Just a quick note, but I wanted to just get some thoughts down about my course from last night. We watched Waiting for Superman in class to go along with our reading of the second half of The White Architects of Black Education by William Watkins. As the movie took the first two thirds of class, we quickly transitioned into a group project where each student was with a group who elected to read the same chapter of the optional readings (Everyone read the first three chapters and chapter six, and then they could choose from chapters 4, 7, and 8). They made posters to help them explain their chapter to the rest of the class. Then, we turned to the connections between the film and our text. Our final discussion of about 100 pages of text and a two hour film only lasted 20 minutes (since I'm committed to always starting on time and always ending on time).
Our conversation was rich, and some folks pushed us to consider if there is any real difference between the Rockefellers using their wealth to dictate educational policy and Bill Gates doing the same through his foundation. As an aside, we will start our next class looking at some of the policy statements from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, as well as at the Phelps-Stokes Fund website that I brought up in our Critical Pedagogy course a few weeks ago.
Still, I left feeling like my students had a lot more to say about the film and the text, and that even though we decided collectively to watch the film in class, our time together wasn't as useful as I hoped it would be. Or, perhaps better phrased, we could have had a much richer discussion of the role of philanthropy and big business in public education had we not watched the film together.
In an attempt to continue the conversation, I created a discussion board on our course WebVista site and invited students to post their reactions to the film. To try and get the ball rolling, I wrote the first post on the discussion board. No one has yet responded, and while I know I made it optional and that they have a paper due next week, I'm now worrying that I put too much of my own opinions about the film into the post and thus silenced students (potentially). Below is what I posted on the discussion board:
I want to start by just stating that I don't understand this film completely. Or, perhaps better put, the logic of the film's main arguments doesn’t make sense to me. If I’m understanding them correctly, they boil down to this:
The problem with the United States, the cause of poverty and systemic inequity, is our unequal education system. The cause of these poor performing schools are “bad” teachers, who get to keep their jobs indefinitely because of the system of tenure. To fix all of this, we need to have every school in the country use the same explicitly test-prep oriented curriculum as KIPP and Harlem Children’s zone schools, so that every child will go to a 4-year college.
OK, let’s work backwards as I break down my confusion: Not everyone can go to a 4-year college because there are not enough colleges with enough space for everyone in the P-12 system to go. On top of that, many universities have admissions criteria along the lines of the “top x% of graduating seniors” – even if everyone is brilliant, they can’t all be in the upper tier of students on the national scale, because that’s the whole point of the national scale.
Teaching to the test makes sense if the test is measuring a students’ ability to be a worthy human being. I do not know what kind of a test this would be, but it certainly is not the Eurocentric “standards” based tests we use today to measure students and teachers. True, if we make our instruction grounded in the test, practice taking the test often, and continually require students to do “test like” exercises and activities, our scores will probably go up. But since everyone’s scores must go up every year, gains are rarely celebrated and often come with considerable loss to learning that does not connect directly to the test. No test could measure everything a teacher teaches or that students know, but in the logic of positivism we have to have numbers to understand things, and we have to leave some things out in order to make tests that give us numbers.
Bad teachers are very loosely defined in the film as “ineffective.” Note the e, in effective here, as opposed to affective teachers which in the literature in teacher education is what we are actually aiming for. The “effect” of a teacher is apparently measurable by scores, through sophisticated modeling and mathematics like there are in value-added assessment. The claim “we have to have a way to measure teacher effectiveness” sort of makes sense. The claim that we can isolate the impact of one teacher by looking at her students’ tests scores does not make sense, because there are just too many variables. So, why not look for other ways to measure effectiveness? What if we had students evaluate their teachers, like we do in the university setting? What if we mandated every teacher would have a monthly visit by their principal, another one by a mentor teacher or vice principal, and do their own peer-reviews of the colleagues and co-workers? We could even make a rubric with however many points we want and then compare them all. As silly and arbitrary as much of this would be, it would be exceptionally more sophisticated and accurate a measure of what is actually going on in the classroom than the results of a standardized test.
And then we come to the claim that I have the most difficulty with: that schools and teachers are the cause of structural inequity and white supremacy. As we’ve just finished reading a book that details the very intentional moves of those in power to use schools and education as tools to maintain or increase their power, it is just plain not factually accurate to say that schools caused inequity. Let me be clear, laws and governmental policy created and maintain inequity – schools were never consulted on the matter, and the public school came into its widespread existence almost 500 years after the first slaves were brought to North America.
The ongoing legacy of white supremacy has at every moment in its history sought to justify itself with the common sense of the time. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, we saw scientific racism emerge as a justification for Jim Crow and the continued exploitation of people of color after slavery was declared illegal. Today, we blame schools instead of banks for redlining, for predatory home loans, for racial restrictive housing (which wasn’t made illegal until 1968 and today continues in the form of “zoning”), for gerrymandering so that politicians get to decide who elects them instead of the people electing their politicians… These are issues far larger than the school, and yet the film blames schools for the very things that make teaching so exceptionally difficult, as if teaching and learning aren’t difficult enough on their own.
Hoping we can get a good conversation to have another life on the internet… What did you think of the film? Or of my reaction, for that matter? Or the connection to Watkins? What should the role of philanthropy be in public education? What say should businesses have in public schools? Anything else is on the table… So, what do you have to say (or type, as the case may be).
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