Waiting for Superman

While the Democrats battled these past months to prove the value of the boldness of their reforms, the director of former Vice-President Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth,” Davis Guggenheim, did his part to help them with a new documentary, “Waiting for Superman.” The film wants to do for public education what Guggenheim’s earlier film did for the environment: denunciate the country’s standstills and vigorously incite change within the practices of its citizens.

“Waiting for Superman,” which calls for radical reform of the American school system, is perfectly timed since it directly follows two years of a policy of secondary school restructuring, led not with drums or trumpets but in a determined manner by the Obama administration. The reforming precepts of the U.S. secretary of education, Arne Duncan, are saluted by Davis Guggenheim, who suggests, like the well-known editor of The New York Times David Brooks, that a revolution could take place in the country’s classrooms.

Change of scene: On July 26, seven of the country’s most important civil rights organizations (such as the NAACP and Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition), as well as Reverend Al Sharpton, the former democratic candidate for the 2004 presidential election, backed by the American Federation of Teachers (the biggest teacher’s union), made public a damning report on the education policy of Obama and Duncan. It denounced the brutality of the reform methods, the contempt for minorities and the inefficiency of the direction taken in the face of the democratic issue of education in poor neighborhoods.

How does one understand this huge difference? For the past two years, President Obama has been launching a comprehensive plan of reform aimed at rebuilding a mediocre secondary education system, the source of tragic racial and social segregation: Half of minority students drop out of middle or high school before the end of their secondary studies, as opposed to one out of three for the rest of the population. Even more horrible for a nation that worries so much about its place in the international landscape, the rankings of the international evaluation program PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) puts the United States at the back of the class when it comes to math and science.

To remedy this double failure (the inability to reduce the racial inequities, explaining the bad international ranking), George W. Bush had put to vote in 2002 a law called “No Child Left Behind,” which, in imposing scrupulous monitoring of students’ results through a series of evaluations and penalizing schools and educators who prevented improvement of the national average, promised to get the school system back on its feet by the end of 2014.

The disappointing assessment of this first wave of reforms had already aroused the anger of teachers’ unions, who supported Hillary Clinton during the presidential campaign. No doubt this allowed the Obama administration takeover and, in many ways, accentuated the conservative spirit of the law: States (in charge of educational administration), high schools and especially teachers, are more than ever put on the spot and asked to provide results. Their ability to provide, with numerical statistics, proof of educational improvement now depends on the recognition of their competence, the level of their salary and how long they’ve been in this profession. States are invited to reorganize and adjust their school systems to make them “high performing,” by increasing educational innovations.

This list has some strings attached: deregulation, less union constriction, longer [school] days, merit pay and the end of lifetime teacher tenure, closing deficient establishments, promotion of management methods in managing pilot establishments called “charter schools,” the ability to raise private money from generous philanthropists … The 12 highest ranking states, according to these criteria, qualify for a “race to the summit,” organized in 2009 by Obama and Duncan. Announced on Aug. 27, this list of the happily chosen few is accompanied by a providential payment, each state receiving part of a $4.3 billion pot (three billion Euros).

The principle itself of this competition constitutes the first point of virulent critique from progressive educators and civil rights associations: At a time when the country is going through a never-before-seen wave of layoffs in the field of education (an estimated 300,000 jobs in 2009-2010) and is faced with budgetary restrictions putting the functional ability of the most fragile schools in peril, only a handful of regions will be helped, which according to them, will further worsen the already glaring scholastic inequities.

More precisely, associations are emphasizing, when it comes to the issue of competition, only 3 percent of African-American students and 2 percent of Latinos will benefit from federal funding. The president’s support of the theory of “free choice” and, in particular, his engagement in favor of deregulated schools called “charter schools” (financed publically but without districts, without unions nor administrative restrictions) appears to them to run contrary to the idea of a fair public school (they accuse these establishments of refusing the poorest or disabled students so as to not take on the risk of seeing their success rates decline).

Even more serious, such a promotion of social engineering and scholastic experimentation would run contrary to the idea of racial desegregation in scholastic establishments, which was rendered obsolete 50 years after the historic 1954 case, Brown v. Board of Education. After viewing the Davis Guggenheim film dedicated to her glory, Arne Duncan qualified this policy as a “Rosa Parks moment,” which left civil rights associations stunned. Drawn together in a “National Opportunity to Learn Campaign,” they condemn the quantitative rhetoric of the secretary of education. If they must have the involvement of Washington, they are proposing a counterprogram that will orient public investment toward schools in poor neighborhoods. As for the imperative of scholastic competition that they perceive to be a rampant privatization and an implicit devaluation of teachers, they oppose enforcing it in public schools, the only ones able to guarantee civil rights, and the only place one can get a quality education when one is poor or a person of color.

In the same spirit, Linda Darling Hammond, education adviser for Barack Obama during the presidential election — let go of in favor of Duncan — calls for a reworking of education that resembles a “Marshall Plan,” which would dispel the illusion that the market is able to reduce educational inequities.

Obama’s speeches against the “rigidity” of education are inspired by the experience of the secretary of education. The head of the Chicago school system from 2001 to 2009, Duncan established a drastic form of educational management, in which ethics and results, however contested, are hailed by progressives who primarily care about getting poor, black and Latino students out of the scholastic slump. William Julius Wilson, a sociologist specializing in urban poverty, also passionately supports this purge, in which he sees the best opportunity that’s been offered for young minorities to get out of the ghetto. This conviction is shared by a new generation of democratic mayors who, all over the country, are taking educational management firmly in their hands and striving to “de-bureaucratize the system.”

Davis Guggenheim’s film also celebrates the educational boldness of the most exemplary of them all, the democratic mayor of Washington D.C., Adrian Fenty. His education policy since 2008 conforms to the new spirit of the times (deregulation of education, “bad” professors and principals fired by the hundreds, schools closed by the dozens, the institution of merit pay for teacher …), which gives Michelle Rhee, its controversial superintendent, national notoriety.

Yet, only a few hours away from the release of the film, Adrian Fenty lost his seat: On Sept. 16, he couldn’t manage to convince his voters (the majority of whom were black and poor) of the necessity of prolonging his service. If the shock therapy imposed on the neighborhood schools wasn’t the sole cause of this dismissal, it certainly played a major role in the imposed ousting of Adrian Fenty.

The educational reconstruction seems intended to stick around for a while, much longer than it will take the democratic president to find bipartisan themes. Therefore John Boehner (the new Republican head of the House of Representatives), who supported education reform in the House when George W. Bush carried it, could be a sizable ally. But John Boehner was also the most ferocious opponent of the $23 billion bill proposed by Obama to avoid massive teacher layoffs in the middle of the crisis. If he’s for the liberalization of education, saving it is out of the question.

The liberal-reformer stance of the president when it comes to education could therefore, especially in these times of paralysis of upward social mobility, alienate a big part of his electoral base. The partisans of a welfare state already undermined by Bill Clinton are defending an educational system that they voluntarily recognize is sick, but in which they see the ultimate safety net in the face of the social insecurity that is ravaging America. It is only in convincing his fellow countrymen that he can unite deregulation of the educational market with social justice that Obama will be able to make education the magic word of his re-election campaign.