effects exuding from the malignant neglect of poverty.  From what I can learn from the well-oiled promotional machine that, beyond the “Superman” website, is funding op-eds, newsy articles, interviews, and TV specials to generate support for the movie’s corporate-approved educational solutions, the film hopes to push over the top an educational revolution of sorts that will sweep away poor children’s failure as easily as plans to sweep away teachers and schools where poor children score the lowest on tests. 

This new corporate poor children’s crusade will not be constrained by burdensome adult work rules, union agreements, due process considerations, or even children’s work rules or due process, for that matter.  The model chain for corporate school reform, KIPP, works students and teachers 10 hours a day, and then they are on duty for 2 to 3 hours of homework every night.  Plus Saturdays.  Though costly for students and teachers alike, who must cut short other life activities such as family and friends (and sleep), the new crusade will be accomplished apparently without the need for addressing the many, otherwise, expensive social and economic challenges where poor children live and score poorly in crumbling schools with shortages of decent learning materials, libraries, health care, parent jobs, housing, transportation, equal opportunity, or the diverse social capital that enables healthy cultures to  interact and thrive.

What this new “civil rights” crusade based on segregated containment and a “no excuses” mantra disguises is a very old ideology based on blaming the poor for their poverty and blaming public schools in order to dismantle them for corporate benefit, with both unacknowledged goals carried out while diverting attention away from the economic canyon that divides the poor from the rich who now plan to get richer by exploiting the poor in ways that leave them even more contained and invisible than before. 

The heart-tugging and anger-pumping machinations of “Waiting for Superman” mask a cynical excuse to impose a cheap form of punitive social triage through a total compliance penal form of schooling for the poor that carries with it the added benefit of a huge financial dividend for the philanthropic investor class that Diane Ravitch has termed the “Billionaire Boys’ Club.”  Though costly for students, parents, and teachers alike, none of these constituencies are even present in strategies for this new crusade, unless they are recruited to serve as passive audiences for lectures by Bill Gates or Arne Duncan.   They did have their presence felt last Tuesday in DC, however, and no doubt they will have it felt again.

Trying to turn poor children into middle class ones without the benefits of the family wealth or access to social capital to go along with the psychological and behavioral modifications of the KIPPs will be do untold damage to children and their families that will not be judged kindly by history in the long term, or by voters and civil rights advocates in the short term.  It will be of minor consequence to the wealth of the wealthy, however, even if it all falls flat.  If this brand of apartheid testing camps were to become the model for urban education, however, corporate education reform would make many of the wealthy even wealthier, with an added social dividend. For if the psychological alterations of the poor are as effective as the corporate “positivity” consultants would have it, we may assume that these poor children, once successfully modified, will become as blind to poverty as the white, and black, missionary types who are lined up for a ticket to feel good about believing that poverty is no longer an excuse for being poor.

Meanwhile, 5 of 35 school children in every overcrowded classroom in America remain impoverished, with nothing on the political horizon or from Hollywood to change that reality or even to challenge it.

Another Review of Waiting for Superman, or At Least Bill Gates

From Rick Ayers for HuffPo:

Davis Guggenheim's 2010 film Waiting for Superman is a slick marketing piece full of half-truths and distortions. The film suggests the problems in education are the fault of teachers and teacher unions alone, and it asserts that the solution to those problems is a greater focus on top-down instruction driven by test scores. It rejects the inconvenient truth that our schools are being starved of funds and other necessary resources, and instead opts for an era of privatization and market-driven school change. Its focus effectively suppresses a more complex and nuanced discussion of what it might actually take to leave no child behind, such as a living wage, a full-employment economy, the de-militarization of our schools, and an education based on the democratic ideal that the fullest development of each is the condition for the full development of all. The film is positioned to become a leading voice in framing the debate on school reform, much like Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth did for the discussion of global warming, and that's heartbreaking.

I'm not categorically opposed to charter schools; they can and often do allow a group of creative and innovative teachers, parents, and communities to build schools that work for their kids and are free of the deadening bureaucracy of most districts. These schools can be catalysts for even larger changes. But there are really two main opposing positions in the "charter movement" -- it's not really a movement, by the way, but rather a diverse range of different projects. On one side are those who hope to use the charter option to operate effective small schools that are autonomous from districts. On the other side are the corporate powerhouses and the ideological opponents of all things public who see this as a chance to break the teacher's unions and to privatize education. Superman is a shill for the latter. Caring, thoughtful teachers are working hard in both types of schools. But their efforts are being framed and defined, even undermined, by powerful forces that have seized the mantle of "reform."

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. Those funds create full family services and a state of the art school. In a sleight of hand, the film magically shifts focus, turning to "bad teaching" as the problem in the poor schools while ignoring these millions of dollars that make people clamor to get into the Promise Academy. As a friend of mine said, "Well, at least now we know what it costs."

Flash!  This just in from the AP:  Goldman Sachs has just written a check for a charter school in HCZ for $20 million.  Now back to our review in progress.

It is so sad to see hundreds of families lined up at these essentially private schools with a public charter cover, praying to get in. Who wouldn't want to get in? Families are paraded in front of the cameras as they wait for an admission lottery in an auditorium where the winners' names are pulled from a hat and read aloud, while the losing families trudge out in tears with cameras looming in their faces.

After dismissing funding as a factor, Superman rolls out the drum-beat of attacks on teachers as the first and really the only problem. Except for a few patronizing pats on the head for educators, the film describes school failure as boiling down to bad teachers. Relying on old clichés that single out the handful of loser teachers anyone could dig up, Waiting for Superman asserts that the unions are the boogey man. In his perfect world, there would be no unions -- we could drive teacher wages even lower, run schools like little corporations, and race to the bottom just as we have in the manufacturing sector. Imagining that the profit motive works best, the privatizers propose merit pay for teachers whose students test well. Such a scheme would only lead to adult cheating (which has already started), to well-connected teachers packing their classes with privileged kids, and to an undermining of the very essence of effective schools -- collaboration between teachers, generous community building with students.

It is interesting to note that Arne Duncan's kids, as well as the Obama kids, attended the University of Chicago Lab Schools -- where teachers had small classes, good pay, and, yes, a union. Students did not concentrate on rote learning and mindless drill and skill or test prep. They were offered in part an exploratory, questioning curriculum. The school for the Obama kids in D.C., Sidwell Friends, also has a unionized faculty. But apparently the masses need to have sweatshop schools. Waiting for Superman sets up AFT president Randi Weingarten as its Darth Vader -- accompanying her appearance on the screen with dire background music. They tell us that the teachers unions have put $50 million into election campaigns over the last ten years, essentially buying politicians. Actually, this number is a pittance compared to what corporations and the rich throw in. It is less than Meg Whitman spent of her own money in one run for governor of California. But the film carefully avoids interviewing Diane Ravitch, the lead organizer of the Education Trust and No Child Left Behind efforts who has been lately writing and speaking about her realization that these reforms have had a disastrous effect on schools and teaching and learning. 

When African American and Chicano Latino families in the 1960's were demanding quality education and access to the resources of the best schools, they were also rejecting the myths about blackness meaning culturally deprived. Today that social revolution has been effectively set back. Schools are more segregated today than before Brown v. Board of Education in 1954; nothing is said about that. Black and Brown students are being suspended and expelled, searched and criminalized; not a word. In place of a movement for transforming power relationships in our society, privatizers and corporate managers step up to define the problem -- proposing a revolution that is anything but revolutionary.

A strong project of education transformation would recognize the funds of knowledge urban students come to school with; it would honor the literacy and language practices of the community. It would support a curriculum of questioning, as students examine their world and imagine ways to make it better. It would put front and center the need to build learning communities, to motivate students to want to learn and believe there was something worth learning. It would create an engaged learning experience for all students, not just the handful who learn to endure boredom and insult in hopes of high income later. In the hands of these so-called reformers, though, the only goal is to train urban students to be obedient followers; they never propose a project that transforms and empowers communities, only holding out the promise for a few exceptional students to escape the ghetto. You can see white middle class audience members sighing, comforted to know that everyone really wants to be like us; that everyone who is not like us is tragic. The film bubbles over with terms like escape and rescue, promoting a liberal charity mentality that is never in solidarity the local community, only regards it as something dysfunctional that needs to be controlled.

In addition, Waiting for Superman promotes the idea that we are in a dire war for US dominance in the world. The poster advertising the film shows a nightmarish battlefield in stark grey, then a little white girl sitting at a desk is dropped in the midst of it. The text: "The fate of our country won't be decided on a battlefield. It will be determined in a classroom." This is a common theme of the so-called reformers: we are at war with India and China and we have to out-math them and crush them so that we can remain rich and they can stay in the sweatshops. But really, who declared this war? When did I as a teacher sign up as an officer in this war? And when did that 4th grade girl become a soldier in it? I have nothing against the Chinese, the Indians, or anyone else in the world -- I wish them well. Instead of this Global Social Darwinist fantasy, perhaps we should be helping kids imagine a world of global cooperation, sustainable economies, and equity

Waiting for Superman accepts a theory of learning that is embarrassing in its stupidity. In one of its many little cartoon segments, it purports to show how kids learn. The top of a child's head is cut open and a jumble of factoids is poured in. Ouch! Oh, and then the evil teacher union and regulations stop this productive pouring project. The film-makers betray no understanding of how people actually learn, the active and agentive participation of students in the learning process. They ignore the social construction of knowledge, the difference between deep learning and rote memorization. The film unquestioningly bows down to standardized tests as the measure of student knowledge, school success. Such a testing regime bullies aside deeper learning, authentic assessment, portfolio and project based learning. Yes, deeper learning like this is difficult to measure with simple numbers -- but we can't let the desire for simple numbers simplify the educational project. Extensive research has demonstrated definitively that standardized testing reproduces inequities, marginalizes English Language Learners and those who do not grow up speaking a middle class vernacular, dumbs down the curriculum, and misinform policy. It is the wisdom of the misinformed, accepted against educational evidence and research. Never mind, they declare: we will define the future of education anyway.

Sadly, the narrow and blinkered reasoning in Waiting for Superman is behind the No Child Left Behind disaster rebranded as Race to the Top. Don't believe the hype. We can and we must do education, and educational change, much differently. We could develop an economy that supported communities which were well-resourced and democratic. We can right now create pathways in which all kids have a reasonable prospect of an honorable, interesting job in their future. And if democracy and the future society concern us at all, we can and we must create schools which unleash students' creativity, imagination, and initiative.

NOT Waiting for Superman and NOT Wanting Superwoman

Michelle Rhee is proving that defeat only brings out more of the bad Superwoman in her.  Valerie Strauss has noticed, pointing to an interview done with Microsoft/NBC's clueless Nora O'Donnell in which Rhee blames the lazy and stupid voters for not appreciating the hard work that she and lame duck dictator boss are engaged in. 

. . . .She further suggests that people didn’t like the reforms -- which include linking teacher pay to student standardized test scores (a terrible idea) and increasing the number of standardized tests kids must take (another rotten idea) because they were hard.

The people just don’t want “hard” reform.

“Reformers across the country knew when the mayor and I took these aggressive reforms on that it was going to be tremendously difficult... People need to see how hard the work is.”

To the extent that Fenty’s fate was tied to Rhee’s performance, it would be wise to remember that communications lapses were the least of her problems. Failing to tell the truth on a number of occasions about major efforts is more to the point, as is pushing forward some reforms that make no sense, the biggest one her IMPACT teacher evaluation system. Overstating success was another issue, as my colleague Bill Turque (who has given us fair and really smart coverage of Rhee's tenure) wrote in this story.. . .

Meanwhile, a Facebook page is up called NOT Waiting for Superman, with ideas for boycotts, demonstrations, leafleting, to counter the shock and awe media campaign that has been launched to coincide with the the Oligarchs' new propaganda film.

Finally, here is Susan O's take on the new heart-tugging drama-ganda:

Fewer than Six Degrees of Separation Between Barack Obama and Waiting for Superman

by Susan Ohanian

I have not seen the film "Waiting for Superman." Nor have I signed the pledge at the film website promising to see it. As of this date, 24,091 people have made the pledge, making the whole thing seem like a religious cause rather than a movie.

Here, I just provide a little background on the people associated with the film.

Jeff Skoll was the first president of e-Bay and used his fortune from that to set up a film-production company Participant Productions--which has produced some really good films, including "Good Night and Good Luck," "The Soloist," and "The Kite Runner" as well as the oft-mention "Inconvenient Truth." Most of Skoll's films have a strong moral message. He says, in fact, that he makes movies to inspire social change. Clearly, this is a fellow who believes in righteous causes. And now he is showing hundreds of thousands of public school teachers that one man's righteous cause may be another's indignation.

According to their website, "The Skoll Foundation celebrates social entrepreneurship and social innovation through film and broadcast partnerships designed to spread the stories of social entrepreneurs." Such partnerships include the PBS NewsHour and the Sundance Institute, "which help drive large-scale public awareness of social entrepreneurship and its potential to address the critical issues of our time."

Skoll's Silicon Valley donations include $300,000 to Teach for America. "over two years for recruitment, training, professional development and support of college graduates who teach underserved students for two years in the Alum Rock Union, East Palo Alto and Redwood City school districts."

In 2008 The Skoll Centre for Social Entrepeurship" gave Wendy Kopp a "social entrepreneurship" award.

Now, if you want to get conspiracy-theory minded, Davis Guggenheim, who wrote and directed "Waiting for Superman, made a bio of Barack Obama's mother, which premiered at the 2008 Democratic National Convention before Barack Obama's speech accepting his party's nomination. He also directed an Obama infomercial which aired in 2008. Guggenheim is best known as director of the blockbuster "Inconvenient Truth." (2006)

Guggenheim went to Sidwell Friends & Brown. Skoll has an electrical engineering degree from the University of Toronto and an MBA from Stanford. What more could you want from people making "an exhaustive review of public education?"

The Synopsis at the film website includes this statement:

Guggenheim undertakes an exhaustive review of public education, surveying drop-out factories and academic sinkholes, methodically dissecting the system and its seemingly intractable problems.

However, embracing the belief that good teachers make good schools, Guggenheim offers hope by exploring innovative approaches taken by education reformers and charter schools that have--in reshaping the culture--refused to leave their students behind.

In an interview with Take Part, Guggenheim says, "And look at Michelle Rhee, she was a teacher and a lot of the reformers are coming out of Teach for America. There are battle lines drawn between the reformers and some teachers, and that's an uncomfortable truth that is part of the film. . . . Steve Barr of Green Dot, who has schools here in LA, is taking over Locke High School in Watts. It's like David and Goliath seeing him against the LA Unified School District -- and he might be winning. There are so many stories that are worthy and inspiring that we couldn't put in the movie."

It comes as no surprise that Bill Gates loves the film. He even showed up at the advanced screening at Sundance, where it won the audience award for best documentary. Gates told Reuters, "Many of these high schools are terrible, and this film, 'Waiting for Superman' by Davis Guggenheim, which I have a very minor part in, tells this story in a brilliant way."

Guggenheim is featured on The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation website.

This all gets even more tangled, circling back to the Skoll Foundation and the Obama administration desire to promote nonprofit social entrepreneurship. On May 27, 2010, First Lady Michelle Obama and the Corporation for National and Community Service CEO Patrick Corvington announced the initial phase of philanthropic commitments to match Social Innovation Fund (SIF) grants. Participating groups are: Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation ($10 million over two years), John and Ann Doerr's Family Foundation ($5 million over two years), the Omidyar Network ($10 million over two years), the Open Society Foundations' Special Fund for Poverty Alleviation ($10 million for one year), and the Skoll Foundation ($10 million over two years).

Alistair Bomphray saw the movie and his review is worth reading.


— Susan Ohanian

2010-07-26

Philanthrocapitalists Go Hollywood With Production of "Waiting for Superman"

As a not-so-subtle, though unconscious?, reference to the good ole' days that led up to the rise of national socialism, the new documentary, Waiting for Superman, features a number of Superman wannabes, including KIPP cult leaders Feinberg and Levin, Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates and Eli Broad's boy, Steve Barr. And how well the film's poster inadvertently captures the venture philanthropists' self-imposed blindness to America's urban devastation in favor of a more lucrative focus on producing white-like compliant children whose psychological bubbles are bathed in a sweet incandescence from above that is worthy of a Microsoft ad. Nothing can stop you, boys and girls, if we can find the right superman to inspire you and to get your mind right. Onward, positive psychology soldiers!

The film is executive produced and financed by Participant Media, which was founded by venture philanthropist and former Ebayist, Jeffrey Skoll. Participant Media's current CEO is Jim Berk. Who is Jim Berk? Well, his recent job history, anyway:

Prior to Participant, Jim was Chairman and CEO of Gryphon Colleges Corporation, where he was responsible for the formation, platform acquisition and establishment of a private company operating for-profit post education schools.

At the Waiting for Superman website, here are the ways that are bulleted for you, the wet-eyed movie watcher, to get involved to make it all better for the poor children in the penal pedagogy urban schools. The list ranges from giving pencils to the poor to book donations to joining the PTA (a favorite of Bill Gates who has given generously to PTA) to visiting Arne Duncan's propaganda site (#4):

1. Join your local PTA

2. Fund specific school activities and supplies

3. Help donate books to kids

4. Check out how the U.S. compares to other industrialized countries
   

5. Text POSSIBLE to 44144 for campaign updates

There is nothing here about electing politicians whose education positions are not written by the Business Roundtable or about advocating for rebuilding our public education system, or for fighting to integrate our schools, or for rebuilding our rotting physical plants, or encouraging and rewarding our teachers, or for ending the genocide of testing and containment.

From PR Newswire:

. . . .The new film, developed, financed and executive produced by Participant Media, examines the crisis of public education in the United States through multiple interlocking stories – from a handful of students and their families whose futures hang in the balance, to the educators and reformers trying to find real and lasting solutions within a dysfunctional system.

The documentary features several leaders in the field of education, including philanthropist Bill Gates of The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; President and CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone in Harlem, New York Geoffrey Canada; Chancellor of the Washington, D.C. public schools Michelle Rhee; Knowledge is Power Program Founders (KIPP) David Levin and Mike Feinberg; and President and CEO of Manchester Bidwell Corporation Bill Strickland.

Six-time Grammy Award-winning recording artist, concert performer and philanthropist John Legend composed the end title song 'Shine'. Legend's own Show Me campaign uses education to break the cycle of poverty through sustainable development at the individual, family, and community levels.

Said Paramount's Goodman: "Our commitment to this movie and the issue of education is urgently important to all of us at Paramount. In collaboration with our partners, we hope to bring about a real solution."

Said Davis Guggenheim: "With these two great partners, Participant Media and Paramount Pictures, we have a chance to create public awareness around this issue, and this is the only way we can make real change in our children's schools."

Said Jim Berk, CEO, Participant Media: "The movie creates an emotional personal connection to an issue which underpins the very future of our country. . . .

Yes, the very future that is waiting for the children of the poor who make it through the testing and containment camps that the Supermen want to manage--at public expense, of course:

SAN FRANCISCO -- Gryphon Investors announced today that it has completed the acquisition of Delta Educational Systems (Delta) through Gryphon's post-secondary education platform, Gryphon Colleges Corporation (GCC). Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Delta operates 16 accredited career colleges located in Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. The schools offer students courses in allied health, business, cosmetology, information technology, legal, and vocational trades through five well-established regional brands, Career Technical College, The Creative Circus, McCann School of Business & Technology, Miami-Jacobs Career College and Miller-Motte Technical College. McCann, Miami-Jacobs and Miller-Motte have each been providing students with high quality education for over ninety years.

Gryphon Colleges Corporation was formed at the end of 2004 by Gryphon Investors through the acquisition of National Career Education (NCE), a four campus school company located in Arizona and California. . . .