Web Letters | The Nation

Grading 'Waiting for Superman'

View of a college professor

I see them coming in from the high schools, of all classes, ethnic groups and age cohorts, some with high GPAs, graduated with honors, and many unprepared. And although I’m a supporter of the public schools, I think my faculty colleagues must take responsibility for the dismal outcomes of our graduating students. Realizing that social class and family dynamics are the principal predictors of success or failure in school, the classroom environment and effort put forth by teachers are important variables.

My response to Waiting for Superman was to feel acknowledgement and articulation of what I have seen over the past twenty years of teaching, my kids’ experience in school and what my students have described for me: important academic subjects taught by coaches and teachers with no interest in teaching; watching Disney cartoons in high school classes while the teacher surfs the Internet or answers e-mail, discussions of the Friday night football game in history class. Many students have informed me that they had so much extra credit in their classes, they could fail virtually every test and earn a C or better in the class; that they wrote no papers in junior high or high school, instead simply cut and pasted information from the Internet; that half or more of their classes involved sitting and completing worksheets while the teacher read a newspaper or a novel or surfed the web. I’m no advocate of union busting, but I think it is necessary for the teachers unions to take responsibility for the performance of their members and to terminate this policy of protectionism. They are responsible for keeping bad teachers in the classrooms, they are responsible for the “rubber rooms” and they have been adversarial with regard to reform efforts… even when the reforms were proposed by their own members.

This review has some valid criticisms for Waiting for Superman, but the admonition that the documentary did not display the worst, most crime-ridden and dysfunctional households misses the point. The role of parental absence and dysfunction and the connection to poverty is well known and another topic of discussion. But Waiting for Superman is about the role of schools and how they are letting down the students and families that are functional, that are making an effort. We need a dialogue about how to assess performance in children, and we should be fair to teachers with regard to the placing of responsibility for student failure. However, when teachers and teacher organizations are acting in a way that is clearly destructive to the educational process, we need activists and journalists to investigate and raise the issue.

Re 'Grading "Waiting for Superman"'

Don't blame the victim of bad schools

With many of Goldstein's perspectives about Waiting for Superman I can agree. However, she seems unconscious in one of her statements of the insidious racist nature of her thinking: "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."

Teen mothers are often cited as the demons responsible for much of society's ills, and the words are usually code for all of those single moms of color; yet most of us "Boomers" had either mothers or grandmothers giving birth while teenagers. Many of our grandmothers were immigrants and spoke no English in the household, yet we all seemed to get educated. And the majority of drug addicts are white middle and upper middle class---and their children are still taught well in school.

The problem, dear Dana, is not with the children and their parents. One of the biggest problems is with poor professional development to educate teachers, who as Dr. Asa G. Hilliard III said, can teach all the nation's children, regardless of the child's background. It is not the nature of the child that matters but the nature of the nurture given the child in schools. Without strong academic nurturing and demand, all children can be left behind, not just poor, black and brown, children of immigrants or of drug addicts.

As a white woman who grew up in the segregated South, I have really grown weary of the old paradigm of excuses for bad education that many of my white brothers and sisters insist upon. Blaming the victim of bad schools is as bad as blaming the teachers' unions for bad schools.

Dr. Bob Moses, president of the Algebra Project, has for twenty-seven years proven that children scoring academically in the bottom quartile in schools (the nation's throwaway children) when immersed in accelerated academic programs and given social supports will excel. They excel because all children will excel when given quality teaching and quality education within a nurturing environment. It works for white children, so why not give it to all children?

In the past, black people in this country could have their hands cut off for trying to learn to read, yet they continued to pursue intellectual enrichment. In the South they were given inferior schools—yet they persisted in educating themselves and delivering in the face of danger and delapidated public schools great scholars, poets, novelists, doctors, lawyers, accountants, judges, courageous activists, etc. So I really think it's time we white folks got out of the dialogue about how to educate black and brown children. I believe it is time we got out of their way so their great educational giants can lead the charge for demonstrating how to develop schools where their children can and will excel.