I recommend everyone see this movie and decide for themselves.
I don't know if it will have this effect on everyone, but I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since I saw it. For me, seeing this movie was one of those experiences that divide your life into the part before it happened, and the part after.
I recommend everyone see this movie and decide for themselves.
If you don't want to see the movie but do want to learn more about the subject, see the long compilation of links about charter schools, teachers' unions, and bureaucratic fighting that characterizes the modern school system here: http://jseliger.com/2009/11/12/susan-engel-doesnt-get .
I originally started that post as a reply to a particular article, but as I kept coming across more and more information about how the system works, the bulleted list of links kept growing.
I'm excited by the number of people who have said this about the movie, as well as the debate about 'the right education reform' that the movie has spurred. Regardless of which side each person is on, it's clear that everyone is uniting under a common goal - to improve our nations schools - and it's inevitable that we would all have slightly different approaches and goals.
What I wonder is how many people like yourself will take that sudden gnawing question and begin working towards the change you believe in. Will it create a new wave of activists, movers, shakers and changers? Or just change the popular topic of conversation at cocktail parties and social news websites?
Would you mind explaining why it affected you so? What exactly are you thinking about? Are you trying to solve the issues it discusses?
I haven't seen it yet so I can't comment much (though I watched the NBC specials and have read quite a bit about it), however from my understanding it covers just a thin sliver of the real problems within our schools that have existed for some time already. In addition, I haven't heard that it offers much in terms of solutions, other than one that isn't especially exhaustive or touches anywhere near the root of the problems. Instead, it seems to shift power from one bureaucracy to another and shift teacher focus even further from student development and learning to surviving evaluations on the teacher and student fronts.
Anyway, the movie isn't out yet where I live but I am very curious to watch it and see if this is true for myself.
On another note, do you think we'll see a spike in Y Combinator funded education related startups as a result of this? :)
It's largely propaganda designed to promote Bill Gates' version of white supremacy dressed up as school reform. They're not advocating that Exeter replace its curriculum with KIPP, what they're advocating is for low-income minorities only. And the curriculum isn't designed based on the best practices from educational research, but rather it's designed to change the culture of minorities (to quote the NYT).[1]
The fact is that poor kids learn just as much or more in school as wealthy kids, they just start several years behind because of bad parenting.[2] And over the summers when wealthy kids are learning and going forward, the poor kids are actually going backwards.[3] Which is why the average 13 year old white kid has the same standardized test scores as the average 17 year old black kid.[4]
In addition, one of the most famous findings from all of education research is that within-school effects are greater than between-school effects.[3] That means that school tracking has a much greater impact on how much your child learns than whether they go to a good school or a bad school. (The movie touches on tracking but doesn't really explain it.) Especially since kids are sorted into tracks based more on their race and looks than on their ability. [5]
Anyway all the problems the movie mentions are completely true, and they need to be solved, but spreading good parenting best-practices and the changing systemic design of school itself are much better solutions than implementing KIPP, which as far as I can tell (after reading a bunch of articles and a book on it) is a huge step in the wrong direction. There is zero evidence that the program works at all in the long term, especially since it conflicts with all of the research on intrinsic motivation. These kids might make some academic gains in the short term, but in the long term it's hard to believe that they'll be anywhere near as well off as even middle class Americans. The fact that these programs produce decent test results in the short term has basically zero predictive value for determining the long term outcomes. Maybe they'll be better than I think, who knows, but advocating replacing our current school system with this for only low-income minorities without having the longterm data is a huge scam.
It's a shame because the Harlem Children Zone actually has a great baby college program for parents, but the movie just mentions this in passing. In reality programs like would be an excellent use of tax dollars because they are actually consistent (for the most part) with the current research on best practices for parenting, unlike KIPP which is just completely pulled out of some guy's ass. (Although most of these programs don't yet show good longterm results, so more tweaking is needed.)
It says a lot about America that our most popular school reform movie is targeted at people who don't read books.
/rant
[1] "Can the culture of child-rearing be changed in poor neighborhoods, and if so, is that a project that government or community organizations have the ability, or the right, to take on?" http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/magazine/26tough.html
I haven't seen the movie and I haven't read nearly as much on education as you have, but if this is an issue you are passionate about, you shouldn't accuse Bill Gates of "white supremacy". That marks you as a crackpot and makes people much less likely to take you seriously.
Right now wealthy white kids and low-income minorities are educated in pretty much the same way. It's a terrible system, but at least it's more or less equal. What Bill Gates et al. are advocating is creating a completely separate system for low-income minorities, with dramatically more hours spent in schools and away from parents/community. If that's something we want to have an open and intellectually honest debate about then I'm all for that once we have the data, but forcing this program on minorities in secret in bullshit.
I understand what you're saying, I'm just suggesting that your message might get more traction if you phrase it differently, or consider what his motivations might actually be. The guy has donated $1.5 billion to fund scholarships for minority students in the U.S., $750 million for vaccines in Africa, and many other initiatives that I can't remember right now. The idea that he is a white supremacist is laughable. He's practically Robin Hood - extracting wealth from mostly white, mostly corporate America via illegal means, in order to give it to minorities who are poor.
while i agree with your basic point (personal judgement on Gates not adding value to the comment) I'd like to point out that even if someone does some good to non-wasp people he can still be a white supremacist.
E.g. Cecil Rhodes was held in high estimation from the Ndebele people to the point of receiving a king-like burial ritual from them, but he still thought that british were god's gift to mankind.
You're making some very strong comments against KIPP, which I think (after watching a documentary on it) puts you directly at odds with the KIPP administrators who have years of data and research to back up their work.
You say they're missing long term data - how else do would they acquire the relevant data without actually implementing the schools? It's not a huge scam, it's an experiment in lifting up the bottom of our society. And it seems to be working.
I don't care if it's pulled out of some guy's ass, as long as it works and validated.
"Directly at odds with the KIPP administrators who have years of data and research to back up their work."
As of a year ago when Paul Tough's book came out all they had were standardized test scores. Not sure if there is any new research, but as far as I've seen there are no studies on longterm outcomes yet.
"How else do would they acquire the relevant data without actually implementing the schools?"
Ignoring the fact that the KIPP methodology is at odds with established research on what leads to good outcomes, I'd say that we should implement the schools. But we shouldn't force all schools to adopt this system until we know they work. It's not the schools that are a scam, it's the movement to spread the system throughout the country without properly validating it first.
> How long should we wait? We have copious evidence of how flawed the current system is.
You could minimize the damage done by "the current system" (control group) by making the majority of schools into testing grounds for various competing educational theories, and see which one produces the best results.
It's by and large not possible for the state to change the parenting practices of actual parents; if it were, the innumerable attempts from the Progressive era forward would have been successful. It's also not possible to make large-scale systemic reforms and changes of schools without somehow dealing with the problems of teachers' unions: if you don't somehow deal with the problem of teachers who aren't just bad, but who actively don't care or aren't learning how to teach better, the idea that you can effectively implement the kinds of changes you're talking about is improbable at best.
It says a lot about America that our most popular school reform movie is targeted at people who don't read books.
I read books and haven't watched the movie, but in effect if not intent you're arguing for the status quo. You can't change the status quo without changing the teachers' unions. You can't easily negotiate with them either, so charter schools are an imperfect but useful way of isolating the problem to the extent possible.
The state may or may not be able to improve the parenting practices of actual parents, but it definitely can wage a decades long "war on drugs" that disproportionately ensnares the poor and minorities in the legal system and follows up on that by imposing disproportionately severe sentences on them. By doing so, it can help tilt the balance towards bad parenting in such communities by ensuring that more children in those communities only have a single custodial parent, at best.
But please, let's continue to act like we can solve the problem by demonizing the teachers unions.
I completely agree with reforming the unions. Ideally we would just eliminate them. The only problem is that will never happen because schools have a 100+ year history of being extremely abusive toward teachers. The unions prevent any real change for the better, but they also keep a lot of bad stuff out of school as well.
"Is there something special about U.S. that makes schools abusive towards teachers?"
For one thing our puritanical roots. Before unions teachers regularly got fired for things like interracial dating, going to a bar, being in town after dark, etc.
Do you have any reason to believe the US would continue these practices if we eliminated unions today?
Way back in 1910 small town America, you could be fired from all sorts of respectable professions for many of the things you mentioned. Certainly, no one would want their money manager doing disreputable things like what you mention. And yet even without a union, I've managed to avoid getting fired for interracial dating. I've even gone to a bar in town after dark with my boss!
The unions are easy scapegoats, but as you point out, there is a reason they are what they are.
Let's also not forget that the good old days of American schooling depended on a society where slightly over half the population had severely limited opportunities in the workforce. Even with the unions, teachers wages were depressed, and the entire profession devalued because other careers and jobs weren't open to women.
I don't know if it will have this effect on everyone, but I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since I saw it. For me, seeing this movie was one of those experiences that divide your life into the part before it happened, and the part after.