If there’s a perception that a person can’t be fired, principals tend to not know to do it or even believe it impossible, and the only person who is saying that it is possible is a union representative, without knowing anything else, I’m still reminded of the bit from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
“But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.”
“Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything.”
“But the plans were on display …”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.”
I’d agree with you, if Arthur Dent’s job description had included a line about “Research and stay aware of latest reports of plans to annihilate the earth.” If principals are able to fire bad teachers, and if managing a school’s personnel is central to their job description, but they can’t be arsed to find out the specific procedures because there’s some vague perception that teachers can’t be fired, I hardly think it’s fair to blame teacher unions for this problem. A principal who fails to terminate a terminally incompetent teacher deserves termination herself.
magiver, a confluence of trends makes your suggestion difficult. There seems to be something of a pendulum between integrating struggling students and tracking all students, and right now we’re pretty far toward the integration phase of things. I’m very leery of giving any specifics, but some of the students I’ve had integrated into my classes are, to put it mildly, surprising: you’d really think that they, and the other students, would benefit from not having such severe mainstreaming. And that’s just behavioral: some years my second grade class starts off academically seeming like a combination kindergarten-third-grade class. I practically have to write two separate lesson plans for every activity.
Combine that with No Child Left Behind, whose name gives the game away. It’s not called Every Child Does Their Best; that’d be an entirely different philosophy. No, the idea is that there’s a minimum level behind which no child will fall, and that if any given child is above that minimum, they’re no longer statistically worth your attention. The result is that in a combination kindergarten/third grade class, there’s overwhelming pressure to devote all your energy to the kids who are below grade level, and to devote little if any energy to the advanced students.
In my opinion, this is inhumane, inefficient, and strategically a terrible course for our nation to take.
But then, I’m part of a teacher’s union at a public school, so I’m part of the problem.
Because, by definition, if one has memorized something, he has not learned it. Knowing basic facts and having them memorized are not the same thing. Memorization just means I can quote back word for word what was said.
Of course, you can use memorization as a stepping board for learning until you understand the significance. But too often memorization is the only thing valued.
Knowing that X happened on Y date is something you can find out in an instant. Understanding why it happened? That’s something you either have learned, or you haven’t.
I have to say, I’m kind of bothered by this attitude, and think it’s a little bit of a cause of some of the issues in education in this country.
If we want competent, professional teachers, we need to treat them as professionals. Right now, we expect teachers to be dedicated selfless souls who are smart and competent enough to get well-paying jobs in another field, but instead choose to work for 80 hours a week at salaries half of what they could get elsewhere, while using their own money to buy basic supplies. Then, when a teacher finally realized they can’t work 80 hours a week for their entire lives (hey, maybe they want to spend more than 2 hours a week with their own spouse and children) and tries to, you know, actually work the hours they’re being paid for, we’re personally offended. Finally we complain that their aren’t enough smart qualified people going into teaching.
Absolutely right. If there are that many crappy teachers out there, why is not a single person blaming the teachers’ supervisors?
I’m sure a lot of it is just knee-jerk (and in part deliberately encouraged) Unions=Communists=BAD! But I wonder if a lot of it is just people who are still pissed at some level that the mean teacher made them do homework or told them they were wrong once. And now they can get their revenge by screwing over teachers in general.
So I haven’t seen the movie, but since I pretty much agree with everything said in this article http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/what-superman-got-wrong-point.html mentioned above, I don’t think I will see it.
– Quercus (not a teacher but shares a bedroom with one)
Can someone tell me what Superman has to do with this movie? Given that George Reeves in archival footage ranks up at #5 on the IMDB credits for the film, it would seem that he does appear in it, and it’s not merely a rhetorically cute title.
When I first heard of this film, and its subject matter, I presumed that the title had something to do with how people are waiting for a hero who will fix the schools. But the title puts quotes around “Superman”, as if to say, “Here’s a movie about how kids in the 1950’s would rush home from school to watch Superman.” Is that it?
– Quercus (not a teacher but shares a bedroom with one)
[/QUOTE]
that article could have a second article called “What the Washington Post got wrong about what Waiting for Superman got wrong”
in any case, I disagree with the notion that treating teachers like professionals somehow equates to them being disinterested hacks who are only there for a paycheck. if you dont care about educating your students then they will not care about taking your class, kids can smell bullshit like that from miles away.
also regarding the unions, the movie doesnt vilify them completely. it points out how one aspect has a massive negative effect on the school systems overall. the movie even shows footage from a new your school back in the late 90’s where teachers were just reading the paper and collecting a check while kids played craps. when they were fired the union stepped in and not only got them their “jobs” back they also got them a years back pay. you have video proof that these teachers are beyond incompetent, one of them actually told kids that their paycheck is the same regardless of weather or not they teach.
my biggest point about seeing this movie isnt that its somehow perfectly accurate about the current state of affairs in education. its that the current state of affairs is deeply flawed and in need of serious help.
Watched this today. I don’t claim to have the answers on how to fix American education. I was watching to see what the filmmakers thought the solution was.
Two things:
I’m very confused on how the US and Canada can have such different rankings in the many country comparisons in the film. Our education systems seem so similar.
Also, having gotten attached to the kids profiled, I was downright pissed that the rich white girl that was going to go to college no matter what was very close to being the only one who won the lottery. Any of the other parents would have been ecstatic to see their kids getting to go to a school half as good as the one she would have gone into without the lottery.
I’m about halfway through the film. A few thoughts so far:
There’s an awful lot of time spent on bad teachers, but what about bad parents and bad students? Aren’t they a huge part of the equation and the problem?
Michelle Rhee…She resigned and, from what I’ve read, didn’t do much good after all.
Around the 30-minute mark: The filmmaker/narrator says it should be “simple” to pour knowledge, metaphorically of course, into the students’ heads and then hope it will stick there. Is he fucking kidding? I imagine he’s never tried to teach students who don’t want to be taught, who would rather screw around with their smart phones than pay attention, whose parents don’t give a shit.
That’s exactly why the mantra “Let’s get rid of all the crappy teachers and pay the good ones more” doesn’t make sense to me.
Hell, we’ve even got helicopter parents showing up on college campuses demanding that the mean, demanding professors (you know, the ones who want students to work and actually earn their grades so their degrees will mean something) be fired for making their little darlings feel less than special.
Late in the film, the narrator/director makes the claim that we have a shortage of qualified computer science specialists here, and that’s how those jobs get sent offshore. Is that true, though? I thought companies offshored just to save money, not because they couldn’t find qualified workers here. That’s certainly the case with MTSOs (big companies that hire medical transcriptionists); they ship your medical record info off to India, Pakistan, and Phillippines so the hospitals can save a few bucks, then claim that they couldn’t find qualified MTs here—which is not the case.