Category: Films

I think it’s indicative of our times that there are two films about education making the rounds of theaters right now. Everyone seems to know that there’s a problem. Many people are sure they have the answer.

The places where we disagree are are simply these:

What is the problem?

What is the solution?

OK, so that should be easy to fix, right? Just kidding.

For background, you can read my review of Waiting for Superman here, and my review of Race to Nowhere here.

The easiest way to think of these films is as Superman, the Republican, and Nowhere, the Democrat. Superman as tough love, Nowhere as nurturing earth parent. Superman as quantifying and Nowhere as qualifying. That would be oversimplifying, but oversimplification is something both films had plenty of.

Here’s where the films agree:

Our schools are really not working. Our students are not happy. We aren’t producing the right sorts of students that are needed. We’re going about it all wrong.

But really, the films don’t even agree on what the problem is. According to Superman, the problem is unions, lack of flexibility, big schools, lack of government oversight, too much government oversight, low expectations, non-involvement of parents, and teachers.

According to Nowhere, the problem is too high expectations, too much homework, too much stress, over-involvement of parents, and cavalier attitudes by administration.

I think that both films are right, in the sense that for any reasonable problem you investigate, you’re going to find plenty of kids who fit the bill. And both films did a great job of finding those kids. Superman found kids who wanted to work harder, who wanted their parents to be involved, who wanted to be asked for more. Nowhere found kids who needed lower expectations, less work, less stress, schools less focused on numbers.

Neither film, true to what’s going on in general in our culture, spent much time talking to the teachers who are on the front lines of all this. Superman simply vilified them; Nowhere showed them as passive enablers of society’s worst attributes.

Both films suffered from what all 2-hour documentaries suffer from: lack of depth and oversimplification of the issues. I got the sense, however, that Superman would not have benefited from a longer length because, frankly, the film-makers were trying NOT to look at the wider picture. They had a narrow thesis and they stuck with it; the film was not nuanced enough to deal with all the exceptions to the rules they were stating.  Nowhere, however, did attempt to do a quick tour of all the issues, and would simply benefit from the format of a PBS series instead of a film that tries to say it all in 2 hours.

What it comes down to is that these two films are a great opening to a much wider conversation. That conversation absolutely must include the undeniable fact that although we have the same rights, we are not all the same. We do not all need the same kinds of schools, the same kinds of instruction, the same levels of stress, the same kinds of teachers… or really the same of pretty much anything.

Superman suffered from the assumption that all neighborhood schools are failing, all charter schools are succeeding, and all kids would do better in the environment they were pushing.

Nowhere raised some very good points, and allowed for a bit more fluidity in the assumptions about what kids need, but it also didn’t speak for all kids, all schools, or all families.

In my wandering about the educational opportunities where we live, trying to place two very different kinds in an environment that suits them, I have seen the whole spectrum. It always comes down to this: For almost every school someone hates, someone else loves it. For almost every teacher who can’t reach your kid, there’s another kid she can reach. For almost every kid who is stressed out about a high level of expectations, there’s another kid who’s suffering because so little is expected of him.

What we need is educational choice. We need to admit that there is not one answer for every child, and we need to open up the possibilities for all children. I actually wrote about my vision for community schooling a few months ago, so I won’t go into details here!

I do hope that these films open up the conversation more: really, Superman and Nowhere could have quite a discussion if they both agreed to leave politics aside and talk about what’s good for all kids. All of us need to stop thinking quite so much about political clout and money, and a whole lot more about how to serve the needs of the students who walk in the doors of our public schools, no matter who they are today and who they will be tomorrow.

The other night I joined a boisterous, energized crowd at the Rio Theater to see the second of two films about education making waves these days. (See my review of the first, Waiting for Superman. I’m going to attempt to avoid a compare/contrast of these two radically different films here; hopefully I’ll get to that soon.)

Race to Nowhere is tailor made for Santa Cruz. The audience loved it, alternately cheering and sighing (and sometimes a bit of crying) for kids suffering from the high stakes of our current educational system. You’d think that Race to Nowhere was just preaching to the choir in Santa Cruz, a city/county chock full of alternative educational opportunities. But the comment time afterwards made it clear that the film’s message is one we could pay a lot more attention to here.

Race to Nowherewas made by a mom, Vicki Abeles, whose daughter was hospitalized due to the stress of her middle school education. Abeles realized that her daughter’s experience was not only not unique, but that it was becoming more and more common. Faced with pressure to succeed from kindergarten or even before, kids are stressed out and anxious. But far from being stressed by an education that demands that they grow and learn, they are being stressed out by an education that constantly demands busy work with few real applications in their future lives.

The film is a low-budget affair, with bad lighting, inexpert camera work, and bare basics editing. But what it doesn’t have in fancy tricks is made up for by the overwhelming sincerity of the people who took part in this project. They didn’t just criticize our system, they poured their hearts out about their experiences in it.

Abeles develops her theme by first showing that our kids are stressed out, and that they don’t have to be. A generation ago, kids were taking home less homework, taking fewer tests, and worrying about college much later. In the last 20 years, our culture and our educational system have changed radically. Where homework once was used as a tool to help kids learn, now it’s used as a tool to punish kids and families by taking away their free time. Where kids once competed with each other for honors, kids now compete with a system designed to constantly cut them down. Where teachers once taught kids how to think, now they are forced to teach test-taking skills. Where kids once learned for life, now they learn for the test and nothing more.

Some of the most poignant aspects of the film for me:

A high school English teacher in East Oakland is shown being the brilliant teacher she clearly is. She inherits kids whose education has left them with few options. Instead of spending another year trying to get these kids to do better on tests, she spends that year inspiring them and teaching them to think for themselves. At the end of the film, she tearfully relates why she became a teacher… and why she is now quitting.

A mom whose teenage daughter committed suicide speaks, for the most part, calmly and with a challenging look at the camera. She knows that her daughter’s story is important. What we don’t know until the film advances is that her daughter’s story is also about how our culture has made getting good grades a life-and-death issue for some kids. This mom challenges us to reconsider our beliefs about teen suicide: her daughter didn’t show any warning signs. She didn’t have any obvious emotional problems. She didn’t run with a bad crowd. She was a normal, healthy girl who was driven to suicide by the pressure placed on her by school, college, and, her mother admits, her parents themselves. Late in the film, we see the mom interacting with her surviving son, and we hear her talking about how she has changed her parenting. She has learned a lesson in the way that none of us wants to have to learn.

The anecdote of a school where the principal read an anti-homework book and decided to try cutting out homework for a while. The parents and teachers liked it so much, they decided to cut out homework entirely. The result? Happier kids, families, and teachers, and no change in test scores. In fact, homework has no correlation with test scores.

I came into this film a member of the choir. In fact, many homeschoolers are part of the league of composers who have been composing for this choir for quite a while. For whatever reason, we took our kids out of school. And then we noticed some weird things:

Our kids were learning more.

Our families were happier and less stressed out.

Our kids (or the older homeschoolers we met) were doing just fine in college and in life, without tests and stress and piles and piles of homework!

But I thought that this film did an admirable job of presenting the facts clearly for those who have never even considered listening to this chorus of voices telling them that everything is being done backwards. In Santa Cruz, a hiss rose from the audience when George W. Bush was on the screen announcing what he hoped to achieve with No Child Left Behind. But we have to remember this: Most of the country, even liberals around this country, thought that NCLB would improve things. This was a bill co-authored by revered liberal politicians. The fact that the educational establishment largely predicted its ill effects on education aside, most people in this country applauded more testing, more focus, less fun.

If you’re one of those people, if you’re reading this and poo-poohing all I’m describing, you are the person who needs to see this film. Yes, it’s short on data. (Most films are.) Yes, it’s heavy on tear-jerking. But these tears are for real kids who suffered real abuse from our educational system. The overwhelming strength of this film is its emphasis on simple reality. No predictions are needed. Kids with less homework are happier kids. They learn just as well. Kids who go to OK colleges learn a lot and become productive members of society. We don’t all have to go to Harvard. If your kid fails algebra, it’s not the end of the world.

And if your kid gets a B in algebra, it shouldn’t be the end of her life.

The open comment time at the end showed just how much this film is needed even in alternative universes like Santa Cruz. The most powerful speakers were teens who got up and talked about the stress and competition at their schools. A graduate of Pacific Collegiate School (PCS) talked about how the teaching in this school that is regularly cited as “one of the best in the country” was geared to the test. He said that AP classes were shoved at students and it was just an exercise in memorizing information for tests. He talked about how many kids in his class dropped out due to the stress.

Ironically, this film was hosted by a number of local private schools, some of which are notable for their reputation for piling on huge amounts of homework. After the film, I heard a parent go up to one of the schools’ information tables and ask, with a twinkle in her eye, “So, you’re going to cut out homework at your school now, right?”

The mom manning the table simply rolled her eyes.

It’ll take more than a film to change our culture, but at least it’s a start.

I went today to a special showing of Waiting for Superman, the first of the two films about the sorry state of American education that are coming out this fall. It was sponsored by the Santa Cruz Education Foundation and had a panel discussion afterward by John Laird, Ellen Moir of the New Teacher Center, former teacher and union president George Martinez, and Mary Gaukel Forster, principal of Delta Charter School. They were introduced by Superintendent Michael Watkins.

When Watkins asked how many teachers were in the audience, a sea of hands went up. Though Forster and probably some number of the teachers represented charter schools, it was a panel and an audience heavily invested in “the system” that Waiting for Superman blames for all of our educational problems.

The film itself was moving — how could it not be? It followed a few months in the educational lives of five children who are at the mercy of the system. Four of them are urban, non-white kids. The fifth is a suburban white girl whose problems, the film argues, are not so different. She ended up being a bit of a distraction, but more on that later.

No one could argue that what the four inner-city kids are going through is in any way acceptable. One of them has a mother who will do anything to keep her daughter in the Catholic school across the street, but the limitations on the “anything” she can do are clear when she loses hours at work and can no longer pay tuition. The other children are in poor-performing schools, and their parents have found a charter school to place all their educational hopes on. Problem is, charter schools are few and far between, and the kids have to go through a lottery to get in.

The film makes some fine points, and I don’t think there’s any reason not to go see it if you care about the state of our public schools. But in my opinion and that of everyone else who had time to express an opinion at this showing, it suffers from a little too much Superman and not quite enough Clark Kent.

We learn about these fabulous charter schools that the children can get into: instead of 90% failure we get 90% success. Instead of teachers who won’t return repeated phone calls, we get teachers who work long hours and in one school, actually live there. We hear from teachers and administrators who are sure that all schools could be their schools. We hear from Michelle Rhee, who at the time of the filming was sure she was going to reform D.C. schools (and who has just resigned her job).

There are a few omissions in this film, however:

First, the acceptance of rather vague measures for what makes a good school. Are test scores the only measure? Rising test scores? Satisfaction of the students and parents? Surely, the schools they featured were good schools by many measures, but what makes a failing school? What do we want from our schools? What is the reality of what kinds of jobs are out there when the students graduate?

Second, the complete ignorance of all the other possible factors that make a poor student. The students at these charter schools are starting with the most important thing: an adult who wants them to get a good education. But if we turned all schools into charters like these, wouldn’t we have to educate the other kids? The ones who have drugged out parents, distant parents, no parents, too many parents fighting over them? And what about the nutrition these kids are getting? Again, we see these thoughtful, caring parents sending their kids to school with a full belly and a last slurp of orange juice. Their classmates are largely arriving on empty stomachs. And the home environment? There is not a single TV in this film except the nostalgic shots from past TV shows. There is only one scene with a kid playing a video game. Otherwise, this film would have us believe, if we turned all schools into charter schools, suddenly the distractions and commotions in every kid’s house would vanish. All the parents would assemble their kids around the dining room table to help them with homework. Hm.

Third, the lack of introspection about what a teacher’s job really should be. I absolutely applaud these teachers who are giving their lives to teaching, but most people aren’t going to do this. Read this EdWeek blog for a really great description of what an average teacher’s job really should be. What the film is proposing is literally impossible: hordes of energetic, young, well-trained teachers who don’t get burned out and magically don’t want job security or good working conditions. Teachers are real people with real lives, and our system needs to be set up with that in mind.

Finally, the reality of how things really have to get done: by working together. Nice idea to go off and start a charter school, but that’s going to serve the needs of 3% of the students. The other 97% are going to see things improved by the combined efforts of districts, principals, teachers, and yes, unions.

As Laird said in his remarks after the film, “Nothing is black and white. If things were easy, they would have been done a long time ago.”

As Moir said, “Charisma matters. Money matters. Focus matters. Teachers matter. Social services, mental health services…there are many pieces we need to think about.”

And Martinez, who has had a long career in education, drew a laugh and then lots of nods when he said, “What I’ve learned after decades of failed reform: To obtain an education requires hard work: by administrators, by teachers, by students, by parents, and with the support of your community.”

In other words, down here in the trenches we don’t have time to wait for Superman; we’re working too hard!

On to my aside above about the lone suburban girl in the film. I can only think that they threw her in as a nod to the demographic they knew they were going to draw, because they spent very little time on her after assuring us that her chances were pretty much the same as the other kids’. We all knew that this was nonsense, of course, and it’s clear that the dynamic in suburban schools, and in the rural/suburban mix we have here in Santa Cruz County, are very different than in urban schools.

In the short dash through her quest for a better school, the film assures us that the education she’s getting at her high school is bad because, simply, of tracking. The implication is that the kids at the top of the learning curve are doing great, and the kids who need remedial help in her school are doing just fine, but the students in the middle are suffering because they aren’t being challenged enough. This may be true, but that’s not because the needs of the students at the top and bottom are being served so well. In fact, it’s highly likely that the needs of the identified GATE kids aren’t being served at all, given the state of GATE funding in California.

This section of the film opened such a huge can of worms and then slammed it shut with a jump cut back to the inner city, rather than explore in any depth how the challenges of these schools compare to the others. And to say that it can all be solved by not serving the needs of different kids differently? That’s what “no tracking” really boils down to. This is an excellent piece about why ability grouping doesn’t have to be “tracking.”

So: heartwarming, yes. Scary, yes. Sad, yes. Inspiring, a bit.

But: overly simplistic, Hollywood-style slights of hand, and lack of real depiction of how a school works and how we can help, rather than blame, the teachers.

My husband decided that the perfect Labor Day outing for our family would be to a showing of the 1938 Errol Flynn/Olivia deHavilland version of Robin Hood. Our daughter is obsessed at the moment with knights and the middle ages, and our son says we never take him to movies. Perfect!

I was, to tell you the truth, expecting that the movie would be corny and dated, more of a giggle than entertainment. But besides some obvious flaws, it has aged extremely well.

The thing that really impressed me, though, is how much more directors used to respect their audiences. Now, I have to admit that I haven’t seen the latest Robin Hood (Russell Crowe), but here’s my prediction: First, very little will be left to imagination. The deaths will be gruesome, the acting will be hard-edged. Second, the actual history will be either implied or ignored. And third, the beautiful morality of the Robin Hood tale will give way to the action. (Click here to read the CommonSense Media review of the modern version, with their rating of IFFY for ages 13+.)

According to a review on IMDB, I’m not far off: “There is the theme of the idea of a king’s right to govern, but this is mostly an action, not a historical film about Medieval government.”

Things were so much different in 1938. Then, many movie-makers believed that part of their role was to inspire and teach their audiences. Robin Hood is full of easily digested history lessons, with the conflict between the Saxons (who have been in England long enough to feel themselves indigenous) and the Normans (relatively new conquerors from France) front and center.

Robin is declared Robin “Hood” almost as a joke — it’s clear to anyone watching that he is the moral player in this conflict. Marion comes over to his side gently, and not just because he’s a gorgeous hunk, but because he convinces her that might does not, in fact, make right. (In one of the inconsistencies of this old film, Flynn has the blue-eyed tall stature of the conqueror, while deHavilland is the dark-eyed beauty he might have found in a Saxon village… but no matter.)

It was so uplifting to watch a film in which people were allowed to be good. A man who could kill chooses not to. A woman who could stay in safety and marry a wealthy (and cruel) protector chooses to be loyal to a man who is about to be hung.

And not only are they allowed to be good, but they are allowed to experience joy. There is so much heartfelt laughter in this movie. This is one thing that really depresses me about movies lately: even movies for little kids are full of negative conflict, rather than the conflict borne of someone trying to be a positive force against conflict. No wonder our kids are depressed!

There is a lot of killing in the 1938 Robin Hood, and it is done comic-book style, with very little blood. There is some amount of laughing at people who have been gotten the best of. Small bits of 1938-style sexism. But I’d much rather my kids see a film like this than one in which bleakness is elevated to something to aspire to.

They’ve still got their teen years ahead of them, when I’m sure they’ll get plenty of angst to go around. For now, their laughter and inspiration was precious to me.