Saving Our Schools: Superman or Real Solutions?

Is America prepared to accept a great education - for the few? That’s the question at the heart of the picture from director Davis Guggenheim, Waiting for Superman.

The picture is selective as well as deficient, which is not astonishing. A cottage industry has risen around pundits who've minor substantive knowledge about public education, yet opine away nonetheless. For example, one of the major shortcomings of this film: that Guggenheim chose to incorporate footage of a bad instructor in a Milwaukee classroom along with the rubber room in New York, but decided not to incorporate footage of thriving public schools where uncounted and unheralded teachers are doing extraordinary things every day to educate our kids. This imbalance may suit Guggenheim's narrow and selective narrative; however it doesn’t tell the complete and textured story of what actually is going on in American schools.

The film calls awareness on the children who are being failed by our education system and therefore deprived of the class of education that will open doors for them all through their lives. Despite Guggenheim's unquestionably good intentions, the film falls short by casting two extremes in starring roles - the "bad" instructor as bad guy and charter schools as heroes ready to save the day. The problem is that these caricatures are more fictional than realistic.

Are there dreadful instructors? Of course there are, just like there are bad accountants, and lawyers, and movie reviewers. I wish there weren't any flawed teachers. But American Federation of Teachers is in the head of developing and implementing means to perfect instructor quality, and to deal effectively and efficiently with problems when they occur.

In truth, union-led teacher assistance and review programs (where new and struggling teachers are coached and assessed by more experienced peers) have shown to be far tougher on poorly performing instructors than those conducted by administrators.

No educator - myself included - wants teachers in the classroom who don't belong there. Those knowledgeable about education understand the need for teacher quality, but they don't buy into the simplistic notion that an outbreak of "bad educators" is bringing down an otherwise thriving enterprise of education.

And tenure should never be misconstrued as being a "job for life." Instructors and instructors unions are right to preserve a good, objective standard by which educators ought to be judged. But due process must not disintegrate into glacial process, and educators who - at the end of a fair, efficient process - are deemed unfit in the profession should be dismissed. Administrators also must fulfill their responsibilities: to support, properly evaluate and, when necessary, make tough decisions about the educators entrusted to teach our children.

I could clutter a cutting room floor with all of the bits and pieces this film gets wrong. For example, New York City's rubber room has been closed, after years of union-led efforts to slam the door on this practice.

For argument's sake, let's say a miracle happened overnight and our current, fully inadequate evaluation system teacher effectiveness suddenly became adequate or, better yet, accurate. Say administrators identified teachers who simply didn't make the grade, and removed them from their classrooms. What then?

Who wants to deal with the extra difficult (but less sexy) and utterly necessary (but unexciting) realities, as in the fact that teachers need tools, resources and support to do their jobs well? It's therapeutic to say "fire the deficient educators," but it does not do much to develop schools. The plain, unsexy reality is that the best way to perfect instructor quality is to do a better job of developing and sustaining the educators to whom we entrust our children's educations. But a number seem to buy into the world according- to-Superman attitude of education reform - that the "best performing schools" are the boutique schools that enjoy extra resources and are more selective in choosing their student populations. I mean no disrespect to the many well-intentioned people who set out to provide a good education to kids that have been denied that right. But most of them fall short, and even those who defy the odds touch only a minuscule percentage of children.

The opportunity for a fantastic public education should come not by chance, not even by choice, but by right.

We all agree that right is being denied to too many students. But, in the end, no solution is as scalable, as reachable or as liable as a remarkable neighborhood school. I've seen such success stories in real life. In schools everywhere from New York City to Albuquerque, N.M., from St. Paul, Minn., to Philadelphia, and from Los Angeles County to Baltimore, students are defying the odds. The solutions are not the stuff of action flicks - supports for disadvantaged kids, extra help for those who start or fall behind, high expectations for all students and challenging coursework - but they achieve the desired results.

Visualize a sequel to Waiting for Superman, released a few years from now. Would we rather stick with the cinematic model of providing an escape plan - occasionally superior, quite often inferior - to a handful of kids? Or offer a model in which we had summoned the determination to perform the hard, but effective and far-reaching, work to make meaningful adjustments to entire school districts, providing all children with the best possible option - a highly effective neighborhood school? 90 percent of American kids - almost 50 million children - attend our public schools. Revolution in a single classroom, a single school, or even a single school district isn’t enough.

We can't wait. And we shouldn't rest our hopes on Superman, or on any mythical answer or silver bullet. We can't depend on anything other than replicable, measurable, successful tactics to provide all kids the education they deserve.