Life got in the way of critiquing Waiting for Superman, but I found more great articles to help break down concerns that those in the education field have with the movie. Rick Ayers, a professor at the University of San Francisco, offers this analysis. He addresses many of the issues that I also found distressing.
One issue that hasn't been mentioned widely, however, is how Redwood City and Woodside High School were misrepresented in this film. (NOTE: I worked in a middle school in Redwood City for two years and while I'm no expert, I know a thing or two about the area.) The film claimed that Redwood City is your average suburban town with nice houses and white families, but also succumbs to the same problems that inner cities face--schools that leave students behind. The film suggests that not even suburbia is escaping these problems.
False. Redwood City is multi-ethnic city, with a large Spanish-speaking community on the other side of town from where the film makers decided to film. It is not your average suburban high school. David Guggenheim didn't even give Woodside High a chance. Not one word from the principal, not one word from teachers or students who actually go to that school. The principal responded in this op-ed.
Guggenheim vilified the school for tracking its students into different classes based on prior performance in school. Don't get me wrong, I don't like tracking. The film uses the premise that tracking started because school was a somewhat of a sorting hat, separating students who were cut out for white color jobs (doctor, lawyer, engineer, teacher, nurse, architect) from those who really were better fit for blue collar jobs. The film suggests that since the nature of work has changed, we need do away with tracking to prepare students for 21st century skills. I don't disagree that we need to prepare students for 21st century jobs. But tracking isn't wrong because the job market has changed. It's wrong from a humanitarian standpoint. Believing that some students aren't intelligent enough to go to college is crazy. There is now research to show that you aren't born smart, you become smart through experiences from birth onward. Intelligence is not innate and ability isn't inherited. (Check out work by Carol Dweck or David Shenk.)
Yet a lot of schools, including those that feed into Woodside High, operate under the assumption that some people will just never be as smart as others. Woodside High's principle writes that his school serves the motivated and engaged, as well as the disinterested and disenfranchised. He didn't say less intelligent, because the students tracked in non-AP classes are not less intelligent. They're not. They're disenfranchised through a number of ways.
In this country, certain knowledge, namely knowledge spoken in English from a Euro-centric world view, is valued over other knowledge. Bilingualism and biculturalism are seen as deficits in schools in the United States and students are punished for it. (Case in point: Arizona bans ethnic studies classes.) Guggenheim could have addressed this issue and noted how some teachers in public schools are not tracking students, like Linda Christensen, a successful high school English teacher in Portland who refuses to believe that some students can learn, and other's can't. You can read a snapshot of her work here and read about her work here, including how she honors students' home languages.
But for non-white students, who never have a teacher like Linda Christensen, who are never told that their cultural background is actually an asset, who never read a picture book or novel about anyone other than a person of European-descent, who never hear about history from any perspective but White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, their educational future is bleak. And the blame for their failure is placed everywhere except on the curriculum, which has implied year after year that their heritage and their culture is not valuable and they cannot be successful. By the time these students reach high school, Woodside High, along with other high schools in urban areas, have the tremendous challenge of educating motivated students along with the disenfranchised.
Guggenheim's solution to tracking is to take the motivated students out of public schools and put them into charter schools. But what if the solution to tracking was about training teachers, from Kindergarten to high school, to teach like Linda Christensen? What if credential programs trained teachers to teach a curriculum that didn't just give lip-service to diversity with a special lesson here and there on non-white cultures, but actually valued the backgrounds of all students and intentionally incorporated non-white perspectives regularly? I think we would have far fewer disinterested and disenfranchised students.
I'm sure I'll talk more about it in future blog posts. But if you're curious about how educators are bringing voices to K-12 education that value all backgrounds and cultures, check out these sites:
-Children's Book Press
-Rethinking Schools
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