Movie Review -- Waiting for "Superman"

I saw a thoughtful documentary tonight on the subject of education in America called Waiting for "Superman" by documentarian Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth, It Might Get Loud).

The movie follows several low income students in different parts of the country and what they have to go through to get a decent education. The families are faced with the choice of putting their kids in substandard public schools or applying to excellent charter schools that often can only take less than 10% of the kids that apply.

Waiting for "Superman" is kind of an odd film in that Guggenheim is generally viewed as liberal for obvious reasons but is receiving kudos from conservatives for this film because it takes on teachers' unions pretty hard. We shouldn't be so entrenched in our views that we become above criticism. I wholeheartedly believe in unions but if the ultimate goal of the teachers' unions is not the quality education of our children then they need to examine what they are doing.

The movie lists some of the biggest impediments to improving our public education system:

- intractable teacher unions that won't allow excellent teachers to be rewarded and deficient teachers to be fired
- a bureaucracy that makes system-wide change almost impossible
- parents either being uninvolved or taking their kids out of public schools and putting them into private ones

Instead of bad schools being a byproduct of bad neighborhoods, they are often one of the contributing causes of bad neighborhoods. When you are graduating 50% or less of the kids that come into your system, you are creating a pipeline to unemployment, poverty and crime.

Several innovative charter schools located in some of the roughest areas of the country have had fantastic results with these same kids and should be a model for how the system can be improved. They worked because they didn't assume anything. They weren't afraid to be innovative. They expected a lot out of their teacher and their students.

Now, my son goes to a charter school and I honestly can say that I don't know how I feel about charter schools as a whole. There are good ones, there are bad ones ... just like with public schools. But it seems to me that we have to make it easier for school systems to innovate and charter schools may be a way.

Our "track" method of education is straight out of the 50's and a time where maybe 20% of high school went on to college and the rest were either factory workers, farmers, or skilled office workers (accountants, etc.). The track system worked then but it doesn't work now where it's almost a requirement for students to have a college degree to even have a decent job, let alone a professional one. We have to rethink a system that makes assumptions about kids early and locks them into a path that they will never advance from.

We are not helping our kids by not caring and by putting them in schools that are no good. But we are also not helping our society as a whole by opting out and putting them in private schools or teaching them at home. We spend way more on housing criminals in prisons where over 2/3 of them are high school dropouts. I'm not talking about throwing more money at bad schools. But we can't keep cutting education funding and expect it to get better. Get rid of a lot of the bureaucracy and competing school boards at every level. Reward schools and teachers that are doing a good job. Quit cutting programs like music and art that help our students in other subjects.

I don't think charter schools are the complete answer but I do think that they might provide us a clue into how we might improve our public schools. There has been some justifiable criticism of the movie in that it highlights some charter schools that get a lot of private funding. But that doesn't necessarily detract from the fact that those schools are succeeding in areas that most would never have imagined possible. There has to be some way of scaling those methods up to a larger system.

Some will criticize the film for having an agenda. But, personally, I'd be more afraid of a film that wasn't try to say anything. Of course it has an agenda. You may not agree with the conclusions or solutions but you would have to be blind to say that there isn't anything wrong with our current system.

Obviously I want my son to have a great education but it helps our whole community if his friend down the street also gets a good education. Check this movie out. It makes you think. Grade: A-

Education

"Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading." -- G.M. Trevelyan, English historian

"Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding." -- Ambrose Bierce, American journalist and satirist

Meet the Flintstones

Nearly a third of Texans believe humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time, and more than half disagree with the theory that humans developed from earlier species of animals, according to the University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.

... 38 percent agreed with the statement "God created human beings pretty much in their present form about 10,000 years ago."

• Most of the Texans in the survey — 51 percent — disagree with the statement, "human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals." Thirty-five percent agreed with that statement, and 15 percent said they don't know.

• Did humans live at the same time as the dinosaurs? Three in ten Texas voters agree with that statement; 41 percent disagree, and 30 percent don't know...

What can we glean from this?

• * This explains an awful lot about the nature of politics in Texas.
• * It is not surprising that the rest of the world has passed us in math and science aptitude.
• * Politics and religion are driving education ... to the detriment of a whole generation of children.
• * You couldn't pay me to live in Texas.

I won't make this particular shortcoming into a Democratic or Republican thing. The poll didn't show a huge difference in responses by party affiliation. It definitely seems to be more a religious "thing".

I wholeheartedly believe in religious freedom but there are areas in which religion has no place, most notably education. I'm not saying there shouldn't be schools with religious affiliation but rather fact-based classes (math, science) should not be influenced by faith. If you want to have religion in your humanities, history, ethics and even writing classes - fine (just not in public schools). There is room for interpretation in those.

However, the age of the planet is not open for interpretation, especially on the scale we are talking about here: 10,000 years vs. 5 billion. Believing the world is 10,000 years old while living in a state whose wealth came from the decomposition of organisms over millions of years (fossil fuels) is an irony that is obviously lost on the average Texan. This goes beyond freedom of belief. We simply cannot afford to be this stupid and survive as a species.

"You know the good part about all those executions in Texas? Fewer Texans." -- George Carlin

Writing Class

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia." -- E.L. Doctorow

I started an online fiction writing class (short stories) through Arizona State University's Virgian Piper Center for Creative Writing a couple of weeks ago. It's my first venture back to the classroom (virtual or otherwise) in 17 years. It's a non-credit class, but I wasn't taking it to get a credit anyway. I just thought it might be useful (and amusing) to develop my creative writing. My first step towards writing the "great American novel" (just like a few million other people who want to be writers - [sigh])

This week we had our first short story due. Very painful and agonizing for me. But you gotta start somewhere. Has anyone else taken any kind of writing classes? Has anyone written any short stories or novels? I'd be curious to get all or your takes.

Reading

"Today a reader, tomorrow a leader." -- Margaret Fuller

As a parent, most of the time, you feel pretty clueless. You do the best you can, try to instill good habits and manners with your child without stunting their creativity. So, it's gratifying when you have those seemingly spontaneous moments where it is obvious that you must have been doing at least something right. One of those occasions was last night about 7:00. It's prime TV viewing time and all three of us are sitting in the family room reading books ... by choice. Alex, at 6 years old, has become a voracious reader and is reading well beyond his age level. He'll probably be reading Harry Potter books within a year.

He could have been playing a game on a computer or watching TV, but he chose to read. But this is not the rule for most kids these days. I was listening to NPR the other day and they spoke of a recent National Endowment for the Arts study which I have excerpted here:

Washington, DC -- Today, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announces the release of To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence, a new and comprehensive analysis of reading patterns in the United States. To Read or Not To Read gathers statistics from more than 40 studies on the reading habits and skills of children, teenagers, and adults. The compendium reveals recent declines in voluntary reading and test scores alike, exposing trends that have severe consequences for American society.

"The new NEA study is the first to bring together reliable, nationally representative data, including everything the federal government knows about reading," said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. "This study shows the startling declines, in how much and how well Americans read, that are adversely affecting this country's culture, economy, and civic life as well as our children's educational achievement."

... Among the key findings:

Americans are reading less - teens and young adults read less often and for shorter amounts of time compared with other age groups and with Americans of previous years.

Less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, a 14 percent decline from 20 years earlier. Among 17-year-olds, the percentage of non-readers doubled over a 20-year period, from nine percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004.

On average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading.

Americans are reading less well – reading scores continue to worsen, especially among teenagers and young males. By contrast, the average reading score of 9-year-olds has improved.

Reading scores for 12th-grade readers fell significantly from 1992 to 2005, with the sharpest declines among lower-level readers.

2005 reading scores for male 12th-graders are 13 points lower than for female 12th-graders, and that gender gap has widened since 1992.

Reading scores for American adults of almost all education levels have deteriorated, notably among the best-educated groups. From 1992 to 2003, the percentage of adults with graduate school experience who were rated proficient in prose reading dropped by 10 points, a 20 percent rate of decline.

The declines in reading have civic, social, and economic implications – Advanced readers accrue personal, professional, and social advantages. Deficient readers run higher risks of failure in all three areas.

Nearly two-thirds of employers ranked reading comprehension "very important" for high school graduates. Yet 38 percent consider most high school graduates deficient in this basic skill.

American 15-year-olds ranked fifteenth in average reading scores for 31 industrialized nations, behind Poland, Korea, France, and Canada, among others.

Literary readers are more likely than non-readers to engage in positive civic and individual activities – such as volunteering, attending sports or cultural events, and exercising ...

The show went on to discuss the fact that reading online items is not a substitute. Studies of children who spend equal amounts of time online but one group also reads recreationally finds that the offline readers have drastically better reading comprehension and school performance.

So, for those people that think visiting digg.com everyday is all the reading you need, you are kidding yourself and you are limiting yourself. And believe me, there are people that think this and have told me so.

Should we be surprised that no one can find Iraq on a map or string together a proper sentence without saying "ya know"? Not in a society where 30-second YouTube clips and text-messaging are ubiquitous. Getting someone to sit down and do one thing for a half-hour is unheard of. We're becoming an illiterate society that laps up anything that our government or FOX News says because we have no historical perspective to compare it with. Anybody that has ever read 1984 or Brave New World can't help but see the parallels.

I'm not saying that you should abandon TV or shouldn't read online. There are great sources in both areas. Just don't shortchange picking up a good book. It's not supposed to be work - it's supposed to be fun. Pick up something you are interested in. Do yourself a favor and unplug once in awhile.

"Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere." -- Jean Rhys

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." -- Ray Bradbury

Filthy Words

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