I saw the movie Waiting for “Superman” over the weekend with 4 New York City school teachers (2 public and 2 charter).  The documentary was directed by Academy Award Winner David Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth).  By the end of the movie we were all crying and passing around the kleenex.  It was an extremely depressing film documenting the absolutely horrific conditions of the education system in the United States.

I wasn’t only sad for the five students profiled as they waited nervously to see if their names would be randomly selected to go to a quality 1st grade class, I WAS FURIOUS.

The movie makes it very clear who the villains are in the fight to finally change the education system in order to provide at least a decent education for our children.  The villains are the teachers unions and bad teachers (also known as “lemons”).

The Teachers Unions

The main villain in the movie is Randi Weingarten the President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).  Every time someone tries to suggest a change in the system Weingarten was back on the movie theatre screen defending her union members and seeming completely unreasonable.  One of the most infuriating parts of the movie is when former D.C. school chancellor Michelle Rhee, who is also profiled in the film, proposes a new contract for teachers in the district, which simply gave an incentive to teachers to be better by offering merit based raises.  The teachers unions would initially not even allow a vote on the proposal (I later discovered a report in The Washington Post showing that the proposal eventually passed which is not mentioned in the movie.)  That was the moment in the movie I wanted to throw my $5 fountain beverage at the screen.  The proposal seemed completely reasonable and the refusal to even consider it illuminated exactly the scope of the problem and why it has been so difficult to improve the system.  There is an extreme resistance to any change and so everyone stands still.

The teachers with me agree that unions are necessary but they emphasize that the teachers themselves should have more of a say in what is and is not voted on.  Merit based pay is one thing they all agreed should be up for a vote.  In the end, the unions need to compromise because the status quo is clearly not working.  The bad teachers out there allowed to continue on with no incentive to provide kids with a quality education.  I don’t think it’s fair for the great teachers, who care deeply about children, like the 4 teachers who were with me at this weekend watching “Superman, to be dragged down like an anchor by bad teachers who have no business being in a classroom.

Bad Teachers

The statistic that stood out for me in the movie, besides the fact that we spend significantly more money per year on housing individual prison inmates than we do on individual students, was that only 1 in 2500 teachers loses their job for poor performance.  This statistic is simply insane to me.  I can’t think of any other job where being horrible at it is an irrelevant detail.  (Excluding the U.S. Senate of course).  The AFT claims that they are against “lemons” but it really doesn’t seem that way because the bad teachers continue to be in the system literally until they retire.

All of the teachers I was with attested to dealing with “lemons” on a regular basis in their own classrooms.  Basically, these “lemons” or chronically bad teachers are passed around from classroom to classroom and school to school to do sometimes menial tasks while being paid full salaries.  Tenure for chronically bad teachers is unacceptable in my view and there should at least be a more reasonable way to deal with them and eventually terminate them in order to replace them with someone who will do a good job.  We should be rewarding those teachers who are excelling and getting rid of those teachers who are simply a drag on the system.  Why is anyone against paying good teachers more money?

In the end, I don’t know what the solution to the problem is.  But there are many things that are already being done that are working, like Kipp Schools and Harlem Children’s Zone, both of which are featured in film.  Also well-known programs like Teach for America are doing exceptional work training great educators and placing them in troubled schools across the country.  I don’t have the answers, but I know what we are doing is not working and we should take the pieces that are working and expand those ideas to more places.  It isn’t fair for children like Daisy or Anthony and the millions of other children out their like them to have to sit in a room and wait for a random drawing to see if they will be able to achieve their dreams.  There is something Un-American about that.

I highly recommend that everyone go see this film.

MSNBC convened a special panel of guests from the movie.  Check it out below:

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