The Convenient Lie
So, why did experts shower an admittedly imperfect “Inconvenient Truth” with praise, but shower scorn on the wildly popular “Waiting for ‘Superman’”? The reason, I think, is that while an imperfect “Inconvenient Truth” actually did expose an inconvenient truth, “Waiting for ‘Superman’” actually promoted a convenient lie. It is a lie because a single well-intentioned, earnest, heart-felt and heart-wrenching documentary cannot overturn over a century of independent, peer-reviewed research showing that the “bad teacher/good teacher” model is both wrong-headed and destructive. It is convenient because it is addressed to a generation of care-givers who are only all too eager to believe that big, tax-and-spend, over-regulating, rule-bound, invasive government in alliance with selfish teachers and the big boss union officials and machine democrat politicians who represent them are bad news in general, but especially bad news for our kids.
The tragedy is that there was nothing to prevent Guggenheim from telling a less convenient, but more truthful story; nothing, that is, except that this less convenient story would have risked praise from experts, but skepticism from parents who desperately want to believe and, in fact, need to believe that the single-most important factor in the success or failure of their children’s education is the school teacher assigned to their child.
In fact, Guggenheim actually did tell this less convenient truth, but then he masterfully twisted it to fit the tastes and prejudices of his anticipated audience. On nearly every frame of “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” Guggenheim vividly displays the central role played in the educational lives of children by a broad circle of adults (most of whom were not educators) who enjoy the interest, energy, and time necessary to care for these children. Scene by scene, frame for frame, Guggenheim documents the aunts, uncles, grandparents, as well as mothers and fathers whose interest, energy, and time commitment proves to be critical for their child’s educational success.
The interest, energy, and time commitment of these adults corresponds both with expert research and with our own experience. My friends who have elected to send their children to private schools, enroll them in charter schools, or who have decided to home school their children display the same interest, energy, and time commitment as the parents, grandparents, aunts, teachers, administrators, superintendents, and politicians featured in Guggenheim’s documentary. They display the same interest, energy, and time commitment as parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, administrators, superintendents and politicians active in my own children’s public school. Which could have led Guggenheim to a fairly straightforward, well-documented, conclusion: in fact, the “good teacher/bad teacher” model is deeply flawed. It takes a village.
So, what does Guggenheim do with this village? He either discounts it or he trashes it. He discounts the village by proposing—against virtually all peer-reviewed research—that it is the school (and, specifically, the teacher) that creates the village, not the reverse. And he trashes the village by suggesting, over and over again, that the real impediments to quality education and learning are the very processes and structures that compose our public life together; in short, the village itself. The solutions Guggenheim and his authorities propose to our problems, by contrast, are nearly all dependent on removing these public or quasi-public impediments and replacing them with private, individual, local mechanisms, institutions, and initiatives. If the fault of our educational system lies with the bad teacher, then we need to find ways of getting good teachers into class rooms. Since public institutions and processes have failed to get good teachers into class rooms, we need to dramatically restrict the roles that public institutions and processes play in vetting, selecting, and placing teachers.
“Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” So declared President Ronald Reagan, the father of this revolution, thirty years ago.