Waiting for “Superman” -- a documentary about failing
government schools — was directed by Davis Guggenheim, who also
produced An Inconvenient Truth (promoting Al Gore’s
“global warming” scare). “Superman” has won lots of awards and
Jonathan Alter, a man of the left, was a featured commentator. Yet
the film, which adds to the general discomfort of teachers unions,
has also won approval from conservatives.
It’s a measure of how far government schools have sunk in the
public esteem that liberals have become alarmed enough to make a
documentary that the American Federation of Teachers dislikes.
Problems caused by teachers unions have been overlooked for years,
and a film highlighting them is praiseworthy. Yet I also felt there
was some confusion about the project. Let me try to say why.
“Superman” follows the fortunes of five families mostly
from poor backgrounds, but with mothers (grandmothers?) hoping to
rescue offspring from bad schools. And they have found the
solution: Charter schools. But they are oversubscribed. One child
is among 792 applicants for 40 slots in the Harlem Success Academy.
So the cameras take us to public lotteries, where mothers and their
offspring are anxious spectators. A child just might but probably
won’t be admitted to the charter school of his choice.
“The political message is unambiguous,” Robert Weissberg wrote
for the American Thinker. “Why permit only a few lucky
kids to escape horrific schools? Every American kid deserves
better, so abolish barrier-like lotteries and make good schools
universal.”
An emeritus professor of political science at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Weissberg recently wrote a
politically incorrect book, Bad
Students, Not Bad Schools (Transaction Publishers). His
“guess” is that charters “are largely a silver-bullet hope among
today’s public school stragglers”; in other words, a hope that
probably won’t fulfill its promise.
Nonetheless, the movie reposes great faith in charter schools.
It’s hard to generalize about them, because they are “chartered” by
the separate states, with diverse regulations. They are taxpayer
supported, but many of the usual union and school-district
regulations are in abeyance. So they are freer. Some are also
supported by mega-philanthropists such as Bill Gates and the Walton
(Walmart) family.
About 5,000 charter schools exist today, disproportionately
attended by black and Hispanic students. A Stanford University
study showed that about 20 percent of charter schools do better
than regular public schools, but about 35 percent do worse.
“Quibbles about the uncertain value of charter schools aside,”
Weissberg writes, “charters here [in ‘Superman’] are
clearly the heroes, and public schools the villains.”
I visited a charter school in New Orleans in 2007. Most of the
public schools, already dysfunctional, had been wiped out by
Hurricane Katrina. So charters were given unusual latitude. To
judge by the school I saw, well located in the French Quarter, a
great deal of idealism had been unleashed. Teachers arrived early
and stayed late, gave out cell phone numbers to students and
answered homework queries at all hours. There was attention to
neatness and order; classes even met every other Saturday. As to
how things would work out, it was still early days.
The eager principal who showed me around had actually gone into
the nearby (dangerous) Iberville housing project to recruit
students. He is no longer at the school. My guess is that in the
long run enthusiasm, even when effective at first, won’t be enough
to overcome a fundamental defect.
Over the years we hear of “superman” principals who come to bad
schools and rejuvenate them by personal example, inspiration, and
discipline. But idealism fades and energies dissipate. A properly
functioning system — as the U.S public school system was for many
decades — must work with ordinary people and everyday incentives,
not with extraordinary people who are somehow inspired. After a few
years they can burn out like a spent rocket.
In Bad Students, Not Bad Schools, Weissberg says that
some of the “kids” presently occupying classrooms, “disdaining
academic achievement” and often disrupting proceedings, should be
“shown the door.” But in a society where diplomas-for-all is a
priority, that is unthinkable. It is not poets but taboos that are
the unacknowledged legislators of our day. And thinking that whole
classrooms of “kids” are just not going to make it is
forbidden.
Schools have become “the refashioned Great Society,” says
Weissberg. He means that rewarding idleness in the name of
abolishing poverty is now unpopular but has been replaced by a new
ideal that currently prevails: “no child left behind.” It also
“puts bread on millions of tables” — full employment for the
education industry — so “slackers must be retained regardless of
educational value.”
Worse, retention is embraced even if this impedes learning among
their classmates. To be grossly politically incorrect, most of
America’s educational woes would vanish if these indifferent,
troublesome students left…
But that is unthinkable, “so we lurch from one guaranteed failed
reform to the next, squandering hundreds of billions of dollars.”
Progress, pols assure us, is just over the horizon; meanwhile
failure attracts more funding. Weissberg blames “slothful,
sometimes disruptive students,” and recommends throwing out “the
bottom quarter of those past 8th grade.”
I DON’T GO all the way with Weissberg because he brings up
another taboo, IQ. But many black children suffer from a
disadvantage so acute that intelligence isn’t needed to explain
anything. At lower income levels, black family life has been all
but destroyed, often leaving neither parent in sight and grandma
holding the baby. Only 17 percent of black children grow up to be
teenagers with both parents still in the home. So the great hazard
for charters, as I see it, is that as long as their students come
from broken homes, especially those lacking fathers, they are
likely to provide little more than an uptick in academic results,
and perhaps a brief one.
The problem with incipient gang members sitting in classrooms,
and planning to outwit rival gangs, not to mention the police, is
not that they are unintelligent but that they plan to join the
lawless world they grew up in. They are not interested in Henry
VIII or quadratic equations.
Private schools can kick out disruptive or failing students.
Government-funded schools essentially cannot. As long as our
regnant ideology of equality prevails, government schools will be
nearly unreformable. Weissberg makes the comparison with public
housing. If bad students cannot be removed, ghetto schools will
resemble public housing projects.
Urging that adults must get married before having children is an
ideal that is now too remote for mere lawmakers to address, let
alone restore. Only a recovered religious faith will be able to do
that. Book learning won’t be attainable in government-funded ghetto
schools, no matter how powerless the teacher unions become.
I spoke to an old friend, Bernard Ruffin, who taught at a
Fairfax County (Virginia) public school. He recently retired with a
pension and a sigh of relief. A man of intellectual
accomplishments, he has degrees from Bowdoin and Yale and has
published eight books. His mother was an administrator at Howard
and two aunts taught at Dunbar High School, the elite black high
school in D.C., since destroyed by egalitarian madness. Yet Ruffin
was relegated to the “ghetto” section of his school. Administrators
want to reward their (younger, more pliant) favored teachers by
assigning them to the best students.
Ruffin found it impossible to teach his pupils for the few hours
a week he saw them. Often at school “for social reasons,” they took
the attitude: “I defy you to teach me anything.” Faced with faculty
complaints, administrators sided with students (to minimize
political repercussions). Ruffin knew that when pupils came from
broken, fatherless homes, “the teachers were blamed for the faults
of the parents.”
Let me repeat the words of Washington Post columnist
and Dunbar alumnus Colby King: “We have to fix the family. There’s
no getting around it. The school system can’t solve it. The police
department can’t solve it, the social service agencies can’t solve
it.”
