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TEACHING THE HUDSON VALLEY BLOG
| Tugging on Superman's Cape |
| Posted by Stephen Mucher | |
| on November 15, 2010 | |
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This Thurs., Nov. 18, 6:30 p.m., join members of Bard College's Master of Arts in Teaching Program at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck to see and discuss Waiting for Superman and other recent education documentaries.
Few filmmakers understand teaching like Davis Guggenheim. That makes it especially disappointing that Waiting for Superman -- a film ostensibly about the power of teachers -- shows us so little teaching. Director of the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth and, more recently, the critically acclaimed rock musicology It Might Get Loud, Guggenheim has embraced the art of pedagogy. His films instruct -- employing celebrities-as-educators to develop the ideas that give his own art focus. With the kind of respect and generous attention good teachers provide students, these documentaries honor audiences with questions of wonder and careful, nuanced explanations. Whether his focus is a former vice president or a renowned guitarist, Guggenheim finds a trope in teaching. Al Gore paces a lecture hall with professorial earnestness. Led Zeppelin legend Jimmy Page outlines the lineage of British rock, U2's the Edge carefully explains the science of amplification, and an inspirational Jack White respectfully illuminates the Jim Crow historical context for his blues record collection. These are masterful moments of authentic instruction. Superman is different. Instead of revealing artful acts of teaching, Guggenheim adopts popular top-down rhetoric about school reform. This approach is easy. And it makes for a simple and predictable film. Guggenheim addresses an audience that is already indignant, and rightfully so. Too many of our nation's poorest students attend bad schools. And it is not difficult to demonstrate the ways poor student performance and uninspired teaching are often closely related. Clearly, we need better teachers. But can charters, sanctions, and tests fix the problem? Can these measures lead to the kinds of sophisticated classroom instruction, rich in subject matter, that students need? Perhaps. But these are big questions. And Guggenheim skirts them. In most cases he merely wants to show us what dynamic, visionary school school administrators believe about teachers. Waiting for Superman is a film about teachers, but not teaching. As a result, it misses the real lessons now emerging from an exciting and energizing proliferation of small innovative schools. Only some of these are charter schools. But all share an interest in the difficult work of improving teaching. These school challenge tradition and encourage instructional risk taking. Small innovative schools can provide laboratories to see great teaching in action. They can pilot new instructional ideas. They can demonstrate limitations and possibilities for building professional communities among teachers. They can be productive places for young teachers to learn this noble craft. Teaching, not the politics of school choice should motivate more filmmakers to visit innovative schools. But Superman takes an easier and emotionally manipulative route. It emphasizes the educational rights of parents and ignores the real constraints imposed by poverty. We are introduced to five youngsters who will, by the end of the film, either win lottery admission to a nearby charter school or face a lifetime of drudgery in an assigned public school. Each child clearly harbors promise, curiosity, humor, and beauty. We feel for their parents. After all, no child deserves a bad teacher. No child deserves a teacher who lacks basic knowledge, skill, caring, or ambition. No child should see opportunity crushed by apathetic teachers or anemic instruction. The examples Guggenheim gives us are infuriating. But lost in this drama are the many other forces that continue to shape students' classroom experiences. We lose sight of the fact that many great teachers -- in schools public and private, large and small -- battle valiantly against these forces everyday. Guggenheim never shows us the wide variety of settings where great teaching happens. By focusing on a few highly publicized charter schools, he ignores the broader challenges of instruction. Creating innovative schools and staffing them with great teachers will require resources and commitment. This may be Guggenheim's greatest omission. He fails to tell us, for instance, that the film's strongest examples, like the Harlem Children's Zone and the SEED schools in Washington, DC, spend heavily to address the needs of students and their families. These schools are fortunate and highly unusual, boasting endowments and extensive private-sector funding. A film about what actually happens in successful classrooms could ask: What kinds of settings tap the creative energy of teachers? Where does professionalism trump tradition? What kinds of teachers collaborate to define and sustain a common purpose for schools? How do teachers mediate absurd constraints imposed, not only by unions, but by state bureaucracies, parents, voters, business leaders, administrators, standardized tests, media influences, and the long tradition of American anti-intellectualism? A film about improving schools through better teaching would also explore what it means to be educated. It would ask who we are as a people and where we are going as a democracy. The influence of Waiting for Superman will be felt widely. It captures a reform impulse that unites a broad base. This impulse feels good. But it feels good precisely because it shifts the blame for the conditions facing our worst schools. Putting caring, knowledgeable, skilled teachers in every classroom requires real sacrifices, not just the illusion of choice. Addressing poverty and growing inequality requires political solutions including ways to identify great teachers and place them in all schools. And we will eventually need filmmakers who can show us what teachers do. Stephen Mucher is assistant professor of History Education at Bard College where he teaches in the Master of Arts in Teaching Program. He co-facilitated THV's 2009 summer institute. This post was adapted from a longer review to be published in Field Notes (Winter 2011) a publication of the MAT Program. As soon as the complete review is ready, we will post a link here. |
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