The trouble with the “fire the bad teachers” mindset is that it assumes teachers work in a vacuum, and that they’re solely responsible for their students’ outcomes. In reality, students are in school for only 25 percent of their day, so their development depends on many factors outside a teacher’s control. And teachers, in turn, are largely dependent on the support structures they get from school and district administrators.
Are there some poor teachers who don’t put forth much effort? Yes, just as in any other field—and these individuals have no place in a classroom. But the vast majority of teachers—even those whose students’ test scores might suggest they are “ineffective”—are trying hard, and they want to be successful. They have an incredibly difficult job, and they need more support to be effective. Firing these individuals and hiring new teachers in their place is no guarantee of success—and it ignores the underlying problems that led to mediocrity in the first place.
If Superman’s contributors thought highly enough of teachers to listen to their concerns, they’d learn that teachers are crying out for more support. In fact, teachers would rather have this support than higher salaries.
In one of the largest-ever national surveys of public school teachers, commissioned by Scholastic Inc. and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and released in March, fewer than half of the teachers surveyed (45 percent) said higher salaries are absolutely essential for retaining good teachers. More teachers said it’s essential to have supportive leadership (68 percent), time to collaborate (54 percent), and high-quality curriculum (49 percent).
This is why merit pay won’t work: It assumes teachers would just try harder for the promise of more money. But most teachers already are trying as hard as they can. What they need instead is more help—such as training on ways to better identify their students’ individual needs and tailor their instruction accordingly, time to plan collaborative projects that would stimulate their students’ interest and lead to higher-order thinking skills, and the technology tools that would allow them to adopt these techniques. Not surprisingly, a new study from Vanderbilt University, which found that merit pay had no impact on student test scores, appears to support this notion.
Yet, merit pay is one of several trendy education reforms that Superman embraces uncritically. The AFT and other education groups have legitimate concerns about many of these reforms, as we’ve written about before. (See here, here, here, and here.) But nowhere in the film do viewers learn what those concerns are—and so the dialogue that Superman purports to want to start about improving U.S. education can’t even get off the ground.
The film alludes to several charter schools as models for reform, such as the Harlem Children’s Zone schools that Canada leads in New York City. And in a haunting final sequence, we see the very public anguish of several families as their children are denied placement in these various schools through an arbitrary lottery process. But what is it about these schools that makes them successful? That’s what the film really should have focused on—and it would have been far more instructive if it had.
The key to these schools’ success cannot be summed up as freedom from the constraints of union rules, as Guggenheim would have us believe. For if that were the case, then charter schools would be outperforming traditional public schools across the board. In truth, charter schools do no better, on average, than regular public schools do. There are some exemplary charters, just as there are exemplary public schools—and there are many bad ones, too.
If the film had looked more closely, it would have discovered that the elements that make some charter schools a success are the same factors that lead to success in traditional public schools: strong leadership; a vision for ensuring that all students can succeed, and a plan for addressing each child’s unique learning needs; a challenging and engaging curriculum that is relevant to students’ lives and interests; and committed teachers who have the training and the tools they need to realize this vision.
New York City’s School of One, for instance, is a charter school whose success relies on giving each child an individual learning plan in math. And the schools we profile in our Special Report on blended learning—a mix of traditional schools and charters—are using a combination of face-to-face and online instruction to personalize the curriculum for students, while also giving them the in-person support that will help them thrive.
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