Waiting for “Waiting for Superman”

A guest post by Joe Donovan, Donovan Group, LLC

In 2000, I was an aide to a U.S. Senator and played a very minor role drafting an important bill, the Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. However, the bill I was working on went nowhere. A bipartisan group moved very quickly on another reauthorization bill, one with a catchier name: No Child Left Behind.

By the time the law was passed and signed, I was no longer working for that senator. Instead, I was working at our state’s Department of Education, where my work, along with that of my colleagues, would entail implementing NCLB.

I remember pouring through the text of the bill and being astonished by the new requirements that would be put on states and school districts as a result of it. I said to my wife, who does not work in education, “Everything will change as a result of this new law.”

My wife’s response was very interesting and I remember it as if it were yesterday. “’Everything is not going to change in education," she said. "Kids will still come to places called schools, learn from people called teachers and bring home backpacks filled with stuff called homework.”

My wife was right. To most people, schools did not fundamentally change as a result of NCLB, just as they did not fundamentally change as a result of other school reforms after the release of the watershed 1983 report on education, A Nation at Risk. In large part, education has not changed because people have not wanted it to change.

The reason for this is simple: the idea of what school “is” is so much a part of our culture that changing education is tantamount to changing people’s minds about what a school should be.

Now, here is the kicker… Those on the outside, like my wife, are okay with the fact that education has not changed fundamentally. The familiar is comforting. My wife knows the system, she knows what it means to be in fourth grade and she likes it when our kids are assigned to work with flashcards because that's what she did when she was a child.

Education leaders, those whose life’s mission is to innovate the system, see caring parents like my wife as maddening because they are not pushing for innovation. My wife and those like her are not against innovation or continuous improvement. However, “school reform,” in their minds, means tinkering around the edges of a system that already works.

The idea that “schools work” is central to how most people make sense of the US education system. We can see in our research that most people like their kids’ schools. Even people who do not have a strong connection to the schools in their community because they do not have school-aged children believe that their schools are generally doing a pretty good job.

However, my wife’s perceptions, and the perceptions of parents and community members around the country, are likely about to change.

“Waiting for Superman,” the new film from director and producer Davis Guggenheim, is a powerful one that will shake the public’s perceptions about America’s public schools. As with any good film, it presents some people as villains, others as saints and mostly points to ways in which the system should and could be fixed if only we, as educational leaders, were paying close enough attention to the problems.

The challenge for educators is to not be caught flatfooted. The ideas presented in the film are not new; they are things that education leaders have been working on for years. With this in mind, we in education should see the film as a blessing, one that will create new advocates for our efforts and a public that embraces change.

As educators, we must work to focus the public on efforts underway to improve the system and get people to understand that we need them to become engaged and stay engaged.

The most important thing we need to do is to ensure that we do not lose the faith of the public. Nothing will do that more quickly than speaking of these issues as if they are only theoretical or far off. The film will create a level of urgency with which we are not familiar in education, and we need to be ready to speak of the issues that we have been wrestling with for years. Most importantly, we must do so with the same passion as the scores of the newly converted, including, by the way, my wife.