The new movie,? “Waiting for ‘Superman'” is currently perplexing our friends on the left.? How could the producer of Al Gore’s global warming movie “An Inconvenient Truth” attack the public school system and the teachers’ union? Well, the failure of this government run monopoly is finally so obvious that even the left notices.? Here is the review from our friends over at Salon. If they “get it,” maybe the minority on the Wake School Board should view the movie and then they might even “get it.”
?A sample:
There’s a great deal that’s appealing about “Waiting for ‘Superman,'” an ambitious blend of hope and scathing criticism that frames the education debate with heart-wrenching case histories of five different families across the country struggling with substandard schools. These range from inner-city Washington, where a parentless fifth-grader named Anthony applies to a rigorous college-prep boarding school in hopes of escaping his failing middle school, to suburban Redwood City, Calif., where an eighth-grader named Emily worries about the academic “tracking” that may set her up for failure even at an attractive and well-appointed high school. Here Guggenheim clearly makes a point that many commentators on education miss: While the system’s failings may hit poor kids of color much harder, schools in affluent suburbs aren’t necessarily providing a great education to all their children either.
All too often, attacking the teachers’ unions is a lazy rhetorical tactic of the anti-government right, but Guggenheim does not shy away from the fact that union contracts — which can make it impossible to fire the worst teachers, or pay the best ones more money — have become a serious impediment to school reform. A former Milwaukee chancellor discusses his district’s annual “Dance of the Lemons” (known elsewhere as the “Turkey Trot”), in which underperforming teachers are shuffled from school to school. Infamously, Guggenheim obtained footage clandestinely shot inside New York’s “rubber room,” where dozens of teachers awaiting disciplinary hearings sat every day for months, collecting their full salaries while reading or playing cards. (Since the film’s Sundance premiere, the New York rubber room has been closed down — but presumably the un-fired teachers are still stashed somewhere.)
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