Tonight (written last night) on my flight back from St. Louis (via Dallas) the in flight movie was the documentary “Waiting for Superman”, I had briefly overheard people talk of the movie before, but didn’t really know specifics about it. I wasn’t going to watch it, but went ahead and plugged my headphones in to listen to it rather than my Zune for the first portion of the flight.
If you haven’t seen this, YOU MUST WATCH THIS DOCUMENTARY. Especially if you are a parent, want to be a parent, or might accidently become a parent (I’m look at you Jeef).
The documentary is about the public school system in America, and unfortunately how bad things have become.
I’ve always heard people say how bad public schools are, but I was a product of public schools and I don’t think I turned out too bad. That being said, if you’ve seen my recent posts you may see that I am finally completing my college degree, after 15.5 years, it does start to make me wonder. If I hadn’t attended public schools would I have been better prepared for college and completed it in a respectable amount of time? Perhaps.
The program covers a lot of information, I would have a hard time trying to cover all the specifics, but I’ll highlight a few of the key points.
- Teacher unions cause far more problems in failing public schools than they solve. They were necessary at one point, but now they are just a hindrance. Kind of goes along with the things going on in Wisconsin right now. Teachers who are not held accountable in any way are bad, bad, bad, bad for a system. Many school districts have contracts with teacher unions that provide tenure, and ultimately the inability for teachers to be held accountable and thus not required to actually do any work.
- Charter schools are an option for resolving some of the issues with Public schools but are by no means a sure thing. It all comes down to the staff and teachers, and commitment to making students excel. I saw this first hand in Colorado with a charter school there. These schools tend to be independent from school districts and have their own management boards. In the Colorado school I will leave un named, the “board” was self appointed and there were no means for parents or staff to have any input into those members, ultimately allowing individuals to have full control over the schools, like a school board, but without any accountability themselves either. This may as well have been tenured union workers. Point being, charter schools are not immune to issues that Public schools have.
- The schools that do well become very competitive for students to gain entry into, many with lottery systems. The program follows a number of students trying to get into schools through a lottery process, of the 6 or 7 students on the program, only one gained entry through the system, though one did get in on a waiting list.
Another interesting aspect of Waiting for Superman was that it didn’t just focus on inner city schools. A portion of the program focused on a student in Redwood City California, the town neighboring our home of San Carlos. That really made things set in even more, our daughter is 4 months old, and we have to start paying attention to school and where we are, what is available, and what it is going to cost when we do send her to school in a few years.
You should definitely take some time and watch the documentary when you get a chance, it’s an interesting take on the state of things.