Third World America - Arianna Huffington [44]
Amy Brisendine was a student at the University of California–Santa Barbara, studying to become a nurse.103 A 32 percent tuition increase in November 2009 forced her to drop out of college, and she now works five to six days a week waitressing and bartending at two restaurants. “I will try to finish my education if and when the economy gets better,” she says, “but until then, I am continuing to work.”
So as education becomes more and more important, why are we allowing our future workforce to become less and less educated?
Academy Award–winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim set out to find the answer. The result is his film Waiting for Superman (the phrase comes from one young student’s dream of being rescued by Superman).104 In it, he shows us the stories behind the statistics and exposes the bloody battlefield America’s education system has become. The many opposing forces are deeply entrenched behind decades-old Maginot Lines—and our children are getting caught in the crossfire.
Guggenheim isn’t afraid to point fingers. From politicians who pay lip service to education reform but never manage to change a thing to school boards and bureaucrats more concerned with protecting their turf than educating our kids, there is plenty of blame to go around. He turns a particularly withering spotlight on America’s teachers’ unions—which have gone from improving pay and working conditions for teachers to thwarting real reform and innovation and protecting incompetent teachers from being fired.
Guggenheim is not anti-teacher.105 Indeed, he sees good teachers as true heroes. In 2001, he made The First Year, a powerful look at a group of inspiring teachers battling to overcome soul-sapping obstacles to teach our children—particularly those in inner-city classrooms. But his new film shows how it’s become next to impossible to get rid of bad or indifferent teachers.
By way of example, he cites the state of Illinois, which has 876 school districts.106 Of those, only 38 have ever successfully fired an incompetent teacher with tenure. “Compare that to other professions,” says Guggenheim in the film’s narration. “For doctors, one in fifty-seven lose their medical licenses. One in ninety-seven attorneys lose their law licenses. But for teachers, only one in twenty-five hundred has ever lost their teaching credentials.”
In New York, tenured teachers awaiting disciplinary hearings on offenses ranging from excessive lateness to sexual abuse—along with those accused of incompetence—are allowed to bide their time, sitting around reading or playing cards for seven hours a day, in places dubbed “Rubber Rooms,” while still collecting their full paycheck.107 On average, they remain in this well-paid limbo for over a year and a half—and some for three years or longer—costing the state $65 million a year.108 And, as Guggenheim points out, “None of this deals with the larger pool of teachers who just aren’t good at their jobs.”
This takes an enormous toll on the quality of the education America’s children receive. In the film, Stanford’s Eric Hanushek says if “we could just eliminate the bottom six to ten percent of our teachers and replace them with an average teacher, we could bring the average U.S. student up to the level of Finland, which is at the top of the world today.”109
The film charts the connection between the unions’ clout and their generous political giving.110 Between them, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers have made nearly $58 million in federal political contributions since 1989. Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute points out that this is “roughly as much as Chevron, Exxon Mobil, the NRA, and Lockheed Martin combined.”111
According to Guggenheim, “Since 1971, educational spending in the U.S. has grown from $4,300 to more than $9,000 per student—and that’s adjusted for inflation.” But while spending is way up, results are not.
Unlike repairing America’s roads, bridges, and dams, it will take more than just a massive infusion of dollars to fix our schools.112 Part of the