Vladimir, Estragon, and Stan Karp are waiting for Superman

Watching the speech, reading the transcript, and blogging at once.  Mostly.       


     Stan Karp, toward the end of his introduction, seems to be positing Waiting for Superman as an endorsement vehicle of the prepackaged, business-model "Success for All" programs dismantled as ineffectual in last week's Kozol piece.  Karp says, 
     "What is really new and alarming—and what makes a film like WfS so insidious—are the large strides that those promoting business models and market reforms as the key to solving educational problems have made in attaching their agenda to the urgent need of poor communities who have, in too many cases, been badly served by the current system."  
     I'm 17'13" in (just after the Fox news quip).  Stan Karp appears to say that NCLB, managerial-style administration, and privatization, despite their employ as response tools to low test scores and lowered global rankings, have in fact left American education the worse for wear.  And further, should power continue to be taken away from teachers and given to politicos and managers, he suggests the education system will fail in spectacular fashion not unlike the housing market and healthcare:
     "Today a deepening corporate/foundation/political alliance is using this same test-based accountability to drill down further into the fabric of public education to close schools, transform the teaching profession, and increase the authority of mayors and managers while decreasing the power of educators.
     What we’re facing is a policy environment where bad ideas nurtured for years in conservative think tanks and private foundations have taken root in Congress, the White House and the federal education department, and are now aligned with powerful national and state campaigns fueled with unprecedented amounts of both public and private dollars.
     Unless we change direction, the combined impact of these proposals will do for public schooling what market reform has done for housing, health care and the economy: produce fabulous profits for a few and unequal access & outcomes for the many."
     This is where my confusion is beginning, because it seems that limited-government Republicans (presumably the group most vocally supportive of a businesslike model of public education) would never acquiesce to taking on the responsibility of writing and implementing countrywide curricula.  Not to mention providing the funds for such an endeavor.  And with the mightily flawed checks-and-balances system that failed to protect millions of Americans from the ramifications of the market collapse.  
    At 20 minutes in, I see that Mr. Karp's point is that the movie seems to point an accusatory finger at "bad teachers," citing that group as responsible for poor test scores and dropout rates while simultaneously gladhanding the "good teachers" who can turn around failing students and help everyone reach the benchmarks.  In actuality, he says, much more has to do with inherited inequality: 
     But when it comes to student achievement—and especially the narrow kind of culturally-slanted, pseudo-achievement captured by standardized test scores—there is no evidence that the test score gaps you read about constantly in the papers can be traced to bad teaching, and there is overwhelming evidence that they closely reflect the inequalities of race, class, and opportunity that follow students to school.
     Perhaps the movie itself is not making the point that bad teachers are to blame, but based on what I hear Karp saying, it really doesn't matter.  If people THINK teachers are to blame, then they ARE to blame.  For Karp, this is a McSolution.  It's hastily arrived-at, indicative of narrow environmental consideration, and lacking in foresight.  But it will probably work RIGHT NOW.  He says that oftentimes teachers who finish on top of performance lists one year will be at the bottom the next, and that the reverse is true, as well:  
         "The National Academy of Sciences found 20–30% error rates in value-added teacher ratings systems based on their own dubious premises. Teachers in the bottom group one year were often in the top group the next and vice versa. The same teachers measured by two different standardized tests produced completely inconsistent results." 


Speech is over now.


     It may be a flaw, but I just think good teachers make sense make sense when they speak.  I'm even at the point where I wanted to believe Stan Karp because of the way he looked - casual and wise, learned and convinced, experienced yet still hungry.  He looks like good teachers I've had, and he looks like people I have learned to trust.  While watching him speak and reading his words, I had the feeling I was watching someone who was articulating something I feel but hadn't yet found the cause or means to say aloud.  
     I am looking forward to watching the film this week, and just now I am of two minds about it.  I feel firstly that this film has probably made people pay more attention to public schools than they were five years ago (any maybe publicity is good publicity), but I am also very skeptical that what I've imagined the movie to be about (based on the Karp speech, and this week's research) is anywhere close to the truth.
     In my travels I found a couple of videos from the rally that Karp mentions.  The first features Matt Damon and his mother, a lifelong educator and public school activist.  The longer version is below, and an abbreviated clip with a transcript can be found by following this link.

 Also of interest was this clip, where Mr. Damon offers a well-reasoned rebuttal of an interviewer's myopic (or baiting) question.  There is also a strange splicing moment...

     
     Evidently, reason.tv sent the above reporter to the rally.  Parts of her various conversations, including one with Jonathan Kozol, are included in a short reel here.  The Matt Damon one is also partly included.  
     To close, in the Michael Azzerad book about independent music in the 1980s, Our Band Could Be Your Life, I remember reading something to the effect that the creative underground always flourishes richly in times when the political climate is most oppressive.  The following piece from slam poet Taylor Mali, written in 1999, is one of my favorite poems about the job I do.  I think it's fitting to include here as an example of the kind of fire-and-brimstone conviction that ignorant capitalists can inspire in the heart of a true educator.  It's called "What Teachers Make."