What Is Wrong With This Picture?

We received the following from our EDDRA2 colleague, Michael Paul Goldenburg, a Michigan math educator.  It is in response to a post by another author to Waiting for Superman and the Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman, recent films depicting aspects of the federal/corporate reform movement sweeping across the nation’s public schools.  If you like your meat well skewered, this one is for you.

From: Michael Paul Goldenberg <mikegold@umich.edu>

Subject: [EDDRA2] Re: [MathTalk] Re: Jay Mathews in WAPO: Why Race To Nowhere is wrong

Date: May 9, 2011 7:21:15 AM PDT

I have to say that I’m skeptical that Mr. Guggenheim was stunned by the reaction his movie engendered. It’s a love paean to every union-bashing, teacher-blaming group and individual on the education deform side of things. It makes charter schools seem flawless (having worked for several run by private, for-profit management companies and spoken with parents at some others in greater Detroit that were run by folks whose financial improprieties moved the parents to start blowing whistles, I am certain that, had he wanted to make a movie worth watching, Guggenheim could have either gone after the big-time charter scams, or at least presented a balanced picture (including some great public schools). Instead, he completely loaded the dice: it’s not “film-making” but propagandizing, and it is so full of lies, half-truths, inaccuracies, and cloying tricks to pluck at the heart-strings of viewers that only an idiot could come away surprised that there would be some pretty pissed off people out there, not all of whom are teachers or union folks. Which is, of course, a major point of ITBWFS: lots of parents and kids, and they’re angry about how they and their community schools are being pushed around in order to serve charters, including Geoffrey Canada’s not-so-impressive miracle school (note that I admire his overall community work, but am not a fan of his school or his capitulation, willing or otherwise, to the deform mentality and high-stakes test madness).

You write as if you know Guggenheim personally, but perhaps that’s not the case. If it is, you might remind him that the reaction, however ill-founded, to THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH should have prepared him for the reaction to WFS. But I think any claim he makes to being “Shocked – SHOCKED!” is disingenuous. Propagandists are adept at pissing people off. He doesn’t raise money for his movies by being polite and uncontroversial.

The fact is, Ihor, that there are in fact a huge majority of teachers who work themselves sick trying to do an impossible job. Teaching is, in and of itself, rightly called “the impossible profession.” That doesn’t mean that it can’t be done, but that to do what it requires in the way reflective, committed professionals want to do it, cannot ever be done. To be able to do it would necessitate powers that are beyond those of any actual human being – Superman and Jaime Escalante and The Bee Eater notwithstanding.

Note well, please, that I mean by the above nothing connected with the current debates about teaching, nothing about whether our schools and their structure help or hinder teachers. I mean that it is simply impossible. And then people of good will and great intellectual honesty and courage go out every day into classrooms and try anyway.

Now, you throw onto their backs everything about the job (not the teaching part, but the “job” part) that makes it potentially onerous for any sane human being, and you start to get into air traffic controller territory – burnout city. Of course, no lives are generally instantly lost when teachers screw up. But the stresses and sense of responsibility, the pressures of being torn by demands from 1,000 different directions at once, demands that contradict and compete with one another and are constantly shifting and changing rules, is sufficient to make even some good folks start mailing it in. I have close friends, some still teaching in places like LAUSD, others recently retired from NYC Public Schools, not to mention the people I know and work with in Detroit, Pontiac, Flint, Willow Run, Ypsilanti, Saginaw, and other ‘garden spots’ around Michigan, who have come to hate their jobs. The one I’m thinking about in LAUSD is an early elementary teacher who has more than 30 years in the classroom. Until a couple of years ago, she was one of the most upbeat folks I’ve ever known when it came to her work, but the last few have really beaten her down. And you see nothing about her or anyone like her in Guggenheim’s one-sided film. I think that’s simply criminal on his part, and it’s NOT an accident.  You load the dice like that, you’d best believe some folks are going to want your head on a platter. I’m not a public school employee (though I am a public school parent) and if I had the chance, I’d love to rip him a new one.

I think it’s rather laughable to accuse teachers as a group as caring more about their own interests than those of kids. There are, as I’ve said many times, execrable individuals in the job who deserve sanctions and who shouldn’t have been allowed to get tenure or, if their awfulness is relatively new (burn-outs, not bad apples from the jump), should not have been allowed to sink so low for so long. But they’re a minority, and that’s hardly what one gets from seeing WFS: instead, we are told, directly and through clever manipulation and implication, that charters are all great; regular schools are all awful. No mention of the average number of hours typical teachers put into their jobs OUTSIDE the classroom. No mention of how much money on average teachers spend on things for their classrooms and for their students out of their own pockets (including buying kids personal items to keep them afloat). No mention of all the teachers I know and you surely know, too, who go so far above and beyond the call of duty for their students that they should be beatified.

And those of us who know the sad history of how teachers have been treated in this country are far too aware of why those teachers unions arose and continue to exist (even if they, like any “institution,” may have lost their way and become reactionary rather than progressive). To paraphrase a common sentiment, I hate teachers’ unions, and will be happy to see them disappear as soon as someone comes up with something better or changes conditions for teachers such that there’s no need for unionization or collective bargaining. Wake me when you’ve got something. I’ll be in the retirement home.

There are, in fact, plenty of very sound ideas about how to make school relevant, useful, and engaging for students. They simply are very difficult to put into place on any sort of large scale in big public school districts. Maybe teachers’ unions are ONE obstacle to such things, but they aren’t the only one or the biggest one. The problem is much more systemic, but the system isn’t a fluke: it reflects precisely what this country has chosen, wittingly or not, to create. If I had it to do over again and didn’t have to fight with my son’s mom to make his education the top priority, I’d have either sent him to a Steiner school or to some place that used a democratic schools model like the Sudbury Valley Free School in Massachusetts. Ideally, I’d like to have had those sorts of educational options in a public setting, and not because of the $$ (not that I’m exactly rolling in dough), but because I do support the sort of diversity and equity that public schools provide most readily in integrated, diverse communities. I’ve not been all that happy from the jump with my son’s mom’s unilateral decision (after we’d split up when he was three) to move from Ypsilanti to Dexter, a nearly all-white district bordering Ann Arbor on the west side. It’s such a typical sort of narrow place (more in terms of the kids than anything else) that my son has not been served well in many ways by living and going to school there (though the music program has been wonderful for him). It’s just so constrained and monotone and traditional, and only a few teachers have “gotten” him for who he is and allowed that he should be dancing to the beat of his own making. He has an enormous passion for science, particularly biology and genetics, but that and music aside, the school hasn’t helped him cultivate a similar love for anything else academic. He’s excellent at math but hasn’t been led to see any of its beauty: too much time doing dumb, drill-and-practice homework that is very time-consuming (particularly for a kid like him) but utterly uninspiring. He makes his A’s but never gets geeked about what he’s asked to do. Neither, of course, did I facing the same sort of work and instruction back in the ’60s. And he’s never caught the literature bug, though he writes extremely well for his age. History? So much busy work, so little thinking.

But Dexter High School or Pioneer, Huron, and Skyline high schools in Ann Arbor are NOT the focus of WAITING FOR SUPERMAN (though by implication, EVERY public high school in the US is indicted by its accusations and insinuations). Most parents in communities like those two are quite happy with their schools and teachers. The big problems most of the debate is REALLY grounded in take place in huge urban poor and rural poor districts, towns, and schools. What is so enraging about the deformer tactics and the entire tone of WFS is the idea that these two sets of schools are the same, and that even within NYC and other urban places, all the schools, all the teachers, all the education is monochrome and universally bad. And to say or imply that is unconscionable.

It’s more than a bit ironic, I think, that some of those who are being led by the deform movement and its propaganda machines to decry teachers, their unions, and the unions of other public service workers are in fact blue collar workers who may be union members themselves. They seem to be able to distinguish between “real, good unions” (namely, their own) and “bad, greedy” white-collar and gray-collar public service unions, particularly those for teachers. Is there perhaps more than a bit of good old American anti-intellectualism at play there? More than a bit of backlash against liberalism? More than a bit of racism (after all, public schools and the liberals who work in them, are the place where some Americans were forced to “let them go to school with them,” as Lenny Bruce put it long ago. I suspect a lot of folks, north AND south, haven’t forgotten that, or the “silent majority” rhetoric of Spiro T. Agnew and Richard M. Nixon, and the various incarnations that’s gone through in the Reagan Era and the GWB/Rush Limbaugh/Newt Gingrich/Glenn Beck Era in which we’re still wallowing.

Of course, it’s hardly the case that all US public school teachers are liberals, progressives, or even Democrats. But that doesn’t matter: we know that teachers’ UNIONS generally support Democratic candidates (who can really blame them, given the alternative?) and that Scott Walker has finally admitted that his agenda, which wasn’t mentioned during his campaign, any more than was Michigan’s Rick “elect me, I’m a smart nerd” Snyder’s open message that he planned to do away with democracy by appointing emergency financial managers at his whim to take over entire town governments and run things as they see fit without needing ANY approval or agreement from local elected officials. And yet, here we are, with Benton Harbor in the complete control of an outsider appointed by Snyder, and Detroit’s public schools about to be handed over to a GM executive (now THERE’S a great recommendation for financial foresight and prudence!) with power not only over money, but over EVERYTHING, thanks to the new law, granting to this fellow what his predecessor, Robert Bobb, was denied. Yes, that giant sucking sound you hear is your democratic rights and core values being consumed by the new fascists.

I can’t help but see a lot of connections, both direct and philosophical, between what Snyder and Walker and others are doing and the repeated bashing of public school teachers by various regressive forces, often if not universally in the pay of the Koch Brothers, the DeVoss Family, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Walton Family, et al. So even as I will continue to call ‘em like I see e’m (see the on-going conversation with Caroline Grannan and others about honesty vs. staying on-message) regardless of whose nose gets put out of joint, if a gun were put to my head (so far, that’s not happened, perhaps miraculously) and I had to pick a side and never say a negative word about everyone on it, it sure as hell wouldn’t be Rhee, Klein, and the rest. They make my skin crawl. Right now, so does David Guggenheim. The folks at GEM who made ITBWFS do not.