Is there life beyond charter schools?

"One of the saddest days of my life was when my mother told me Superman did not exist," said educational reformer and South Bronx native Geoffrey Canada in the documentary Waiting For Superman.  He added, "(My mother) thought I was crying because it's like Santa Claus is not real. I was crying because no one was coming with enough power to save us." The film follows, among other aspects, Canada's charter-school program Harlem Children's Zone, which seems to be extremely successful at getting children through high school and into college. His program's accomplishments are very similar to that of the I Have a Dream Foundation, though both are largely dependent on private money, volunteer time and trial and error.

 To me, the film's most emotional moments followed the lives of five underprivileged children as they competed against hundreds of other students in the same situations to win a lottery drawing and get into a charter school. By the film's end, watching to see if these children won their lotteries, I was dismayed that the direction and future of these elementary school children's lives was based on the pulling of numbered balls from a spinning plastic box. I myself was denied entry in three educational lotteries for charter schools, but since I came from a more privileged background, I didn't suffer the detrimental education loss that these children faced. Underneath is a trailer for The Lottery, a movie that looks inside the charter school lottery process. Watch the first 30 seconds or so and you'll quickly grasp the importance of charter schools that Waiting for Superman promotes.

While this documentary effectively brings viewers' attention to America's failing school systems, I believe it puts too much of its focus on charter schools as the answer to all of our nation's educational woes. Also, it paints a somewhat overly simplistic view on the problems facing low-income communities. 

The documentary also harshly criticizes teacher's unions and the lack of various schools' abilities to fire incompetent teachers once they receive tenure. It is shocking to see the statistic that only 1 out of 2,500 teachers loses their credentials, or learn that a teacher can gain tenure by doing little more than staying awake in their classroom for two consecutive years.  When I combined the problems of tenure with film's idea of the "lemon dance" where schools shuffle around their under performing teachers, which seem more likely than not to end up in segregated minority districts, I worried that the children I'm tutoring will have weak or apathetic teachers who can never give their students the chances in life that motivated charter or private teachers give. However, there are several factors than teachers alone we must take into consideration when looking at problems facing the education of underprivileged children.  Factors such as difficult home life situations, poverty, health problems, lack of community involvement and more can also shape a child's educational future.

 Waiting for Superman's unaddressed paradox is that if unions are actually the source of urban public education problems, why aren’t the predominantly non-union charter schools performing better? For example, Stanford University, in the first national study looking at charter school students' academic performances, found that only 17 percent of charter school students were outperforming their public school peers on math assessment tests. Forty-six percent of charter school students had results that were indistinguishable from results of their public school peers, and 37 percent of charter school students were performing significantly worse. Not to mention the fact that these public neighborhood schools were accomplishing these rates despite the fact that they are also enrolling and including in their tests higher numbers of non-English speaking and special needs students than charter schools.

http://www.nea.org/home/33177.htm

Waiting for Superman did not need to explain the widening gap between the rich and poor, the technological divide, schools' deviance from the social contract or the despair of the underclass. Instead, it effectively showed how dedicated education reformers such as Canada are making a difference. This documentary, while housing a few faults, is an inspiring call to arms. Take a stance!  Don't give up on the school system, work with or around it until we can find something that works.