Documentary finds heroes, villains in complicated education
issue
Davis Guggenheim, the director behind

An Inconvenient Truth,

uses the same tactics of turning statistics into graphics in his
latest documentary about the state of public education.
Anyone who has read a newspaper in the last few years probably
already has an idea that California public school education is
struggling. In recent years in San Benito County, school budgets
have been cut, class sizes have increased and middle school sports
are set to be eliminated when the semester ends. The Hollister
School District and the Gilroy Unified School District (where I
live) are both being threatened with a state takeover. Aromas-San
Juan Unified School District is already there.
Documentary finds heroes, villains in complicated education issue

Davis Guggenheim, the director behind “An Inconvenient Truth,” uses the same tactics of turning statistics into graphics in his latest documentary about the state of public education.

Anyone who has read a newspaper in the last few years probably already has an idea that California public school education is struggling. In recent years in San Benito County, school budgets have been cut, class sizes have increased and middle school sports are set to be eliminated when the semester ends. The Hollister School District and the Gilroy Unified School District (where I live) are both being threatened with a state takeover. Aromas-San Juan Unified School District is already there.

Despite what I know about local education concerns, Guggenheim’s documentary still offers quite a gut punch to anyone who has a stake in public education, which is most people in the United States.

Guggenheim starts off with some shocking statistics about how though spending has double in the last five decades, student proficiency in math and reading has stayed the same. Even with “No Child Left Behind,” which aimed to have all students 100 percent proficient in the two subjects by now, every state in the nation is lagging behind. In some states only 14 percent of the students are proficient. No state is anywhere near 100 percent.

But in addition to the mind-boggling statistics, Guggenheim intersperses interviews with the families of five children in different neighborhoods around the United States who are at risk of becoming part of those statistics. He mixes these interviews with school administrators, teachers and union rally footage.

From the beginning, Guggenheim, who made the TV documentary “The First Year,” in 2001 about first-year teachers, acknowledges that he has put his own children in private school. That is not an option for most of the families with whom he talks.

Anthony is an inner city kid who lives with his grandmother. His mother abandoned him when he was a baby and his father died of a drug overdose when he was in second grade. In interviews, Anthony is a smart student who seems to understand the importance of education. But his elementary school feeds into a middle school that feeds into a high school where the majority of the students drop out before they graduate. His family has put all their hopes on a charter boarding school. Anthony is one of 61 students who have applied for the 24 spaces available at the school.

The story is the same for many of the other students. Daisy Esparza lives in Los Angeles and wants to be a veterinarian or a doctor when she grows up. Neither of her parents graduated high school. Her mother works cleaning at a local hospital and her father was laid off from his job. The East Los Angeles middle school where she is set to go the next year is another bad school that feeds into a drop-out factory at the high school level. Her parents have set their hopes on KIPP Academy, a school that focuses on math and science. But the charter school has only 10 open spaces for Daisy’s grade.

The story goes much the same for Bianca, whose mother can no longer afford $500-a-month tuition payments for her private school education. Francisco’s mother is frustrated with a teacher who tells her that her son is struggling to read, but who refuses to return her calls to set up a parent-teacher conference. Even Emily, who lives in Redwood City in the suburbs, has low test scores that put her at risk. The state-of-the-art high school in her neighborhood tracks students, deciding early on which ones are destined for four-year universities and which ones are not. Her family has their hopes set on a charter high school that has close to a 100-percent graduation rate and acceptance into college for graduating students.

Guggenheim holds up charter schools as a beacon – they are schools that are funded using public money that are not held to the same requirements as public schools. The administrators and board have control over how the money is spent and they don’t have to teach state standards as long as the students are still scoring well on state tests. They can design their own curriculum and hire teachers without the strings that come with union contracts.

Unfortunately charter schools are not common enough to solve the problem. As Guggenheim shows, some of the schools have a few dozen spots and hundreds of applicants.

If charter schools are the hero of the film, the teachers’ unions are the villains, according to Guggenheim. He talks about the tenure clause in many contracts that makes it nearly impossible to fire low-performing teachers. With one graphic illustration, Guggenheim shows that a medical doctor and lawyer are more likely to lose their licenses in Connecticut than a teacher is to lose their credential. In New York, tenured teachers who were low-performing have been removed from the classroom – but they sit seven hours a day in what has become known as the rubber room, receiving their full pay as they await disciplinary hearings. They wait for an average of three to four years for their hearings, and even then, the majority of the actions are dismissed.

In the end, Guggenheim’s documentary illustrates how broken the education system in the United States is, but it doesn’t offer many solutions. I’ve always been a proponent of public school education, but now I wonder if I had kids (and the money) would I offer them the best chances with a private school or gamble on the local public school system?

Melissa Flores can be reached at

mf*****@pi**********.com











. She writes a blog at http://melissa-movielines.blogspot.com where she writes about movies, TV shows, food and more.

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