The Birmingham News — October 3, 2010
“It’s time to vanquish the teacher unions” By Sarah Longwell
There’s no better way to gauge the temperature of the nation than to see what is dominating the cultural scene at any given moment.
Professional pop prognosticators might be interested that the latest rage has nothing to do with vampires or Harry Potter or Lady Gaga. It has to do with schools.
“Waiting for ‘Superman,’” the new documentary from Davis Guggenheim, the Academy Award-winning director of “An Inconvenient Truth,” has struck a nerve. In its opening weekend, the documentary dominated the competition, taking in more money per screen than any other release. Guggenheim has been all over the airwaves promoting his picture. Oprah has hosted him on her couch; George Stephanopoulos has picked his brain on “Good Morning America” newspaper columnists across the country have marveled at the power of his new picture.
And powerful it is.
Tugging at the heartstrings throughout, Guggenheim follows five kids from a variety of backgrounds in cities and suburbs all over the country as they navigate their way through our broken public school system and vie for the limited few spots available in their community’s charter schools. You have a heart of stone if you can watch the culminating scenes -- where these students’ futures rest on whether they manage to win a lottery drawing that determines who will receive one of the few available spots in the charter schools -- without tearing up.
In addition to telling the story of these kids, Guggenheim also profiles the school reform movement. He features interviews with key players like the charismatic Geoffrey Canada, president and CEO of Harlem Children’s Zone and passionate defender of the idea that education is the best way to lift people out of poverty. Also given a place of prominence is Michelle Rhee, the determined chancellor of schools in Washington, D.C., who has been trying to implement important reforms like teacher accountability and higher pay for better educators in the face of stiff opposition from the teachers’ union.
The unions are also represented in the form of Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. Though often described as a reformer, Weingarten and her union’s true agenda is laid bare in this film. They are in favor of blocking moves that will get bad teachers out of the classroom, are opposed to reforms that weaken the stranglehold teacher tenure has on school districts, and are terrified of efforts to introduce teacher accountability.
We don’t need a documentary to teach us that, however. All we have to do is look at the behavior of teachers’ unions across the land to understand how resistant they are to change.
In California, when the Los Angeles Times published a “value-added” analysis of teachers that showed which educators helped children improve and which didn’t, the local union announced a boycott of the newspaper. In Washington, D.C., when Rhee announced the firing of 241 “highly ineffective” teachers, the local union responded by threatening a lawsuit. And, as the 2010 midterms draw near, the unions have begun ramping up their political activity. First, the AFT and the Washington, D.C., Teachers’ Union poured more than $1 million into defeating pro-reform Mayor Adrian Fenty in the Democratic mayoral primary. Oregon’s teachers’ union has marked $200,000 for independent expenditures that will go toward helping Democratic gubernatorial candidate and friend of the unions John Kitzhaber. In response to recent reforms that weakened tenure and strengthened teacher evaluations, Colorado teachers’ unions have dumped almost $1 million into both state and national elections. As “Waiting for ‘Superman’” shows, teachers’ unions are even more dangerous than Lex Luthor and his Legion of Doom. Let’s hope some of our real-life superheroes can vanquish them.
Sarah Longwell is director of communications at the Center for Union Facts. E-mail: longwell@unionfacts.com.