waiting for superman

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">belated</font><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">re’s what you see in&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: inherit;">Waiting for Superman</em>, the new documentary that celebrates the charter school movement while blaming teachers unions for much of what ails American education: working- and middle-class parents desperate to get their charming, healthy, well-behaved children into successful public charter schools.</font></p><div class="scroll_handler" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><p /><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Here’s what you don’t see:</b> the four out of five charters that are no better, on average, than traditional neighborhood public schools (and are sometimes much worse); charter school teachers, like those at the Green Dot schools in Los Angeles, who are unionized and like it that way; and noncharter neighborhood public schools, like PS 83 in East Harlem and the George Hall Elementary School in Mobile, Alabama, that are nationally recognized for successfully educating poor children.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">You don’t see teen moms, households without an adult English speaker or headed by a drug addict, or any of the millions of children who never have a chance to enter a charter school lottery (or get help with their homework or a nice breakfast) because adults simply aren’t engaged in their education. These children, of course, are often the ones who are most difficult to educate, and the ones neighborhood public schools can’t turn away.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>You also don’t learn that in the Finnish education system, much cited in the film as the best in the world, teachers are—gasp!—unionized and granted tenure,</b> and families benefit from a cradle-to-grave social welfare system that includes universal daycare, preschool and healthcare, all of which are proven to help children achieve better results at school.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In other words,&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: inherit;">Waiting for Superman</em>&nbsp;is a moving but vastly oversimplified brief on American educational inequality. Nevertheless, it has been greeted by rapturous reviews.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">"Can One Little Movie Save America’s Schools?" asked the cover of&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: inherit;">New York&nbsp;</em>magazine. On September 20&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: inherit;">The Oprah Winfrey Show</em>&nbsp;featured the<b> film’s director, Davis Guggenheim, of&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: inherit;">An Inconvenient Truth</em></b>. Tom Friedman of the&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: inherit;">New York Times</em>&nbsp;devoted a column to praising the film.&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: inherit;">Time</em>&nbsp;published an education issue coinciding with the documentary’s release and is planning a conference built in part around the school reform strategies the film endorses. NBC, too, will host an education reform conference in late September;&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: inherit;">Waiting for Superman</em>&nbsp;will be screened and debated there, and many of the reformers involved in its production will be there. Katie Couric of&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: inherit;">CBS Evening News</em>&nbsp;has promised a series of segments based on the movie.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Meanwhile, mega-philanthropist Bill Gates, who appears in&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: inherit;">Waiting for Superman</em>, hit the road in early September to promote the film;</b> while he was at it, he told an audience at the Toronto International Film Festival that school districts should cut pension payments for retired teachers. Other players in the free-market school reform movement, most of whom had seen the documentary at early screenings for opinion leaders and policy-makers, anticipated its September 24 release with cautious optimism.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The media excitement around the film "is beginning to open up an overdue public conversation," says Amy Wilkins, vice president at the Washington advocacy group Education Trust. "Do I think the coverage is always elegant and superior and perfect? No. Of course there is going to be some bumbling and stumbling. But the fact that the film is provoking this conversation is really important for teachers and kids."</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Indeed, a tense public sparring match over the achievement gap, unions and the future of the teaching profession is already under way. In August the&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: inherit;">Los Angeles Times</em>&nbsp;defied the protests of unions and many education policy experts by publishing a searchable online database of elementary school teachers’ effectiveness rankings. The newspaper’s calculations were made using a new statistical method called value-added measurement, which is based on children’s standardized test scores and which social scientists across the political spectrum agree is volatile and often flawed.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In Washington, Mayor Adrian Fenty lost his re-election bid in part because of black voters’ skepticism toward his aggressive school reform efforts, led by lightning-rod schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, who pursued an agenda of closing troubled neighborhood schools, instituting a privately funded merit-pay program for teachers and firing teachers and principals deemed ineffective. And at the federal level, President Obama’s signature education program, the Race to the Top grant competition, pressures states to implement many of the most controversial teacher reforms, including merit pay based on value-added measurement.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yet under the radar of this polarized debate, union affiliates across the country are coming to the table to talk about effective teaching in a more meaningful way than they ever have before. These stories of cooperation, from Pittsburgh to Memphis, are rarely being told, in part because national union leaders are worried about vocally stepping out beyond their members, and in part because of the media’s tendency to finger-point at organized labor.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">As in the work of influential magazine writer Steven Brill, this intra-union ferment is ignored in&nbsp;</span><em style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: inherit;">Waiting for Superman</em><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. The film presents teachers unions as the villains in the struggle to close the achievement gap, despite their long history of advocating for more school funding, smaller class sizes and better school resources and facilities. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Guggenheim represents the unions through Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.5 million–member American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Ominous music plays during some of her interviews, which are presented alongside footage of Harlem Children’s Zone founder Geoffrey Canada and former Milwaukee superintendent and school-voucher proponent Howard Fuller complaining that union contracts protect bad teachers.</span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>But in real life, Weingarten is the union leader most credited by even free-market education reformers with being committed to retooling the teaching profession to better emphasize professional excellence and student achievement.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"The education landscape has changed pretty profoundly, and the unions have to adapt," says Tim Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a Teach for America (TFA) offshoot often seen as a counterweight to the power of unions and teachers colleges. "It’s no longer just school districts they’re dealing with but charter schools, accountability measures that flow from Washington and new governance structures such as mayoral control and state takeovers.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Teachers unions have really struggled over the last two decades to recruit good, visionary new leadership prepared to help the unions navigate this," Daly continues. "There are exceptions. The most glaring, notable exception is Randi. She has a long career ahead of her."</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: inherit;">Waiting for Superman</em>&nbsp;companion book, Guggenheim writes about his struggle, as a lifelong liberal, over how to present teachers unions in the film. "Their role in education is not a black-and-white one," he admits. "I’ve gotten to know union leaders who I think understand that the reforms we need will mean some serious adjustments on the part of their members, and that we need to rethink the rigid systems we’ve gotten locked into since the New Deal era. At the same time, these progressive union leaders can’t get too far ahead of their members. And they understandably don’t want to give aid and comfort to some politicians who are in fact anti-worker and are at least as interested in undermining the power of labor as they are in improving our schools."</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>The movie, though, does not attempt any such balancing act. </b>It presents Rhee as a heroine whose hands are tied by the union. Yet in April, after Rhee’s administration finally collaborated with education experts and the union to create a new, detailed teacher evaluation system tied to the district’s curriculum, the Washington Teachers Union and AFT agreed to a contract that includes many of Rhee’s priorities, including her merit-pay plan and an unprecedented weakening of tenure protections.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The film doesn’t acknowledge that Bill Gates, who began his philanthropic career deeply skeptical of teachers unions, has lately embraced them as essential players in the fight for school improvement.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> His foundation finances a program in Boston called Turnaround Teacher Teams, which works with the district and its teachers union to move cohorts of experienced, highly rated instructors into high-needs schools, while giving them extra training and support.</span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In July Gates spoke at the American Federation of Teachers convention</b> in Seattle, saying, "If reforms aren’t shaped by teachers’ knowledge and experience, they’re not going to succeed." A few protesters booed, but he received several standing ovations. Members of the Gates Foundation staff later met with AFT executives, and the two teams discussed ways to collaborate, despite lingering differences on issues like teacher pensions.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When I spoke with Weingarten in late August at her office on Capitol Hill, she was livid about&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: inherit;">Waiting for Superman</em>, referring to its charter school triumphalism as an example of "magic dust." "There’s always pressure to find the one thing that’s going to be the shortcut," she said. But she was ecstatic about improved relations with Gates and angry that, in her view, the mainstream media have ignored the news of their rapprochement. "The media want conflict," she said. "They don’t let us tell our story."</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Younger teachers are often the driving force behind union-backed reforms. In Denver in 2008, a group of them launched Denver Teachers for Change, which grew into a 350-member coalition dedicated to supporting performance pay and other student achievement–focused reforms while preserving organized labor’s voice at the negotiating table. In Colorado earlier this year, the AFT state affiliate signed on to the state’s Race to the Top application, which promised to make student achievement data count for up to 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation score, potentially totally reforming the process by which tenure is granted.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In Memphis the teachers union has worked alongside the New Teacher Project to move some of the best teachers into the highest-poverty schools. The Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers agreed to a performance-pay system for all new hires and to adding a year to the tenure-granting process. In the small city of Evansville, Indiana, the local affiliate of the National Education Association (NEA) worked with the superintendent to craft a turnaround model for three low-performing schools that includes a longer school year and a professional development academy for teachers working with high-poverty kids.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Weingarten admits that because systemic school reform is often about boring topics such as the scalability and sustainability of success in a field "littered with pilot programs," it can be difficult to add complexity to the media war over teaching. "We’ve never figured out how to tell that story in a compelling way," she says.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The unions are also hurt by public frustration with teacher tenure, a level of job security inconceivable to most American workers, who are barely hanging on during a recession with a nearly 10 percent unemployment rate.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>"Only 7 percent of American workers are in unions," Weingarten says, adding matter-of-factly, "America looks at us as islands of privilege."</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">* * *</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It’s true that nobody loves a good fight more than a journalist; after all, a story with a bad guy is much more interesting than one in which it is unclear exactly whom to blame for what went wrong.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Perhaps the writer most associated with the teachers-unions-as-villains narrative is Brill, the Court TV founder cum promoter of micropayments for online news. </b>In August 2009&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: inherit;">The New Yorker</em>&nbsp;published Brill’s report on New York City’s "rubber rooms,"</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> an exposé focused on the one-twentieth of 1 percent of the district’s 80,000 public school teachers (about forty people) who had been removed from the classroom because of gross negligence, such as failing to teach at all or verbally harassing students. Nevertheless, because these teachers had been granted tenure by the district, their contracts—negotiated between the Education Department and their union, the United Federation of Teachers—entitled them to a full salary until a due process hearing determined whether they would be fired or reassigned. While they awaited hearings, sometimes for as long as three years, the UFT portrayed some rubber room teachers as innocent victims of "seniority purges," ignoring evidence of incompetence including, in one case, alcohol abuse. (Many teachers, it turns out, are opposed to such efforts. According to a 2003 Public Agenda poll, 47 percent of them believe "the union sometimes fights to protect teachers who really should be out of the classroom.")</span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In part because of the outcry generated by the&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: inherit;">New Yorker</em>&nbsp;piece among the city’s elite—many of whom do not send their children to public schools and are ignorant of the system’s inner workings—the Education Department and the UFT have phased out rubber rooms.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Brill’s crusade continued in a May&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: inherit;">New York Times Magazine</em>&nbsp;feature called "The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand," which praised the Obama administration’s attempt to tie teacher evaluations to children’s standardized test scores, a policy the UFT opposed until recently. In one section of the article, Brill visits the building on 118th Street in Harlem that houses both PS 149 and the Harlem Success Academy, a charter school known for its tough discipline, rigid test prep and high scores. He praises the charter school’s longer day, uniforms and involved teachers, and criticizes the public school for showing students a film during the school day and providing its employees with a more generous pension plan.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Neither article contains a single scene set in a competently managed public school classroom, nor a single interview with a respected, effective public or charter school teacher who appreciates his or her union representation. (There are many such people. A 2007 poll of teachers conducted by the think tank Education Sector found that only 11 percent believed a union was "something you could do without." A March 2010 Gates Foundation/Scholastic poll of 40,000 teachers found that on issues such as evaluation, pay and benefits, most are roughly in line with their unions.) Brill portrays the UFT as almost the sole force preventing Mayor Michael Bloomberg and schools chancellor Joel Klein from transforming the city’s public schools, ignoring issues like segregation and poverty, as well as evidence that the higher graduation rates and test scores the Education Department advertises are the result of lower standards, narrowed curriculums and massaged data.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Brill is working on a book about education reform, to be published by Simon and Schuster. His first book,&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: inherit;">Teamsters</em>, was released in 1978 and told the story of internal corruption and reform within that union.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Despite their one-sidedness, the influential Brill pieces, followed by the much-hyped release of&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: inherit;">Waiting for Superman</em>, present a public relations crisis for the two national teachers unions, the AFT and the larger NEA, which has 3.2 million members.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In Washington in August, I had coffee with a lanky 25-year-old Teach for America veteran named Dustin Thomas, who had ascended from teaching high school social studies to a district office job recruiting preschoolers for early intervention programs. Thomas, who founded the group Educators for Fenty, is exactly the sort of young, politically active education reformer teachers unions will need to engage to stay relevant. He grew up in Dallas, attended the University of Oklahoma and decided to pursue a career in education after a friend was killed in gun violence.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"The person who pulled the trigger could have used someone like my friend in his life," said Thomas, who sometimes sounds exactly like a committed union leader. "The amount of work that teachers put into bringing results for our kids is not represented in the picture of us," he complained. "The paycheck is not the motivation."</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yet Thomas became visibly uncomfortable when I brought up the Washington Teachers Union or teacher unionism in general. He avoided even saying the word "union," finally telling me, after a long pause, "I had some incredible veteran teachers around me. But we saw teachers in the school who were so far removed from making sure kids were learning, it was shocking. People are glad there’s a process now."</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thomas was referring to Rhee’s July dismissal of 241 teachers, which the union contested. The AFT spent more than $1 million in support of Fenty’s opponent, City Council chair Vincent Gray, who ran on a platform of "one city," promising to push forward on school reform while working harder to collaborate with those angry about Rhee’s teacher firings and school closings, and her perceived dismissive attitude toward the local black communities who were losing jobs and institutions. (A typical Rhee comment: "Collaboration and consensus building are quite frankly overrated in my mind.")</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It’s unclear now what will happen to Thomas’s job working for Rhee, or whether the election results will lead him to reconsider his skeptical stance toward unions, which remain powerful across the country. Thomas’s attitude is the kind that frustrates Alex Caputo-Pearl, an eighteen-year veteran of the Los Angeles public schools and member of Progressive Educators for Action (PEAC), which works for reform from within the United Teachers of Los Angeles.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 1990 Caputo-Pearl graduated from Brown and became part of the first class of TFA recruits. Since then, his opinions on school reform have diverged significantly from those of TFA and many of its alums. He believes that teaching is a kind of community organizing and has worked with parents, for example, to bring more computers into high-poverty Crenshaw High School and to advocate for a more culturally relevant curriculum for students of color. (As a reward for his efforts, the district branded him a troublemaker in 2006 and transferred him to a school across town. Students and parents protested, and he was reinstated. Without tenure, he might have been fired.)</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Caputo-Pearl sees unionization as key to this work. "What we’re promoting is the idea that teachers unions need to become social justice unions," he says. "There certainly are parts of the union leadership and bureaucracy across the country that would argue the public schools are basically doing what they need to do right now and there’s not a need for basic reform within the system, other than more funding. PEAC has never believed that is the case, especially in communities of color, and has been in the lead of trying to promote reform models, whether it be around small learning communities or around schools partnering with trusted outside organizations to have more autonomy."</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For Caputo-Pearl, the&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: inherit;">Los Angeles Times</em>&nbsp;teacher rankings are a distraction from what he calls "real school reform." "Data! There’s a good term out there," he says with a laugh. "There are all sorts of problems with standardized tests, but that doesn’t mean you don’t look at them as one small tool to inform instruction. You do. The problem with value-added, on top of its severe lack of reliability and validity, is that if you use it in a high-stakes way where teachers are constantly thinking about it in relationship to their evaluations, you will smother a lot of the beautiful instincts that drive the inside of a school, with teachers talking to each other, collaborating and teaming up to support students."</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That message is part of Weingarten’s strategy for how to hit back against&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: inherit;">Waiting for Superman</em>. She has been telling the press that teaching is more an art than a science, and quoting Einstein: "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." She’s also planning a new proposal for fighting the high school dropout crisis and says she’s going to "stay positive and focus on how you invest in kids."</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dennis van Roekel, Weingarten’s counterpart at the NEA, is also worried about the documentary. His media strategy for the year is to launch a "commission on quality teaching" made up of "teachers of the year," he says. The idea is to amplify teachers’ voices in debates about the future of the profession.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ultimately, though, a new generation of educators, more and more of whom, like Dustin Thomas, have come up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed through alternative certification programs like TFA, will judge teachers unions on whether they share the commitment that motivates many of the best teachers to enter the profession: a drive toward eradicating the achievement gap. Unions will need to make the case through actions and words, not least because of a hostile media climate that stacks the deck against them.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px auto 20px; word-wrap: break-word; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; border: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"If teachers unions don’t make a turn toward the social justice union model, along with fighting for more funding, it’s going to mean not just a fundamental weakening of the union but frankly a real possibility of unions passing into history," says Caputo-Pearl. "It’s a necessity to fight with and for a broad sector of society that includes teachers, but also the families and the kids we serve. Otherwise, unions, and more significantly, truly public, accessible and equitable education, will go out of existence.</font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.thenation.com/article/grading-waiting-superman/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Ordinarily, documentaries about education attract little attention, and seldom, if ever, reach neighborhood movie theaters. Davis Guggenheim’s&nbsp;<i>Waiting for “Superman”</i>&nbsp;is different. It arrived in late September with the biggest publicity splash I have ever seen for a documentary. Not only was it the subject of major stories in&nbsp;<i>Time</i>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<i>New York</i>, but it was featured twice on&nbsp;<i>The Oprah Winfrey Show</i>&nbsp;and was the centerpiece of several days of programming by NBC, including an interview with President Obama.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Two other films expounding the same arguments—<i>The Lottery</i>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<i>The Cartel</i>—were released in the late spring, but they received far less attention than Guggenheim’s film. His reputation as the director of the Academy Award–winning&nbsp;<i>An Inconvenient Truth</i>, about global warming, contributed to the anticipation surrounding&nbsp;<i>Waiting for “Superman,”</i>&nbsp;but the media frenzy suggested something more. Guggenheim presents the popularized version of an account of American public education that is promoted by some of the nation’s most powerful figures and institutions.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The message of these films has become alarmingly familiar: American public education is a failed enterprise. The problem is not money. Public schools already spend too much. Test scores are low because there are so many bad teachers, whose jobs are protected by powerful unions. Students drop out because the schools fail them, but they could accomplish practically anything if they were saved from bad teachers. They would get higher test scores if schools could fire more bad teachers and pay more to good ones. The only hope for the future of our society, especially for poor black and Hispanic children, is escape from public schools, especially to charter schools, which are mostly funded by the government but controlled by private organizations, many of them operating to make a profit.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><i>The Cartel</i>&nbsp;maintains that we must not only create more charter schools, but provide vouchers so that children can flee incompetent public schools and attend private schools. There, we are led to believe, teachers will be caring and highly skilled (unlike the lazy dullards in public schools); the schools will have high expectations and test scores will soar; and all children will succeed academically, regardless of their circumstances.&nbsp;<i>The Lottery</i>&nbsp;echoes the main story line of&nbsp;<i>Waiting for “Superman”</i>: it is about children who are desperate to avoid the New York City public schools and eager to win a spot in a shiny new charter school in Harlem.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">For many people, these arguments require a willing suspension of disbelief. Most Americans graduated from public schools, and most went from school to college or the workplace without thinking that their school had limited their life chances. There was a time—which now seems distant—when most people assumed that students’ performance in school was largely determined by their own efforts and by the circumstances and support of their family, not by their teachers. There were good teachers and mediocre teachers, even bad teachers, but in the end, most public schools offered ample opportunity for education to those willing to pursue it. The annual Gallup poll about education shows that Americans are overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the quality of the nation’s schools, but 77 percent of public school parents award their own child’s public school a grade of A or B, the highest level of approval since the question was first asked in 1985.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><i>Waiting for “Superman”</i>&nbsp;and the other films appeal to a broad apprehension that the nation is falling behind in global competition. If the economy is a shambles, if poverty persists for significant segments of the population, if American kids are not as serious about their studies as their peers in other nations, the schools must be to blame. At last we have the culprit on which we can pin our anger, our palpable sense that something is very wrong with our society, that we are on the wrong track, and that America is losing the race for global dominance. It is not globalization or deindustrialization or poverty or our coarse popular culture or predatory financial practices that bear responsibility: it’s the public schools, their teachers, and their unions.</p><p class="initial" style="margin: 30px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The inspiration for&nbsp;<i>Waiting for “Superman”</i>&nbsp;began, Guggenheim explains, as he drove his own children to a private school, past the neighborhood schools with low test scores. He wondered about the fate of the children whose families did not have the choice of schools available to his own children. What was the quality of their education? He was sure it must be terrible. The press release for the film says that he wondered, “How heartsick and worried did&nbsp;<i>their</i>&nbsp;parents feel as they dropped their kids off this morning?” Guggenheim is a graduate of Sidwell Friends, the elite private school in Washington, D.C., where President Obama’s daughters are enrolled. The public schools that he passed by each morning must have seemed as hopeless and dreadful to him as the public schools in Washington that his own parents had shunned.</p><div id="article-p1" data-google-query-id="CKzkivfss9QCFU6EYgod6vQNkQ" style="margin-bottom: 15px; text-align: center; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><i>Waiting for “Superman”</i>&nbsp;tells the story of five children who enter a lottery to win a coveted place in a charter school. Four of them seek to escape the public schools; one was asked to leave a Catholic school because her mother couldn’t afford the tuition. Four of the children are black or Hispanic and live in gritty neighborhoods, while the one white child lives in a leafy suburb. We come to know each of these children and their families; we learn about their dreams for the future; we see that they are lovable; and we identify with them. By the end of the film, we are rooting for them as the day of the lottery approaches.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In each of the schools to which they have applied, the odds against them are large. Anthony, a fifth-grader in Washington, D.C., applies to the SEED charter boarding school, where there are sixty-one applicants for twenty-four places. Francisco is a first-grade student in the Bronx whose mother (a social worker with a graduate degree) is desperate to get him out of the New York City public schools and into a charter school; she applies to Harlem Success Academy where he is one of 792 applicants for forty places. Bianca is the kindergarten student in Harlem whose mother cannot afford Catholic school tuition; she enters the lottery at another Harlem Success Academy, as one of 767 students competing for thirty-five openings. Daisy is a fifth-grade student in East Los Angeles whose parents hope she can win a spot at KIPP LA PREP, where 135 students have applied for ten places. Emily is an eighth-grade student in Silicon Valley, where the local high school has gorgeous facilities, high graduation rates, and impressive test scores, but her family worries that she will be assigned to a slow track because of her low test scores; so they enter the lottery for Summit Preparatory Charter High School, where she is one of 455 students competing for 110 places.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The stars of the film are Geoffrey Canada, the CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone, which provides a broad variety of social services to families and children and runs two charter schools; Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the Washington, D.C., public school system, who closed schools, fired teachers and principals, and gained a national reputation for her tough policies; David Levin and Michael Feinberg, who have built a network of nearly one hundred high-performing KIPP charter schools over the past sixteen years; and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who is cast in the role of chief villain. Other charter school leaders, like Steve Barr of the Green Dot chain in Los Angeles, do star turns, as does Bill Gates of Microsoft, whose foundation has invested many millions of dollars in expanding the number of charter schools. No successful public school teacher or principal or superintendent appears in the film; indeed there is no mention of any successful public school, only the incessant drumbeat on the theme of public school failure.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The situation is dire, the film warns us. We must act. But what must we do? The message of the film is clear. Public schools are bad, privately managed charter schools are good. Parents clamor to get their children out of the public schools in New York City (despite the claims by Mayor Michael Bloomberg that the city’s schools are better than ever) and into the charters (the mayor also plans to double the number of charters, to help more families escape from the public schools that he controls). If we could fire the bottom 5 to 10 percent of the lowest-performing teachers every year, says Hoover Institution economist Eric Hanushek in the film, our national test scores would soon approach the top of international rankings in mathematics and science.</p><p class="initial" style="margin: 30px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Some fact-checking is in order, and the place to start is with the film’s quiet acknowledgment that only one in five charter schools is able to get the “amazing results” that it celebrates. Nothing more is said about this astonishing statistic. It is drawn from a national study of charter schools by Stanford economist Margaret Raymond (the wife of Hanushek). Known as the CREDO study, it evaluated student progress on math tests in half the nation’s five thousand charter schools and concluded that 17 percent were superior to a matched traditional public school; 37 percent were worse than the public school; and the remaining 46 percent had academic gains no different from that of a similar public school. The proportion of charters that get amazing results is far smaller than 17 percent.Why did Davis Guggenheim pay no attention to the charter schools that are run by incompetent leaders or corporations mainly concerned to make money? Why propound to an unknowing public the myth that charter schools are the answer to our educational woes, when the filmmaker knows that there are twice as many failing charters as there are successful ones? Why not give an honest accounting?</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The propagandistic nature of&nbsp;<i>Waiting for “Superman”</i>&nbsp;is revealed by Guggenheim’s complete indifference to the wide variation among charter schools. There are excellent charter schools, just as there are excellent public schools. Why did he not also inquire into the charter chains that are mired in unsavory real estate deals, or take his camera to the charters where most students are getting lower scores than those in the neighborhood public schools? Why did he not report on the charter principals who have been indicted for embezzlement, or the charters that blur the line between church and state? Why did he not look into the charter schools whose leaders are paid $300,000–$400,000 a year to oversee small numbers of schools and students?</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Guggenheim seems to believe that teachers alone can overcome the effects of student poverty, even though there are countless studies that demonstrate the link between income and test scores. He shows us footage of the pilot Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier, to the amazement of people who said it couldn’t be done. Since Yeager broke the sound barrier, we should be prepared to believe that able teachers are all it takes to overcome the disadvantages of poverty, homelessness, joblessness, poor nutrition, absent parents, etc.</p><figure data-id="36857" class="wp-caption alignright" style="margin: 5px 0px 20px 20px; padding: 0px; float: right; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/ravitch_2-111110.jpg" style="color: rgb(153, 1, 1); text-decoration-line: none;"><img src="http://www.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/ravitch_2-111110.jpg" alt="ravitch_2-111110.jpg" width="630" height="339" class="size-full wp-image-36857" srcset="http://www.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/ravitch_2-111110.jpg 630w, http://www.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/ravitch_2-111110-125x67.jpg 125w" sizes="(max-width: 630px) 100vw, 630px" style="max-width: 100%; height: auto; vertical-align: middle; border: 0px; width: 250px;" /></a><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" style="font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.3em; padding: 5px 0px 0px; text-align: center; width: 250px;">
</figcaption></figure><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The movie asserts a central thesis in today’s school reform discussion: the idea that teachers are the most important factor determining student achievement. But this proposition is false. Hanushek has released studies showing that teacher quality accounts for about 7.5–10 percent of student test score gains. Several other high-quality analyses echo this finding, and while estimates vary a bit, there is a relative consensus: teachers statistically account for around 10–20 percent of achievement outcomes. Teachers are the most important factor within schools.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But the same body of research shows that nonschool factors matter even more than teachers. According to University of Washington economist Dan Goldhaber, about 60 percent of achievement is explained by nonschool factors, such as family income. So while teachers are the most important factor within schools, their effects pale in comparison with those of students’ backgrounds, families, and other factors beyond the control of schools and teachers. Teachers can have a profound effect on students, but it would be foolish to believe that teachers alone can undo the damage caused by poverty and its associated burdens.</p><p class="initial" style="margin: 30px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Guggenheim skirts the issue of poverty by showing only families that are intact and dedicated to helping their children succeed. One of the children he follows is raised by a doting grandmother; two have single mothers who are relentless in seeking better education for them; two of them live with a mother and father. Nothing is said about children whose families are not available, for whatever reason, to support them, or about children who are homeless, or children with special needs. Nor is there any reference to the many charter schools that enroll disproportionately small numbers of children who are English-language learners or have disabilities.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The film never acknowledges that charter schools were created mainly at the instigation of Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers from 1974 to 1997. Shanker had the idea in 1988 that a group of public school teachers would ask their colleagues for permission to create a small school that would focus on the neediest students, those who had dropped out and those who were disengaged from school and likely to drop out. He sold the idea as a way to open schools that would collaborate with public schools and help motivate disengaged students. In 1993, Shanker turned against the charter school idea when he realized that for-profit organizations saw it as a business opportunity and were advancing an agenda of school privatization. Michelle Rhee gained her teaching experience in Baltimore as an employee of Education Alternatives, Inc., one of the first of the for-profit operations.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Today, charter schools are promoted not as ways to collaborate with public schools but as competitors that will force them to get better or go out of business. In fact, they have become the force for privatization that Shanker feared. Because of the high-stakes testing regime created by President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, charter schools compete to get higher test scores than regular public schools and thus have an incentive to avoid students who might pull down their scores. Under NCLB, low-performing schools may be closed, while high-performing ones may get bonuses. Some charter schools “counsel out” or expel students just before state testing day. Some have high attrition rates, especially among lower-performing students.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Perhaps the greatest distortion in this film is its misrepresentation of data about student academic performance. The film claims that 70 percent of eighth-grade students cannot read at grade level. This is flatly wrong. Guggenheim here relies on numbers drawn from the federally sponsored National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). I served as a member of the governing board for the national tests for seven years, and I know how misleading Guggenheim’s figures are. NAEP doesn’t measure performance in terms of grade-level achievement. The highest level of performance, “advanced,” is equivalent to an A+, representing the highest possible academic performance. The next level, “proficient,” is equivalent to an A or a very strong B. The next level is “basic,” which probably translates into a C grade. The film assumes that any student below proficient is “below grade level.” But it would be far more fitting to worry about students who are “below basic,” who are 25 percent of the national sample, not 70 percent.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Guggenheim didn’t bother to take a close look at the heroes of his documentary. Geoffrey Canada is justly celebrated for the creation of the Harlem Children’s Zone, which not only runs two charter schools but surrounds children and their families with a broad array of social and medical services. Canada has a board of wealthy philanthropists and a very successful fund-raising apparatus. With assets of more than $200 million, his organization has no shortage of funds. Canada himself is currently paid $400,000 annually. For Guggenheim to praise Canada while also claiming that public schools don’t need any more money is bizarre. Canada’s charter schools get better results than nearby public schools serving impoverished students. If all inner-city schools had the same resources as his, they might get the same good results.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But contrary to the myth that Guggenheim propounds about “amazing results,” even Geoffrey Canada’s schools have many students who are not proficient. On the 2010 state tests, 60 percent of the fourth-grade students in one of his charter schools were not proficient in reading, nor were 50 percent in the other. It should be noted—and Guggenheim didn’t note it—that Canada kicked out his entire first class of middle school students when they didn’t get good enough test scores to satisfy his board of trustees. This sad event was documented by Paul Tough in his laudatory account of Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone,<i>&nbsp;Whatever It Takes (2009)</i>. Contrary to Guggenheim’s mythology, even the best-funded charters, with the finest services, can’t completely negate the effects of poverty.</p><p class="initial" style="margin: 30px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Guggenheim ignored other clues that might have gotten in the way of a good story. While blasting the teachers’ unions, he points to Finland as a nation whose educational system the US should emulate, not bothering to explain that it has a completely unionized teaching force. His documentary showers praise on testing and accountability, yet he does not acknowledge that Finland seldom tests its students. Any Finnish educator will say that Finland improved its public education system not by privatizing its schools or constantly testing its students, but by investing in the preparation, support, and retention of excellent teachers. It achieved its present eminence not by systematically firing 5–10 percent of its teachers, but by patiently building for the future. Finland has a national curriculum, which is not restricted to the basic skills of reading and math, but includes the arts, sciences, history, foreign languages, and other subjects that are essential to a good, rounded education. Finland also strengthened its social welfare programs for children and families. Guggenheim simply ignores the realities of the Finnish system.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In any school reform proposal, the question of “scalability” always arises. Can reforms be reproduced on a broad scale? The fact that one school produces amazing results is not in itself a demonstration that every other school can do the same. For example, Guggenheim holds up Locke High School in Los Angeles, part of the Green Dot charter chain, as a success story but does not tell the whole story. With an infusion of $15 million of mostly private funding, Green Dot produced a safer, cleaner campus, but no more than tiny improvements in its students’ abysmal test scores. According to the&nbsp;<i>Los Angeles Times</i>, the percentage of its students proficient in English rose from 13.7 percent in 2009 to 14.9 percent in 2010, while in math the proportion of proficient students grew from 4 percent to 6.7 percent. What can be learned from this small progress? Becoming a charter is no guarantee that a school serving a tough neighborhood will produce educational miracles.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Another highly praised school that is featured in the film is the SEED charter boarding school in Washington, D.C. SEED seems to deserve all the praise that it receives from Guggenheim, CBS’s&nbsp;<i>60 Minutes</i>, and elsewhere. It has remarkable rates of graduation and college acceptance. But SEED spends $35,000 per student, as compared to average current spending for public schools of about one third that amount. Is our society prepared to open boarding schools for tens of thousands of inner-city students and pay what it costs to copy the SEED model? Those who claim that better education for the neediest students won’t require more money cannot use SEED to support their argument.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Guggenheim seems to demand that public schools start firing “bad” teachers so they can get the great results that one of every five charter schools gets. But he never explains how difficult it is to identify “bad” teachers. If one looks only at test scores, teachers in affluent suburbs get higher ones. If one uses student gains or losses as a general measure, then those who teach the neediest children—English-language learners, troubled students, autistic students—will see the smallest gains, and teachers will have an incentive to avoid districts and classes with large numbers of the neediest students.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Ultimately the job of hiring teachers, evaluating them, and deciding who should stay and who should go falls to administrators. We should be taking a close look at those who award due process rights (the accurate term for “tenure”) to too many incompetent teachers. The best way to ensure that there are no bad or ineffective teachers in our public schools is to insist that we have principals and supervisors who are knowledgeable and experienced educators. Yet there is currently a vogue to recruit and train principals who have little or no education experience. (The George W. Bush Institute just announced its intention to train 50,000 new principals in the next decade and to recruit noneducators for this sensitive post.)</p><p class="initial" style="margin: 30px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><i>Waiting for “Superman”</i>&nbsp;is the most important public-relations coup that the critics of public education have made so far. Their power is not to be underestimated. For years, right-wing critics demanded vouchers and got nowhere. Now, many of them are watching in amazement as their ineffectual attacks on “government schools” and their advocacy of privately managed schools with public funding have become the received wisdom among liberal elites. Despite their uneven record, charter schools have the enthusiastic endorsement of the Obama administration, the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the Dell Foundation. In recent months,&nbsp;<i>The New York Times</i>&nbsp;has published three stories about how charter schools have become the favorite cause of hedge fund executives. According to the&nbsp;<i>Times</i>, when Andrew Cuomo wanted to tap into Wall Street money for his gubernatorial campaign, he had to meet with the executive director of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a pro-charter group.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Dominated by hedge fund managers who control billions of dollars, DFER has contributed heavily to political candidates for local and state offices who pledge to promote charter schools. (Its efforts to unseat incumbents in three predominantly black State Senate districts in New York City came to nothing; none of its hand-picked candidates received as much as 30 percent of the vote in the primary elections, even with the full-throated endorsement of the city’s tabloids.) Despite the loss of local elections and the defeat of Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty (who had appointed the controversial schools chancellor Michelle Rhee), the combined clout of these groups, plus the enormous power of the federal government and the uncritical support of the major media, presents a serious challenge to the viability and future of public education.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">It bears mentioning that nations with high-performing school systems—whether Korea, Singapore, Finland, or Japan—have succeeded not by privatizing their schools or closing those with low scores, but by strengthening the education profession. They also have less poverty than we do. Fewer than 5 percent of children in Finland live in poverty, as compared to 20 percent in the United States. Those who insist that poverty doesn’t matter, that only teachers matter, prefer to ignore such contrasts.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">If we are serious about improving our schools, we will take steps to improve our teacher force, as Finland and other nations have done. That would mean better screening to select the best candidates, higher salaries, better support and mentoring systems, and better working conditions. Guggenheim complains that only one in 2,500 teachers loses his or her teaching certificate, but fails to mention that 50 percent of those who enter teaching leave within five years, mostly because of poor working conditions, lack of adequate resources, and the stress of dealing with difficult children and disrespectful parents. Some who leave “fire themselves”; others were fired before they got tenure. We should also insist that only highly experienced teachers become principals (the “head teacher” in the school), not retired businessmen and military personnel. Every school should have a curriculum that includes a full range of studies, not just basic skills. And if we really are intent on school improvement, we must reduce the appalling rates of child poverty that impede success in school and in life.</p><p class="initial" style="margin: 30px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">There is a clash of ideas occurring in education right now between those who believe that public education is not only a fundamental right but a vital public service, akin to the public provision of police, fire protection, parks, and public libraries, and those who believe that the private sector is always superior to the public sector.&nbsp;<i>Waiting for “Superman”</i>&nbsp;is a powerful weapon on behalf of those championing the “free market” and privatization. It raises important questions, but all of the answers it offers require a transfer of public funds to the private sector. The stock market crash of 2008 should suffice to remind us that the managers of the private sector do not have a monopoly on success.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Public education is one of the cornerstones of American democracy. The public schools must accept everyone who appears at their doors, no matter their race, language, economic status, or disability. Like the huddled masses who arrived from Europe in years gone by, immigrants from across the world today turn to the public schools to learn what they need to know to become part of this society. The schools should be far better than they are now, but privatizing them is no solution.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In the final moments of&nbsp;<i>Waiting for “Superman,”</i>&nbsp;the children and their parents assemble in auditoriums in New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Silicon Valley, waiting nervously to see if they will win the lottery. As the camera pans the room, you see tears rolling down the cheeks of children and adults alike, all their hopes focused on a listing of numbers or names. Many people react to the scene with their own tears, sad for the children who lose. I had a different reaction. First, I thought to myself that the charter operators were cynically using children as political pawns in their own campaign to promote their cause. (Gail Collins in&nbsp;<i>The New York Times</i>&nbsp;had a similar reaction and wondered why they couldn’t just send the families a letter in the mail instead of subjecting them to public rejection.) Second, I felt an immense sense of gratitude to the much-maligned American public education system, where no one has to win a lottery to gain admission.</p><div class="article-refers-to quiet small" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h5 style="margin: 0px; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px; color: inherit; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; font-size: 14px; padding: 0px;">Letters</h5><p style="margin: 0px 0px 15px;"><em><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/01/13/myth-charter-schools/" style="color: rgb(153, 1, 1); text-decoration-line: none;">'The Myth of Charter Schools'</a></em>&nbsp;December 23, 2010</p></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><div class="g" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 26px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div data-hveid="37" data-ved="0ahUKEwjniMvM6LPUAhXI7YMKHTydCAoQFQglKAAwAA"><div class="rc" style="position: relative;"><h3 class="r" style="font-weight: normal; 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cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;" /></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></li></ol></div></div></div><a class="fl" href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:aZFgGKX3Dl0J:www.takepart.com/waiting-for-superman/index.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;"><span class="st" style="line-height: 1.4; word-wrap: break-word;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">For a nation that proudly declared it would leave no child behind, America continues to do so at alarming rates. Despite increased spending and politicians'<wbr />&nbsp;...</font></span></a></div></div></div></div><div class="g" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 26px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div data-hveid="42" data-ved="0ahUKEwjniMvM6LPUAhXI7YMKHTydCAoQFQgqKAEwAQ"><div class="rc" style="position: relative;"><h3 class="r" style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for%22Superman%22" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Waiting for "Superman" - Wikipedia</font></a></h3><div class="s" style="max-width: 48em; line-height: 18px;"><div class="f kv SWb" style="height: 18px; line-height: 16px; white-space: nowrap;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><cite class="Rm" style="font-style: normal;">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for%22Superman%22</cite></font><div class="action-menu ab_ctl" style="display: inline; 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padding: 0px; border: 0px; list-style: none; user-select: none; cursor: pointer;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a class="fl" href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iP6_jBvUtQUJ:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for%2522Superman%2522+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;" /></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></li><li class="action-menu-item ab_dropdownitem" role="menuitem" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; list-style: none; user-select: none; cursor: pointer;"><a class="fl" href="https://www.google.com/search?q=related:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for%2522Superman%2522+waiting+for+superman&tbo=1&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjniMvM6LPUAhXI7YMKHTydCAoQHwgvMAE" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;" /></li></ol></div></div></div><a class="fl" href="https://www.google.com/search?q=related:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for%2522Superman%2522+waiting+for+superman&tbo=1&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjniMvM6LPUAhXI7YMKHTydCAoQHwgvMAE" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;"><span class="st" style="line-height: 1.4; word-wrap: break-word;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Waiting for "Superman</span>" is a 2010 documentary film from director Davis Guggenheim and producer Lesley Chilcott. The film criticizes the American public<wbr />&nbsp;...</font></span></a><div class="osl" style="margin-top: 0px;"><a class="fl" href="https://www.google.com/search?q=related:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for%2522Superman%2522+waiting+for+superman&tbo=1&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjniMvM6LPUAhXI7YMKHTydCAoQHwgvMAE" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">‎</font></a><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a class="fl" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for%22Superman%22#Synopsis" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer;">Synopsis</a>&nbsp;·&nbsp;‎<a class="fl" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for%22Superman%22#Details" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer;">Details</a>&nbsp;·&nbsp;‎<a class="fl" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for%22Superman%22#Critical_and_media_reception" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer;">Critical and media reception</a>&nbsp;·&nbsp;‎<a class="fl" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for%22Superman%22#Educational_reception_and_allegations_of_inaccuracy" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer;">Educational reception and ...</a></font></div></div></div></div></div><div class="g" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 26px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div data-hveid="54" data-ved="0ahUKEwjniMvM6LPUAhXI7YMKHTydCAoQFQg2KAIwAg"><div class="rc" style="position: relative;"><h3 class="r" style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1566648/" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Waiting for 'Superman' (2010) - IMDb</font></a></h3><div class="s" style="max-width: 48em; line-height: 18px;"><div class="f kv SWb" style="height: 18px; line-height: 16px; white-space: nowrap;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><cite class="Rm" style="font-style: normal;">www.imdb.com/title/tt1566648/</cite></font><div class="action-menu ab_ctl" style="display: inline; position: relative; 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Waiting for 'Superman' Poster · Trailer. 2:35 | Trailer.</font></span></a></div></div></div></div><div class="g" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 26px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div data-hveid="61" data-ved="0ahUKEwjniMvM6LPUAhXI7YMKHTydCAoQFQg9KAMwAw"><div class="rc" style="position: relative;"><h3 class="r" style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Waiting-Superman-Geoffrey-Canada/dp/B003Q6D28C" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Amazon.com: Waiting for "Superman": Geoffrey Canada, Michelle ...</font></a></h3><div class="s" style="max-width: 48em; line-height: 18px;"><div class="f kv SWb" style="height: 18px; line-height: 16px; white-space: nowrap;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><cite class="Rm" style="font-style: normal;">https://www.amazon.com/Waiting-Superman-Geoffrey-Canada/dp/B003Q6D28C</cite></font><div class="action-menu ab_ctl" style="display: inline; 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cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;"><span class="st" style="line-height: 1.4; word-wrap: break-word;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Documentary · A group of New York City public school teachers and parents wrote and produced this documentary in response to Davis Guggenheim's highly<wbr />&nbsp;...</font></span></a></div></div></div></div></h3><h3 class="r" style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;"><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/24/inconvenient-truth-behind-waiting-for-superman_n_865962.html" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">NYC Teachers Counter 'Waiting For Superman' With Film Of Their ...</font></a></h3><h3 class="r" style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;"><div class="g" style="line-height: 1.2; 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cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;"><span class="st" style="line-height: 1.4; word-wrap: break-word;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000"><span class="f">May 24, 2011 -&nbsp;</span>What did "Waiting For 'Superman'" get wrong? ... is a new documentary, wryly titled “<span style="font-weight: bold;">The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting For Superman</span>.”.</font></span></a></div></div></div></div></h3><h3 class="r" style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inconvenient_Truth_Behind_Waiting_for_Superman" style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration-line: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman - Wikipedia</font></a></h3><h3 class="r" style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;"><div class="g" style="line-height: 1.2; 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position: absolute; right: auto; top: 12px; z-index: 3; transition: opacity 0.218s; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) 0px 2px 4px; left: 0px; visibility: hidden;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><ol style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /></font></font></font><li class="action-menu-item ab_dropdownitem" role="menuitem" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; list-style: none; user-select: none; cursor: pointer;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a class="fl" href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NwxqkXkdVSAJ:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inconvenient_Truth_Behind_Waiting_for_Superman+&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" style="text-decoration-line: none; 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display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;"><span class="st" style="line-height: 1.4; word-wrap: break-word;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000"><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman</span>&nbsp;is a 2011 documentary produced by the Grassroots Education Movement. The film was directed, filmed,&nbsp;...</font></span></a></div></div></div></div></h3></div></div></div></div></div><a class="fl" href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5KL1afOzSToJ:https://www.amazon.com/Waiting-Superman-Geoffrey-Canada/dp/B003Q6D28C+&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" style="text-decoration-line: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px; outline: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">===</font></a></div>