A powerful documentary argues that we have the data and the means to dramatically improve student performance. Now we need the will
Waiting for "Superman": A Call to Action for Our Schools
One Wednesday afternoon this summer, 55 young men and women filed into a dark movie theater for a private screening. Sundance this was not. There was no Robert Redford, no Diesel swag. But this audience had one important qualification: sometime recently, they had all dropped out of high school. So for a movie about America's malfunctioning education system, it was an unusually qualified focus group.
Waiting for "Superman" is a new film by Davis Guggenheim, the Academy Award ? winning director of An Inconvenient Truth, a movie that took on another mind-numbingly complex issue and, confounding all logic, grossed $50 million worldwide ? and changed the way many Americans think about climate change.
In anticipation of Superman's Sept. 24 release, screenings are being held all over the country for elite audiences ? Bill Gates has become an evangelist for the film ? and for education activists, including ones who help kids who have dropped out. So it was that Crystal Rojas, 19, sat down in the stadium seating in Chicago to watch a movie that might have been loosely based on her life. She nodded when she saw footage of things she recognized, like teachers reading newspapers in class. She raised her eyebrows when she saw how much America spends per pupil ? far more than almost every country in the world does. (See what you can do to help the education system.)
At the end, her eyes filled with tears. Rojas had long believed that her problems in school were all her fault. In fifth grade, her teacher told her that she wouldn't amount to much. "She said, 'It doesn't matter if you learn. Your future is determined.'" And for a while it seemed as if her teacher had been right. In sixth grade, Rojas tried to transfer to a charter school, but it was full. So she stayed in her neighborhood public school, where only 1 in 5 students was doing math at grade level. Then she went to a vocational high school where, she says, she spent almost three hours a day in a typing class. "I would just go there and feel like I was wasting space. So I thought, Why should I keep coming?" She dropped out two weeks into 10th grade.
Rojas has since earned her GED and is studying business administration at a community college. Her future is not certain, but nor is it lost. Watching the movie, she heard that teacher's voice in her head all over again. And she started to think that maybe there is a problem in America's schools, and that it is bigger than Crystal Rojas.
Waiting for "Superman" is a documentary that follows five kids and their parents as they try to escape their neighborhood public schools for higher-performing public charter schools. The movie serves up a lot of clarifying statistics about the problems facing education reform, explaining how it could be that the U.S. since 1971 has more than doubled the money it spends per pupil yet still trails most other rich nations in science and math scores. But the film succeeds because it also lays out the solutions, something no one could credibly attempt to do until very recently. (See 21 ways to serve America.)
Today, several decades into America's long, tedious fight over how to upend the status quo in public education, three remarkable things are happening simultaneously. First, thanks partly to the blunt instruments of No Child Left Behind, we can now track how well individual students are doing from year to year ? and figure out which schools are working and which are not. Most Americans think testing is a spurious trend; a new TIME poll found that only 1 out of 5 people surveyed felt that testing has had a positive effect in schools. But as the tests get better, we are starting to be able to see in the dark. We can track what works ? and what doesn't ? in the classroom, something that had been for all of history a matter of conjecture and hearsay. And while the data isn't perfect, it's far better than any other yardstick we've ever had before.
Second, legions of public schools ? some charters, some not ? are succeeding while others flounder. These successful schools are altering fundamentals that were for so long untouchable, by insisting on great teachers, more class time and higher standards. We now know that it is possible to teach every kid, even poor kids with wretched home lives, to read, write and do math and science at respectable levels. In Harlem, low-income African-American students at these schools are performing on par with kids across New York City and the state. And the researchers studying their success have learned that what matters more than anything else in the school is the teacher, the one person in the building whose job has changed the least in the past half-century.
The third novelty is in Washington, where a Democratic President is standing up to his party's most dysfunctional long-term romantic interest, the teachers' unions. President Barack Obama and his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, have dangled $4.35 billion in stimulus money in front of cash-strapped state legislatures to get them to rationalize their systems. Overnight, the White House has become the biggest benefactor in the education world, far surpassing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The competition, known as Race to the Top, is pushing school districts to raise academic standards, to evaluate teachers based in part on how much their students are learning, to train teachers more effectively ? and to remove those who are not cut out for the job.
In the states' response, we are witnessing what may be the beginning of a commonsense revolution. Seven states have enacted laws to remove firewalls between student achievement and teacher evaluations. At least 12 states have passed laws requiring student-progress data to be used in making teacher-evaluation or tenure decisions, a notion that would have been unimaginable five years ago. And 35 states and the District of Columbia have agreed to adopt common standards for what kids should learn at every grade level. Recently, officials from more than one European nation have contacted education reformers to learn how they could do something like Race to the Top in their own countries. (See 25 responsibility pioneers.)
The pace of change is, relatively speaking, breathtaking. A couple of weeks ago, the Los Angeles Times released a searchable database of 6,000 teachers, ranked by their effectiveness on the basis of how much their students had improved on standardized tests during a year in their classrooms. The newspaper got access to the data through California's Public Records Act ? and hired a seasoned education analyst to crunch the numbers. The charts reveal huge disparities among teachers in the same buildings, disparities that in many cases hold up over seven years of data.
The response started out predictably. The local teachers' union called for a boycott of the paper. But more than 1,100 teachers also answered the paper's invitation to see their data before it came out. And in a startling sign of the times, a Democratic Education Secretary offered his cautious support. "Why, in education, are we scared to talk about what success looks like?" Duncan asked in a speech. He acknowledged that a newspaper was not the ideal forum for teachers to get performance feedback, but he stressed a more important question: Why did it take a newspaper to do what the school district should have done years ago? "The fact that teachers did not have this information is ridiculous." Days later, the Los Angeles School Board endorsed using the data as part of teacher evaluations. Now the district must negotiate with the union to see if they can agree on a way to do so. (See the case for national service.)
It's worth noting that these are early days. The vast majority of American kids have yet to be affected by any of these changes. But the drumbeat is hard to ignore. Instead of continuing to rely on tradition and interest groups to set education policy, which is like using astrology to design a space program, we may be on the cusp of running schools ? brace yourself ? according to what actually works. "Little by little, the curtain is being peeled back," says Charles Barone of Democrats for Education Reform. "It's going to create a lot of discomfort and some upheaval. But you can't keep a lid on it."
Caught in the Matrix
When Davis Guggenheim got a call from a studio executive in 2007 asking him to make a movie about public schools, he said no. He was on vacation, having just ridden a heady wave of publicity from the success of An Inconvenient Truth. He said, "I don't know if you can go there because it's just so complicated." (Apparently, you can ask a man to make a movie about Al Gore, a slideshow and global warming, but if you want him to get people to pay attention to education reform, well, sir, now you've gone too far.)
Nearly every President since John F. Kennedy has vowed to be the "education President," to finally lift our schools to a level befitting the richest nation in the world. But since the early 1970s, high schoolers' math and reading scores have barely budged. We have the smallest elementary class sizes we've had in 45 years, and yet our kids ? even more affluent, suburban kids ? perform worse than kids in comparable nations. Teenagers are now less likely to graduate from high school than their parents were. (See how to recruit better teachers.)
In all this time, we have made many earnest changes ? from school uniforms to phonics to new textbooks. And yet we have hardly touched the fundamentals. "It is unbelievable how little has changed since I went to school," says Geoffrey Canada, a veteran education reformer in Harlem who is 58. "And for generations, it has not worked. It's like we're caught in the Matrix."
By now, we're all exhausted by the cycles of crisis and stasis. It's part of what makes education reform so grueling: education policy is made at the local level, so the opinions of parents, community leaders and the rest of the public matter enormously, but the public has lost faith in the exercise. The Time poll suggests that Americans have gotten more pessimistic about schools than they were just four years ago. Of those surveyed, 65% said our schools are not preparing kids well for the challenges ahead.
Waiting for "Superman" is a new film by Davis Guggenheim, the Academy Award ? winning director of An Inconvenient Truth, a movie that took on another mind-numbingly complex issue and, confounding all logic, grossed $50 million worldwide ? and changed the way many Americans think about climate change.
In anticipation of Superman's Sept. 24 release, screenings are being held all over the country for elite audiences ? Bill Gates has become an evangelist for the film ? and for education activists, including ones who help kids who have dropped out. So it was that Crystal Rojas, 19, sat down in the stadium seating in Chicago to watch a movie that might have been loosely based on her life. She nodded when she saw footage of things she recognized, like teachers reading newspapers in class. She raised her eyebrows when she saw how much America spends per pupil ? far more than almost every country in the world does. (See what you can do to help the education system.)
At the end, her eyes filled with tears. Rojas had long believed that her problems in school were all her fault. In fifth grade, her teacher told her that she wouldn't amount to much. "She said, 'It doesn't matter if you learn. Your future is determined.'" And for a while it seemed as if her teacher had been right. In sixth grade, Rojas tried to transfer to a charter school, but it was full. So she stayed in her neighborhood public school, where only 1 in 5 students was doing math at grade level. Then she went to a vocational high school where, she says, she spent almost three hours a day in a typing class. "I would just go there and feel like I was wasting space. So I thought, Why should I keep coming?" She dropped out two weeks into 10th grade.
Rojas has since earned her GED and is studying business administration at a community college. Her future is not certain, but nor is it lost. Watching the movie, she heard that teacher's voice in her head all over again. And she started to think that maybe there is a problem in America's schools, and that it is bigger than Crystal Rojas.
Waiting for "Superman" is a documentary that follows five kids and their parents as they try to escape their neighborhood public schools for higher-performing public charter schools. The movie serves up a lot of clarifying statistics about the problems facing education reform, explaining how it could be that the U.S. since 1971 has more than doubled the money it spends per pupil yet still trails most other rich nations in science and math scores. But the film succeeds because it also lays out the solutions, something no one could credibly attempt to do until very recently. (See 21 ways to serve America.)
Today, several decades into America's long, tedious fight over how to upend the status quo in public education, three remarkable things are happening simultaneously. First, thanks partly to the blunt instruments of No Child Left Behind, we can now track how well individual students are doing from year to year ? and figure out which schools are working and which are not. Most Americans think testing is a spurious trend; a new TIME poll found that only 1 out of 5 people surveyed felt that testing has had a positive effect in schools. But as the tests get better, we are starting to be able to see in the dark. We can track what works ? and what doesn't ? in the classroom, something that had been for all of history a matter of conjecture and hearsay. And while the data isn't perfect, it's far better than any other yardstick we've ever had before.
Second, legions of public schools ? some charters, some not ? are succeeding while others flounder. These successful schools are altering fundamentals that were for so long untouchable, by insisting on great teachers, more class time and higher standards. We now know that it is possible to teach every kid, even poor kids with wretched home lives, to read, write and do math and science at respectable levels. In Harlem, low-income African-American students at these schools are performing on par with kids across New York City and the state. And the researchers studying their success have learned that what matters more than anything else in the school is the teacher, the one person in the building whose job has changed the least in the past half-century.
The third novelty is in Washington, where a Democratic President is standing up to his party's most dysfunctional long-term romantic interest, the teachers' unions. President Barack Obama and his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, have dangled $4.35 billion in stimulus money in front of cash-strapped state legislatures to get them to rationalize their systems. Overnight, the White House has become the biggest benefactor in the education world, far surpassing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The competition, known as Race to the Top, is pushing school districts to raise academic standards, to evaluate teachers based in part on how much their students are learning, to train teachers more effectively ? and to remove those who are not cut out for the job.
In the states' response, we are witnessing what may be the beginning of a commonsense revolution. Seven states have enacted laws to remove firewalls between student achievement and teacher evaluations. At least 12 states have passed laws requiring student-progress data to be used in making teacher-evaluation or tenure decisions, a notion that would have been unimaginable five years ago. And 35 states and the District of Columbia have agreed to adopt common standards for what kids should learn at every grade level. Recently, officials from more than one European nation have contacted education reformers to learn how they could do something like Race to the Top in their own countries. (See 25 responsibility pioneers.)
The pace of change is, relatively speaking, breathtaking. A couple of weeks ago, the Los Angeles Times released a searchable database of 6,000 teachers, ranked by their effectiveness on the basis of how much their students had improved on standardized tests during a year in their classrooms. The newspaper got access to the data through California's Public Records Act ? and hired a seasoned education analyst to crunch the numbers. The charts reveal huge disparities among teachers in the same buildings, disparities that in many cases hold up over seven years of data.
The response started out predictably. The local teachers' union called for a boycott of the paper. But more than 1,100 teachers also answered the paper's invitation to see their data before it came out. And in a startling sign of the times, a Democratic Education Secretary offered his cautious support. "Why, in education, are we scared to talk about what success looks like?" Duncan asked in a speech. He acknowledged that a newspaper was not the ideal forum for teachers to get performance feedback, but he stressed a more important question: Why did it take a newspaper to do what the school district should have done years ago? "The fact that teachers did not have this information is ridiculous." Days later, the Los Angeles School Board endorsed using the data as part of teacher evaluations. Now the district must negotiate with the union to see if they can agree on a way to do so. (See the case for national service.)
It's worth noting that these are early days. The vast majority of American kids have yet to be affected by any of these changes. But the drumbeat is hard to ignore. Instead of continuing to rely on tradition and interest groups to set education policy, which is like using astrology to design a space program, we may be on the cusp of running schools ? brace yourself ? according to what actually works. "Little by little, the curtain is being peeled back," says Charles Barone of Democrats for Education Reform. "It's going to create a lot of discomfort and some upheaval. But you can't keep a lid on it."
Caught in the Matrix
When Davis Guggenheim got a call from a studio executive in 2007 asking him to make a movie about public schools, he said no. He was on vacation, having just ridden a heady wave of publicity from the success of An Inconvenient Truth. He said, "I don't know if you can go there because it's just so complicated." (Apparently, you can ask a man to make a movie about Al Gore, a slideshow and global warming, but if you want him to get people to pay attention to education reform, well, sir, now you've gone too far.)
Nearly every President since John F. Kennedy has vowed to be the "education President," to finally lift our schools to a level befitting the richest nation in the world. But since the early 1970s, high schoolers' math and reading scores have barely budged. We have the smallest elementary class sizes we've had in 45 years, and yet our kids ? even more affluent, suburban kids ? perform worse than kids in comparable nations. Teenagers are now less likely to graduate from high school than their parents were. (See how to recruit better teachers.)
In all this time, we have made many earnest changes ? from school uniforms to phonics to new textbooks. And yet we have hardly touched the fundamentals. "It is unbelievable how little has changed since I went to school," says Geoffrey Canada, a veteran education reformer in Harlem who is 58. "And for generations, it has not worked. It's like we're caught in the Matrix."
By now, we're all exhausted by the cycles of crisis and stasis. It's part of what makes education reform so grueling: education policy is made at the local level, so the opinions of parents, community leaders and the rest of the public matter enormously, but the public has lost faith in the exercise. The Time poll suggests that Americans have gotten more pessimistic about schools than they were just four years ago. Of those surveyed, 65% said our schools are not preparing kids well for the challenges ahead.
In the states' response, we are witnessing what may be the beginning of a commonsense revolution. Seven states have enacted laws to remove firewalls between student achievement and teacher evaluations. At least 12 states have passed laws requiring student-progress data to be used in making teacher-evaluation or tenure decisions, a notion that would have been unimaginable five years ago. And 35 states and the District of Columbia have agreed to adopt common standards for what kids should learn at every grade level. Recently, officials from more than one European nation have contacted education reformers to learn how they could do something like Race to the Top in their own countries. (See 25 responsibility pioneers.)
The pace of change is, relatively speaking, breathtaking. A couple of weeks ago, the Los Angeles Times released a searchable database of 6,000 teachers, ranked by their effectiveness on the basis of how much their students had improved on standardized tests during a year in their classrooms. The newspaper got access to the data through California's Public Records Act ? and hired a seasoned education analyst to crunch the numbers. The charts reveal huge disparities among teachers in the same buildings, disparities that in many cases hold up over seven years of data.
The response started out predictably. The local teachers' union called for a boycott of the paper. But more than 1,100 teachers also answered the paper's invitation to see their data before it came out. And in a startling sign of the times, a Democratic Education Secretary offered his cautious support. "Why, in education, are we scared to talk about what success looks like?" Duncan asked in a speech. He acknowledged that a newspaper was not the ideal forum for teachers to get performance feedback, but he stressed a more important question: Why did it take a newspaper to do what the school district should have done years ago? "The fact that teachers did not have this information is ridiculous." Days later, the Los Angeles School Board endorsed using the data as part of teacher evaluations. Now the district must negotiate with the union to see if they can agree on a way to do so. (See the case for national service.)
It's worth noting that these are early days. The vast majority of American kids have yet to be affected by any of these changes. But the drumbeat is hard to ignore. Instead of continuing to rely on tradition and interest groups to set education policy, which is like using astrology to design a space program, we may be on the cusp of running schools ? brace yourself ? according to what actually works. "Little by little, the curtain is being peeled back," says Charles Barone of Democrats for Education Reform. "It's going to create a lot of discomfort and some upheaval. But you can't keep a lid on it."
Caught in the Matrix
When Davis Guggenheim got a call from a studio executive in 2007 asking him to make a movie about public schools, he said no. He was on vacation, having just ridden a heady wave of publicity from the success of An Inconvenient Truth. He said, "I don't know if you can go there because it's just so complicated." (Apparently, you can ask a man to make a movie about Al Gore, a slideshow and global warming, but if you want him to get people to pay attention to education reform, well, sir, now you've gone too far.)
Nearly every President since John F. Kennedy has vowed to be the "education President," to finally lift our schools to a level befitting the richest nation in the world. But since the early 1970s, high schoolers' math and reading scores have barely budged. We have the smallest elementary class sizes we've had in 45 years, and yet our kids ? even more affluent, suburban kids ? perform worse than kids in comparable nations. Teenagers are now less likely to graduate from high school than their parents were. (See how to recruit better teachers.)
In all this time, we have made many earnest changes ? from school uniforms to phonics to new textbooks. And yet we have hardly touched the fundamentals. "It is unbelievable how little has changed since I went to school," says Geoffrey Canada, a veteran education reformer in Harlem who is 58. "And for generations, it has not worked. It's like we're caught in the Matrix."
By now, we're all exhausted by the cycles of crisis and stasis. It's part of what makes education reform so grueling: education policy is made at the local level, so the opinions of parents, community leaders and the rest of the public matter enormously, but the public has lost faith in the exercise. The Time poll suggests that Americans have gotten more pessimistic about schools than they were just four years ago. Of those surveyed, 65% said our schools are not preparing kids well for the challenges ahead.
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