Monday, Sept. 20, 2010

Teenagers are now less likely to graduate from high school than their parents were.

Let that sink in a moment, then consider: As a country, we’re spending more than twice as much per student than in 1971, only to rank 25th among industrial nations in math.

Eighty-nine percent of U.S. students — some 50 million — attend public schools.

We rank fifth in cumulative K-12 education spending per student after only Luxembourg, Switzerland, Norway and Iceland, yet rank 21st in science literacy out of 30 developed countries and 25 in math literacy in 2006 (Time magazine, Sept. 20).

Maybe a documentary filmmaker can bring to public education the urgency he brought to global warming.

“Waiting for Superman” is a new film by Davis Guggenheim, husband of actress Elisabeth Shue and the Academy Award-winning director of “An Inconvenient Truth,” which grossed $50 million worldwide while exploring a complex issue and changed the way many Americans think about climate change.

Superman is being released Sept. 24, though elite audiences have already enjoyed screenings.

Bill Gates, who saw it in January in Seattle, has become a fan of the film.

So have education activists who help dropouts.

The title comes from Geoffrey Canada, 58, CEO of the 97-block Harlem Children’s Zone.

The documentary follows five kids and their parents trying to escape neighborhood schools for higher-performing public charter schools.

In charter-school lotteries, leaders of oversubcribed schools pull bouncing balls from metal cages to decide which kid lands a coveted space.

Some public schools flourish while others flounder, proving it is possible to teach every child, even those with horrible home lives, to read, write and do math and science at respectable levels.

Low-income African-American students in Harlem have been found matching performance with kids not only across New York City, but across New York state.

Researchers studying their success conclude that what matters more than anything else in the school is the teacher, whose job has changed the least in the past 50 years of tumultuous change.

President Barack Obama and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan have been taking on teachers’ unions with $4.35 billion in stimulus money with Race to the Top, designed to prod school districts to raise academic standards, to train teachers more effectively and to remove those who are not up to the job.

Seven states have enacted laws to remove barriers between student achievement and teacher evaluations.

At least a dozen states have passed laws requiring student-progress data to be considered in making teacher-evaluation or tenure decisions — unimaginable a few years ago.

The Los Angeles Times created a searchable database of 6,000 teachers ranked by their effectiveness on the basis of how much their students improved on standardized tests during a year in their classrooms.

Predictably, the teachers’ union called for a boycott of the paper, but more than 1,100 teaches also responded to the Times’ invitation to see their data before it came out.

“Why, in education, are we scared to talk about what success looks like?” Duncan wondered.

Duncan acknowledged that a newspaper might not be an ideal forum for teacher performance feedback, but asked why it took a newspaper do do what the school district should have years ago. “The drumbeat is hard to ignore,” Time concludes in a cover story. “Instead of continuing to rely on tradition and interest groups to set education policy, which is like using astrology to design a space program, we may be on the cusp of running schools — brace yourself — according to what actually works.” A confluence of falling test scores, growing dissatisfaction among parents, a more difficult and more competitive global economy, innovators and an administration  willing to listen to them should yield overdue real change.