The drama, the genius, and even the occasional naivete of the educational documentary "Waiting for Superman" all stem from director David Guggenheim's decision to give education reform real faces. As we wait with five children and their families to learn whether they have "won" the lottery to enter a charter school, we yearn for Francisco to continue loving books. We cheer Daisy's dream of becoming a veterinarian, or a surgeon. We ache for Bianca's mother as she has to explain to her little girl that in these tough economic times the tuition money for her private school simply isn't there anymore.
"Waiting for Superman" numbered among the top 12 box office hits of October. Philip Brand's small book, "The Neighbor's Kid: A Cross Country Journey in Search of What Education Means to Americans" currently ranks at around 600,000th in Amazon.com sales. Yet as Brand's subtitle suggests, he and Guggenheim are engaged in the same enterprise. Guggenheim's documentary is more emotionally and artistically satisfying, but I found Brand's analysis more thought-provoking, and ultimately, more troubling.
In September 2008, 24-year-old Brand, a think-tank researcher specializing in education, tossed a tent and sleeping bags into a Volkswagen station wagon that had already logged 130,000 miles, and he and his younger brother set off on a seven month road trip through the lower 48 states plus Hawaii. Visiting almost 100 public, charter and private schools, he sought to capture the " 'felt experience' of the hundreds of students, parents, teachers and administrators (he) met during (his) travels."
The narrative itself, frankly, disappoints. Guggenheim was wise to focus so narrowly on five families and the schools they hoped to attend. Brand grants most of the schools he visited only a page of text, and as a writer he has not mastered the art of capturing place in a vivid snapshot. In it entirety, however, his cross-country photo album offers an intriguing glimpse of the diverse, and relentlessly local, character of education in America. His stops include online academies, classical schools that have resurrected logic and Latin, single sex charter schools, a Catholic high school where low-income students earn most of their own tuition while gaining workforce skills, a four-classroom K-8 rural school, a school that focuses its curriculum around transcendental meditation and several "traditional" public schools, including his own alma mater. Unlike Guggenheim, Brand describes some charter schools that are faltering and some neighborhood public schools that serve their communities well.
Moreover, if the individual schools' stories are not always compelling, Brand's conclusions are. He began his journey an avid supporter of educational choice; he ended it a chastened, nuanced supporter … of educational choice. What gave him – and give me – pause were "two central lessons" he learned on his trip.
The first lesson: "When it comes to picking a school, parents care most about the kids with whom their own children associate." So at a Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) charter school in Helena, Ark., two eighth-grade student guides tell Brand that many of their friends view attending KIPP as akin to "'torture,'" and several former classmates who enrolled at KIPP stayed only a few days before bailing out and returning to public school. KIPP can impose stricter discipline, longer school days and a more demanding curriculum, but surely much of what it offers parents and students are other families and classmates who not only accept, but welcome this rigor.
The second lesson: "What happens outside of school — in the home and the community — shapes what happens inside the school." At a public elementary school in Chesaning, Mich., the school counselor tells Brand about a group of third-grade girls who, deciding to mimic the characters in the movie Mean Girls, start up a club devoted to bullying their classmates. Observing that "for good and ill, popular culture seeps into schools," Brand further notes that "strong families and strong communities produce the cultural strength that gives rise to good schools. Schools in turn build social capital, bringing neighbors together for the sake of their children."
Although Brand travels through Utah, he does not stop to profile any Utah schools. Instead he reflects on why Utah voters so decisively rejected school vouchers. Once convinced that teachers' unions and liberal interest groups orchestrated this defeat, Brand now believes that many Utah citizens genuinely feared losing the social capital and community ties fostered by their local schools. More bluntly, he reports that "my observations around the country lead me to believe parents' intuition about peer effects played a deciding role in the outcome of the Utah voucher vote." They chose their neighborhoods in no small part because that way they could choose their neighbors' kids.
Which in turn begs that most famous and disturbing of rhetorical questions: Who is my neighbor?
One reason why I found the voucher referendum so dismaying was that for me, as for Guggenheim, educational choice has faces. I taught at Juan Diego Catholic High School, where a significant percentage of the student body receives scholarships and parents, often minorities and recent immigrants, struggle to find the extra dollars to keep their children in a school where every student takes math through Algebra 2, and almost every student goes on to college. How many of the Hispanic students at my daughters' alma mater, West High School, graduated prepared for college or, for that matter, graduated at all?
At the same time, I respect families' desire to build strong community schools, and recognize that educational choice presents a dilemma. The parents and children who were waiting for Superman were, after all, both looking for a neighborhood … and looking to escape a neighborhood. Critics of the movie, and of charter schools, fret that they skim away the most dedicated parents and most promising students from neighborhood public schools. The movie partly reinforces this criticism: These are very involved, even aggressive parents. Yet we root for them because we, too, understand that our children's school neighborhood — and our neighbors' kids — will fundamentally shape our children's educational aspirations and achievements.
"Schools," Brand observes, "reflect all the kids of all the neighbors. We may not like it, but if we face this reality squarely, it will help us understand why education looks as it does in America, and perhaps we will learn what has to be done to improve it."
What ultimately encourages me about "Waiting for Superman," and "The Neighbor's Kid," and the future of education in Utah and throughout the United States is what I perceive as a growing consensus that education needs to be reformed — coupled with a greater humility about silver bullet solutions. Maybe it is time that we can reason together.
Teachers must help lead this conversation. I understand the frustration of those in my profession who feel demonized by "Waiting for Superman." Most teachers, I'm persuaded, are not driven by ideology or committed to one or another dueling educational theory. They walk into their classroom each morning and stare into a sea of sleepy, apathetic or even angry eyes. They care about their students and fret that all too often they are not reaching these kids. They want to walk out that afternoon thinking they made a difference. They also know that some teachers, and some schools, make more of a difference than others.
But the most important missing voices — the voices that Guggenheim and Brand help us hear — are parents. I read education blogs voraciously … but what I read are teachers, administrators and self-described policy wonks talking to each other. Here at the Deseret News we want to invite parents and community leaders and, yes, students into the conversation. We want to look into the diverse face of education in Utah, and think about what works for all of our neighbors' kids. So early next year, we will be starting up our own education blog — Educating Ourselves — at our website, and we invite you to join in and speak up. Superman isn't coming. But you can.
Mary McConnell is a member of the Deseret News Editorial Advisory Board and a curriculum consultant to Juan Diego Catholic High School in Salt Lake where she previously taught. She graduated from Michigan State University and Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. Among her many professional roles, she has served as chief legislative assistant for Congressman Jack Kemp and chief speechwriter for Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger.