Around this time last year, Waiting For Superman was everywhere. If you hadn’t seen it, you were left behind. Practically every conversation about education began with where you stood on the movie. Even though WFS didn’t get the box office returns or Oscar nominations it was hoping for, it did leave a lasting imprint on the discourse— hardening into the mainstream the idea that public education reform was in the throes of an epic good (charter schools) vs. evil (teachers’ unions) battle for the soul of our country.

My reflections on Waiting for Superman are extensively detailed on the Huffington Post, Washington Post Answer Sheet blog and here and here on teacherleaders.org. I felt desperately I needed to rebut a film that opined with such certitude about teachers, but didn’t actually include teachers’ voices. It’s true— the closest in WFS you get to hearing a teacher’s thoughts is Jason Kamras, a former teacher turned Michelle Rhee aide.

Playing defense against broad attacks of complacency and incompetence is exhausting. How I wanted a film that put out the truth about teachers’ real experiences! And while I was dreaming, maybe that film could show how real, actionable, tested solutions on how to improve education for students…

It is here. The movie has been made. It’s called Mitchell 20.

Teachers and non-teachers need to see it. With its approximately 70-minute running time, Mitchell 20 is probably not suited for theatrical distribution. But however it gets out there— on TV, online, with neighborhood screenings— it has to happen.

This is a documentary about an elementary school (Mitchell) in the high-poverty Isaac School District in Arizona where the hardworking staff engaged in an unprecedented push for 20 of its teachers to pursue National Board Certification.

Daniela Robles, the teacher who inspires and recruits her colleagues to make the rigorous push for excellence, is the de facto star of the film and she ought to become a leading voice in the teaching quality debate. Unassuming but iron strong, Daniela’s passion teaching her students supplies the film’s jumping-off point.

With narration by ultra-gravelly Edward James Olmos, we watch the Mitchell 20’s road to National Board Certification morph into an instructive and often surprising illustration of what it takes to be an excellent public school educator. (Hint: it includes intense persistence and collaboration in the face of staggering obstacles.) The teachers’ voices are front and center, but they are supplemented with running commentary from edu-luminaries including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Linda Darling-Hammond, and CTQ’s own Barnett Berry.

I found the second half of the film, where the story takes a sinister turn involving sudden transfers and administrative ousters, even more compelling than the first.  The story isn’t neatly sewn up like a Hollywood movie, and this provides a wealth of material for discussion. 

Mitchell 20 lacks the technical polish of Waiting for Superman. Flashy editing, overloaded graphics, and on-the-nose pop music cues (ex. “Everyday People” and “Get Ready”) attempt to intensify what is largely a talking heads documentary. But talking heads are okay if they’re saying fascinating things, which the teachers in Mitchell 20 are. Two cinematic scenes involving teachers discovering out their National Board scores are real winners, though.

National Board Certification is a worthy endeavor and collaboration among colleagues is essential for a school to succeed. How can a school break the inertia and become dramatically better? Mitchell did it and the answers are in the film.

See Mitchell 20. (Here is where you can go to find out how.) This is a movie that, unlike Waiting for Superman, can tangibly improve education across the country.

Teachers are getting more media attention this season but most of it is pretty vitriolic. In my previous post I wrote that if I wasn’t a teacher, and only received my information about public education from the media and Arne Duncan, I’d probably think an epidemic of lazy and incompetent teachers are a main reason many American students are struggling. Many voices would seek to convince me that implementing performance pay, or merit pay, for teachers is essential to whipping our school system into shape.

The implication is that with the chance to earn a bonus for higher student test scores, would-be competent teachers would try harder and incompetent teachers would be identified and weeded out. That’s cynical and wrong on the first count and betrays a misplaced faith in the accuracy of state test data on the second.

Teacher evaluations do need to be overhauled; I don’t think anyone— unions included— would defend the current ad hoc system. However, business models imported from the private sector emphasizing year-to-year high-stakes test score changes just aren’t a constructive way to do it. Paying (or withholding payment) for year-to-year test scores is an unhealthy, priority-distorting enterprise.

Many have an entrenched interest (Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Presidents Obama and Bush) in pressing a reductive high-stakes testing regime that spits out easy-to-understand data. They want to trumpet gains on the graph this news cycle, this election cycle. They have the biggest microphones on their side. (See Waiting for Superman, No Child Left Behind, and the Obama Administation’s Race to the Top criteria as examples where “state test scores” and “student achievement” are conflated by design.)

Who can speak out— to a significant audience— for solutions that work in living classrooms? Teachers are too busy grinding it out in their classrooms to cultivate mainstream media clout. And it’s not like the media has displayed great interest in amplifying on-the-ground voices in education.

This is where Diane Ravitch comes in. Yesterday, the widely read Daily Beast put her essay titled “Stop Trashing Teachers!” as the top story on their top ten “Cheat Sheet: Must Reads From All Over” list.

 I’ve excerpted below some of Ravitch’s comments on merit pay. How I wish that every stakeholder in education would read this and nod in understanding. Life in a classroom is a messy, human endeavor that requires multiple forms of personal, on-the-ground observation and assessment. Merit pay is no silver bullet; on the contrary it may be a self-inflicted wound to our long term goal of a better-educated citizenry. I know if my ability to provide for my family was determined by my students’ test scores, my curriculum would be drastically altered (and not for the richer) and my stress would be through the ceiling.

Here is Diane Ravitch:

 …The claim that merit pay will improve student performance has been disproven again and again. Whenever businessmen decide to "reform" education, they insist on merit pay. But it doesn't work. The latest study, released only a week ago by the National Center on Performance Incentives, was the most rigorous evaluation of merit pay ever conducted. One group of teachers in Nashville was offered bonuses up to $15,000 if they raised students' math scores; another, the control group, was offered nothing. The average teacher pay is about $50,000, so this was a significant incentive to get higher scores. Over the three years of the study, both groups produced the same results. The economists, who were scrupulously nonpartisan, concluded that performance pay had no effect on student performance. It turns out that teachers were working as hard as they knew how, with or without the bonus.

The claim that teachers can be accurately evaluated by student test scores has been refuted again and again by scholars. The Economic Policy Institute released a statement by many of the nation's leading testing experts warning that this method was riddled with error and instability. A study released days ago by Sean Corcoran of New York University showed that a teacher who was ranked at the 43rd percentile, using student test scores, might actually be at the 15th percentile or the 71st percentile because the margin of error in this methodology is so large.

Tests that assess what students have learned are not intended to be, nor are they, measures of teacher quality. It is easier for teachers to get higher test scores if they teach advantaged students. If they teach children who are poor or children who are English language learners, or homeless children, or children with disabilities, they will not get big score gains. So, the result of this approach—judging teachers by the score gains of their students—will incentivize teachers to avoid students with the greatest needs. This is just plain stupid as a matter of policy.

Waiting for Superman, directed by Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth), will be the most talked-about movie in American when it comes out September 24. It’s the big-ticket, mass-media, crossover-audience education movie we’ve been waiting for. And it sends audiences home full of passion, indignation, and outrage.

The problem is that the movie pushes a purely anti-union, pro-charter school ideology that won’t improve our school system en masse. The big takeaways from Waiting for Superman are: charter schools are saviors, unions are villains. Much of Guggenheim’s ammunition intended to drive the discourse is dated or inaccurate.

The movie follows five lovable children and their families who feel— quite justifiably, as the filmmaker goes to lengths to show—that their local public school is a doomed option as they pin their hopes on admission by lottery to charter schools. The segments featuring the students are poignant and powerful, and the film’s final act is dedicated almost entirely to them.  You badly want these deserving kids to attend schools that will unlock their potential. Any denial or obstruction of that feels criminal.

Indeed, who is denying these kids— and their millions of vulnerable, unheralded counterparts— a great education? One leaves Waiting for Superman believing teachers’ unions the biggest culprit. The film blames unions of educators for putting adults’ interests consistently over students’ needs, a practice that has allegedly protected legions of deadbeat teachers and wasted billions of precious education dollars. This makes for compelling movie-watching, but it’s totally off-base.

Waiting for Superman also deploys images of New York City’s infamous Kafka-esque “rubber rooms” as evidence that teachers’ unions waste money and protect losers. This is problematic for two huge reasons:

Reason #1:  The rubber room cases are dragged out so outrageously long— years, for many— because New York City, not the union, hired so few hearing officers. This is a head-scratcher; one may conjecture that the city didn't mind keeping this bureaucratic abomination going in order to shovel righteous indignation on its perennial rival, and to score anti-union hit pieces like Steven Brill’s widely read New Yorker article from last year.

Buried in a 2007 Village Voice exposé on rubber rooms, reporter Mara Altman dropped this shocker:

"The length of the process depends on the complexity of allegations and case," DOE spokeswoman Melody Meyer says. "Some investigations take days, others take months."

There are currently only 18 hearing officers handling misconduct cases. Each officer is contracted to meet only five times a month. The backlog of cases is immense.

"We have been saying for years that we want these people out of these places much more quickly," UFT president Randi Weingarten says. "There is no reason for them to be sitting six months or longer without charges being filed."

Hearing officers are chosen jointly by the DOE and the UFT, but are paid for by the New York State Education Department. With New York City officers making up to $1,900 a day, it's a lucrative part-time job, which some critics say leads these officers to overly compromising opinions.

Reason #2: Rubber rooms are gone. They all closed, effective this past Monday. The city and the union reached an agreement to get rid of them for the betterment of all. Getting stirred up about them while watching this film moves us backwards, not forwards.

Another uppercut the film levels against unions sprang the Washington Teachers Union’s (WTU) blocking of D.C. School Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s first proposal for radically overhauling the District’s contract with teachers. I’ve got two huge problems here as well:

Problem #1: Guggenheim portrays Rhee as a valiant crusaders who can only look on, heartbroken, as a raucous union meeting scuttles her vital plan. Actually, Rhee’s green vs. red track system was problematic in many ways. For one thing, it deified test scores, an educationally counterproductive practice that teachers have known for years to be dangerous. Rhee may be a self-styled “reformer,” but that doesn’t mean she should have been immediately embraced as a benevolent dictator.

Problem #2: The WTU and Michelle Rhee agreed on a contract. It was passed unanimously by the DC City Council yesterday, the last hurdle before adoption. A vigorous, protracted, often nasty debate happened, and eventually, both sides came to an agreement. The union didn’t ruin everything, despite what Waiting for Superman leads one to believe. Getting upset about the early part of the negotiation process shown in the film helps nobody to move forward and attack today and tomorrow's issues in classrooms. 

The film also claims that tenure protections make it virtually impossible to fire bad teachers. That’s an out-of-date assertion. In January 2010, the AFT partnered with Kenneth Feinberg (Special Master for the TARP Executive Compensation and September 11 Victims Compensation Fund) to present a fair-minded and comprehensive overhaul of teacher evaluations. The plan improves accountability and will remove teachers who can’t pull their weight. 

Unions are the most available and politically expedient scapegoat for explaining why so many American schools are underperforming. But blaming them, as Waiting for Superman does, avoids the heart of the matter and distorts the discourse on the best way forward to take on very real and very urgent injustices in American public schools.

I’ll have more to say on the heart of the matter, and Waiting for Superman’s portrayal of charter schools, in my next post.