Brilliantly crafted video. I’m interested to see what the movie will be like. I’m pretty cynical when it comes to all this talk about education reform…and some questions come to mind when I hear facts like these:

What are some factors that lead to success for education in other countries? (i.e. economic politics, cultural norms, special education protocol, etc.).

Are poverty/other social problems going to be solved by “fixing” education? Because it doesn’t seem linear to me…more like a vicious cycle, which makes it hard to tell whether poor education gives way to poverty, or poverty negatively affects education.

Who are stakeholders in education? Who’s making the decisions?

And on and on….

I guess I’ll be curious to see the film this fall. I agree that our system is broken, I’m just skeptical of all the great “fixes” that have been mentioned over the past year.

I’m not sure how I feel either.

It’s pretty.

But I don’t see a lot of content.

Even the title alone feeds into the idea that all you need to fix education is a superhero or two. Haven’t we seen this story before?

(But, right, it’s a teaser and it’s hype for the real content. So whatever.)

Hey Dan,

Why do you feel conflicted?

I’m not an educator (or in education), but my wife is. I’m curious as to what your perspective is.

–R

“Why can’t education be isolated?”

I thought my comment was clear. In brief, when public education is isolated from the many contexts in which it operates and various external and internal constraints put upon it with the express purpose of BLAMING public education for woes over which it has no or very little direct control, pretty much any conclusions drawn are likely to be less than useless.

I don’t believe any of the things you mention above are particularly new, nor are they things that schools or staff have desired or asked for, by and large. So is the problem public education (from which you are opting to withdraw your child(ren), or some larger social and political issues and systems?

Not that I’m opposed to parents having input in their kids’ educations, but I’m always amazed at how many Americans are convinced they can do a better job of doing a profession about which they know nothing than can those who do it for a living. Of course, some parents are likely quite gifted and knowledgeable, and some teachers are quite ignorant and incompetent. But on the whole, parents teaching their own children in isolation from the society in which those children will one day likely live is a rather interesting way to go about things (unless, of course, you’re of the mindset that you can protect your progeny forever from the rest of the world, a not uncommon wish on the part of all sorts of folks, I realize).

I was raised in a public school. It wasn’t the best nor the worst. I had some marvelous, inspired, inspiring teachers and some idiots and dullards. I managed despite the worst of them to get graduate degrees in English, educational psychology, and mathematics education. I never swallowed what I was told (to the extent that I was paying attention to it at all) without some degree of skepticism. I assume most children could do the same, though it’s a fine line between healthy intellectual skepticism and denialism, a philosophy that needs not pay attention to any scientific or historical facts that conflict with received dogma, be that of a religious, philosophical, or political nature.

Naturally, good test scores are not the most important or useful indicators of the quality or nature of the education students are getting: most likely they reflect the income and education levels of the majority of parents in that community. So it’s smart to be skeptical of said scores. But as the parent of a 15 y.o., I am pleased with my son’s ability to think critically about what he is asked to learn in school. Were I a wealthy man without the need to make joint decisions with a woman (my son’s mother) with whom I share virtually nothing except parenting the same child, I no doubt would have given my son some different educational opportunities than he had by going to public school in a nearly all-white community (where his mother, not I, resides). But if wishes were fishes. . .

And of course the school system in that town is not isolated from the people who live there, the county, the state, or the nation. Everything makes a difference. And so, isolating our public schools in order to bash them, which is what I suspect may be up with the movie in question (or perhaps to offer some panacea which I will likely find severely problematic) is to make some very serious intellectual errors indeed. On my view, that is. Your mileage may vary and probably already does.

Not bad, “e”. The notion that parents and/or have no role in or responsibility for educational/academic, is usually (but not always) an indication that the school critic is out to pin the blame for everything on public (never private) education. And of course it makes no sense to suggest that it’s all the fault of a given school, a given set of teachers, etc., without regard to the other educational stake holders.

The flip side of this approach is to pin the blame entirely on bad parenting and lazy, dumb kids. I hear that one a lot from bad teachers, almost never from good ones (and from some administrators, too). But I also hear it from those who claim that given the “poor raw material” kids from poverty and their families represent, we’re wasting precious resources (particularly of the monetary kind) on schools in these sorts of neighborhoods, communities, districts, etc. I can almost hear the voice of Alistair Sim from the 1951(?) version of A CHRISTMAS CAROL: “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”

There’s plenty of blame to go around, of course, but it’s not merely the obvious folks and institutions that need to be targeted. The genius of American classism and racism is its ability to deflect blame on everyone but those with the greatest vested interest in maintaining the status quo, keeping the majority in poverty and ignorance, and ensuring that the have-nots and barely-haves fight amongst themselves for the few crumbs that come their way. US public education gets the blame for every failure, real or imagined, but NEVER gets credit for a single success. That says it all right there.

First, I’d like to see how the comparisons with other countries are drawn, otherwise I’m not sold. There have been a host of invalid comparisons made over the years between countries with vastly different educational systems and vastly different goals with vastly different student demographics.

Second, as a math teacher myself I shudder when I see this as I suspect that this will not mean more art, more cooking, more school gardens or more time learning how to act locally, but rather I fear it will mean more algebra, more trig, more AP classes, more facts, more accceleration, less thinking.

Dan has inspired me to find ways to bring something of value within a content area that generally does not serve students. But that job becomes harder if the pressure is directed at ‘more’ math, more topics, etc.

I completely agree with Michael’s comment. Working with families in impoverished areas I have see many factors that effect a child’s ability to receive a diploma. What about the child who has six younger siblings and no father in the house? When one of the children gets sick, it falls to the oldest child to care for them if the mother needs to work to make ends meet. What about that same child who has to come home from school and cook dinner, from whatever she can find, clean the house, get the other children in bed, and then try and do homework, while her mother is out running the streets? What about the family that is constantly on the move following jobs and the child has to readjust to new situations and teaching styles? What about the child who has been told from the day that they were born that they were a mistake and/or stupid and that they will never succeed? What about the teacher who is overwhelmed and works until 2 or 3 in the morning trying to come up with ways to reach children who see education as a luxury compared to survival? Where are the people in the community who build these children up and tell them that they are worth something? The neighbor who volunteers to take care of the sick child so the older sibling can go to school and not fall behind? Instead of addressing the social issues, we are working to isolate our children from them and denying support for those children who do not get encouragement at home. I remember growing up, we always had several kids, that did not live in our house, over for dinner. Some of them every night. Some had situations that they didn’t want to go home to, others didn’t have anything to eat if they did go home. My mother always made them feel as if they were part of our family. Technology has given us the opportunity to connect with people around the world, but it has also caused us to disconnect with those around us. The old adage is true, “It takes a village to raise a child.” Whose village are you part of and whose children are you helping to raise?

This movie has all the bells and whistles of being “socially responsible”, however, I beg to differ. It is a well-packaged, well-financed and well coordinated attack on the public school system. One needs only to check who financed this film to find that there is much more afoot than “social responsibility”.

It seems to make a compelling argument that teachers are at the root of all of our educational woes in this country, but it fails to dole out the much deserved serving of criticism to the proponents of No Child Left Behind who instituted “unreasonable demands” upon local school entities and promulgated a toxic “culture of testing” that would irrevocable harm special needs students, children whose first language is other than English and students who do not test well for whatever reason according to educational historian, Diane Ravitch.

Read Diane Ravitch’s book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System:How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education” before you enter the theater.

Involving the community has been brought up briefly in the previous replies, but the level of importance in community involvement is undersold. Communities and our schools need to be interconnected where our parents and teachers form a partnership for the betterment of the child. Aside from creating a sense of community in our school systems, many families are underprivileged and the lack of education becomes a generational pattern, making it difficult for students to reach the standardized bench marks. Standardized “knowledge” is another problem that I won’t get in to, but the key to efficient and effective learning is to adopt the curriculum to every child’s cognitive state. Example- If a kid gets in a fight at recess, his brain is not going to be prepared to learn long division. Schools need to focus on the ENTIRE individual. New curriculum technology is coming out where curriculum can be personalized from day 1, adapting to the child’s learning ability. There aren’t many schools implementing this philosophy, but there is one school out in Phoenix that has been doing this for quite sometime, and have proven that even the most difficult students can transform their own lives into being happy, productive, aspiring adults.

The school I’m referring to is StarShine Academy in Phoenix (www.starshineacademy.org) who uses individualized learning plans and other innovative techniques to create a happy productive student through the development of every childs mind, body, spirit, health, wealth, and happiness. Holding the child’s fate in a lottery is so symbolic of the state of our school system. Only the wealthy, and lucky get the chance for a good education. Spreading quality charter schools through franchise opportunities is the only way to reach every child from coast to coast.

StarShine’s curriculum works, which is why StarShine works closely with the United Nations and their Millennium Development Goals. As individual schools around the country work tirelessly to change our broken educational system, they also need support from our government. Hopefully this movie will wake them up, put their individual interests aside and work to make a difference.