(2010) An inconvenient truth about our country's educational system - as Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of the DC public-school system (having resigned after her unwavering political supporter, Mayor Fenty, was defeated) points out in a Newsweek essay: "The U.S. is currently 21st, 23rd, and 25th among 30 developed nations in science, reading, and math, respectively. The children in our schools today will be the first generation of Americans who will be less educated than the previous generation" - is that with declining educational standards our economy, made up of people with inferior intellectual skills, will soon falter in global competition as well.

If the US is to remain a world leader, Bill Gates stresses that we need a well-educated work force for innovation. While American students rank number one in their self-confidence at mathematics in international comparisons, their actual abilities are below average in the developed world.

Many of the same parents who complain about teachers who push their kids too hard academically with too much homework readily accept the demands of coaches on young athletes to be competitive. Our priorities are skewed.

As a college instructor, teaching remedial algebra at a state university, I see first-hand the effect of high-school graduates entering college without the intellectual tools necessary to be successful - time and money wasted on what should have been attained in a dozen years of public schooling. But when 70% of secondary-school graduates, which translates roughly into half of all high-school students, immediately matriculate at a four-year university or community college, one can readily appreciate that not that many students were enrolled in high-school advanced-placement or college-prep courses, yet these students somehow expect they will be prepared for a rigorous course of study.

No one, other than nontraditional students, should require remedial classes in mathematics or English, yet a significant percentage of incoming freshmen need these programs to have a chance at getting through college.

"Remedial education at colleges is becoming more common and more costly," write Eve Newman and Becky Orr in the Laramie Boomerang, and according to the US Dept of Education's research, as the journalists report in their series on education: "The study concluded that 30 percent of first-year students at four-year universities and 42 percent of students at community colleges must take at least one remedial class. The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education found 60 percent of new college freshmen need to take at least one remedial class. Only 17 percent of the students who take even one remedial reading class at college are likely to get their bachelor's degree."

Ten years after focusing his camera on teachers, director Davis Guggenheim, who co-wrote the script for this documentary with Billy Kimball, felt the fear many parents of young children experience before sending their kids off to a public school: Will the kids be lost inside an "academic sinkhole"? Unlike many parents ("It's not fair, but this is where I live"), Guggenheim had an option of choosing instead a private school. Getting a good education in the US now requires earning a fortune or being fortunate.

This film is about those parents and their children - such as Anthony, Daisy, Francisco, Bianca, and Emily - who have to rely on luck in a lottery to get into a really good school with quality, dedicated teachers.

"Kids believe that education is a way out," says educator and reformer Geoffrey Canada, president and CEO since 1990 of Harlem Children's Zone in New York, whose Zone provides free, comprehensive educational, social, and medical services for some 10,000 children residing within the 96 blocks of central Harlem. Speaking of his own childhood: "One of the saddest days of my life was when my mother told me 'Superman' did not exist…. She thought I was crying because it's like Santa Claus is not real. I was crying because no one was coming with enough power to save us."

While kids bring to school with them their problems and poverty from troubled homes, Canada has demonstrated that disadvantaged kids can learn and close the achievement gap.

Over the past four decades spending (adjusted for inflation) on education per pupil in America has doubled without significant improvement in academic performances. Instead, there are over 2,000 "dropout factories," secondary schools with over 40% of the incoming student population not graduating, according to Johns Hopkins researcher Bob Balfanz. Today no diploma means no skills means no career. In Pittsburgh social architect and community leader Bill Strickland points out that upkeep of prison inmates costs more than sending someone to a private school.

Conflicting state standards with parochial interests of local school boards have produced incoherent policies; teachers unions ("a menace to reform") have garnered the political power to grant classroom teachers contracts with tenure for life (only one out of 2,500 tenured teachers has been fired); school-district bureaucracies and a laxity toward accountability ("dance of the lemons") have created a place where it's "all about the adults," says Rhee, not the students.

But when Rhee attempted to reform the DC public-school system by firing inept teachers and administrators, closing failing schools, offering six-figure salaries based on merit in exchange for giving up tenure, she met resistance from Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, along with most teachers and parents in the district with many of the worst schools in the nation, proof that parents and teachers are largely to blame for their unwillingness to try something new that has shown promise elsewhere.

Though not the answer to all the problems, magnet and charter schools (only one out of five has produced anticipated achievement) offer some hope for meaningful changes. Another example in an effort to separate children from the hostile influences within their neighborhoods is the Seed School of Washington, DC, where students are boarded in dormitories on campus.

Elsewhere programs similar in some respects to Canada's Zone are budding, such as KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) in Houston and LA, created by Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, formerly public-school teachers - where excellence, discipline, and rigor are expected; instructional time has been expanded in the day, week, and year; and over 90% of students enrolled go on to college - since having blossomed nationally into 82 academies.

Yet until more public-school districts rise above mediocrity to grasp the hands reaching out for help in the classroom, the imperiled children of impoverished and even many middleclass families who care enough about getting an education as a way out of ignorance and into a more promising future will have to wait for their number or name to get pulled from a lottery.

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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