What "Waiting for Superman" got Wrong - Point by Point

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/what-superman-got-wrong-point.html

This was written by Rick Ayers, a former high school teacher, founder of Communication Arts and Sciences small school at Berkeley High School, and currently adjunct professor in teacher education at the University of San Francisco. He is the co-author, with his brother William Ayers, of the forthcoming "Teaching the Taboo" from Teachers College Press. This post is long, but it is worth your time.

By Rick Ayers
While the education filmWaiting For Superman has moving profiles of students struggling to succeed under difficult circumstances, it puts forward a sometimes misleading and other times dishonest account of the roots of the problem and possible solutions.

The amped-up rhetoric of crisis and failure everywhere is being used to promote business-model reforms that are destabilizing even in successful schools and districts. A panel at NBC’s Education Nation Summit, taking place in New York today and tomorrow, was originally titled "Does Education Need a Katrina?" Such disgraceful rhetoric undermines reasonable debate.

I got so mad, I googled WFS+propaganda, and that was one of the first links that showed

I called the station and said they should do what I did, as the movie was pure propaganda, and anyone who liked it didn't have the first notion of what's going on in education these days

I specifically asked that people google "WFS+propaganda" and they'd get a different view than is being rammed down our throats by NBC, Oprah, this administration, and the MSM...

So far what I get from the teachers is...until we solve poverty and bad parenting and pay me more nothing will change. Moreover there are no bad teachers, only teachers who would be fired because of biased and shitty principals, and holding us accountable is impossible because there is no way to test a student.

Forgive me if I don't think this sounds like any solution at all and I don't think anyone holding these views is capable of doing much.

I hear zero "can do attitude" coming from this profession.

In David Simon's book Homicide, a year-long report on homicides in Baltimore, there was one memorable scene where an abandoned rowhouse, filled with addicts, was cleared to question its denizens concerning the murder of a little girl. Refuse was everywhere. Detectives feared to take off their coats in the sweltering heat for fear of them being overwhelmed by vermin and stench. Everyone pissed in buckets. There was no electricity or hot water, etc. Toward the end of the search, a child living there meekly asked a detective if he might retrieve his spelling homework.

To claim that this child can be reasonably expected to close the achievement gap that exists between students like him and wealthy suburbanites, without any difference made in their circumstances, is absolutely ridiculous and morally insane. To imagine that teacher performance is the only or most crucial factor in that gap is likewise ridiculous and insane.

Not to you, though?

like you, to the teaching profession.

really? You want to fight that fight?

And by inference, people who choose to work for low wages at a job they love are....I won't say stupid, but I will reframe your words: not smart?

thank goodness today is over and I can go and learn something now.

today's system is built around filling out forms

it is not built around teaching students.

the system is failing our children.