Not Exactly Heroic

Caught some of a documentary entitled Waiting For 'Superman' today, having watched quite a bit of the same film back in November with a degree of puzzlement. Basically it's about the state of the public schools in the USA and seems to be suggesting that the charter schools over there are the answer to that nation's educational woes. At least, I think that's what is being suggested. There's a rather dramatic intensity to the piece that's quite gripping but leads to a bit of a problem when you try to follow exactly what it's saying. A number of talking heads are wheeled out, seemingly to suggest they have the answers would we but listen to them, but there are moments also that seem to acknowledge the sheer complexity of what is being dealt with, inevitably pointing to the fact that there are probably few, if any, easy answers.

The problem I find with almost any treatment I've seen of education on film is the perplexing tendency of film-makers to valorise the 'good' teacher in ways that must ultimately prove counter-productive. Teaching is, like most work, ultimately fairly routine and mundane. Expecting people doing the job to go into work on a daily basis fired up to change the world is silly, especially when you really can't afford to pay them the kind of money that is necessary to attract heroes.

And kids, in my experience, are very much aware of this. They'll happily settle for clear directions for what they need to do and competence in getting there. In fact, they are often remarkably tolerant of less-than-competence, as long as it isn't likely to de-rail them from their ultimate goals.

The most interesting part of the documentary for me was the segment on the downright 'bad' teachers who get shunted from school to school and who are ultimately unsackable as the system there stands. My experience of teaching in two fairly different systems has not left me averse to the idea of sacking under-performing teachers, but it has left me profoundly sceptical with regard to ways of assessing teacher performance. This was glossed over in the documentary which gave the impression that such assessment was really quite straightforward, with a shot of the young lady responsible for the New York public schools, and who was extremely keen to sack non-performers, leaning over to a boy in a classroom to ask what he thought of his teacher. (He grunted, He's okay.)

Ultimately the inconvenient truth is that understanding of what goes on in schools is not furthered by any kind of treatment on camera. A proper consideration of the factors that need to be involved in a system to assess the performance of teachers with at least a basic degree of accuracy would in itself take several necessarily tedious and undramatic hours, possibly days, maybe weeks - not the stuff for the big or small screen.