Waiting for Superman

I do not care how many times a man may circle the globe, the world does not need us to turn back the clock in order to improve the poor state of education. It is disturbing to read that the quality of an individual's education depends so much on the quality of the teacher. A person's future and prosperity should not hang in the balance with one person.

 For many students, they are not fortunate enough to get a teacher who is good, whatever that means. Some students are stuck with ineffective, incompetent, or incorrigible teachers for years at a time. After reading a recent expose on educational reform, I was struck by how hard certain teachers worked. Education reformers like Michelle Rhee put in at least sixty hours a week training up her young charges. The first few months were hell for many teachers, such as the lady who would become the hard-hitting chancellor of D.C. Schools. As a young teacher in Baltimore, Rhee saw that her kids were learning, that they understood what she was teaching, and she felt that she had a real knack for the teaching thing. After a year with in her class, student achievement improved dramatically with her kids. Then the sickening, stark reality dawned on her: the same students whom she had struggled with to nurture into appropriate efficacy would be farmed off to who-knows-what the following year. She had no guarantee that those students would enjoy the same kind of attention and diligence from the next teacher, although the likelihood was great that they would suffer with an inferior instructor, one who would probably lead many of these students to lose the very skills and capacities which they had learned with Ms. Rhee.

 This is a heartbreaking outcome all around. A dedicated teacher throws in everything that she has. She witnesses intense improvement and achievement with her core classes, only to wonder with sudden and then long-lasting panic if these same students will maintain what they have gained.

 Superman could save Lois Lane, but how many times will he have to do it once Lane realizes that the Man of Steel will always be available to whisk her away from danger? How many "Supermans" will it take to whisk our youth out of decrepit school conditions?

Enough with the hero-worsip, I say. Enough with forcing kids to look for some mentor to see them through the hard times. A man is just a man, even if he claims to be Superman. A teacher cannot be all things for all people, no matter how dedicated. Every human being possesses stellar capacities that make genius as common as dirt. We have so much to offer one another beyond the daily grind of the K-12 shuffle. Students deserve better; they deserve to learn that they are life-long learners, that their strengths and weaknesses can change or diminish depending on how well they can define themselves in this life.

No one person can solve the problems facing public education. Perhaps it's about time that educators and all other interested parties pay attention to the warnings of John Taylor Gatto, an invested educator who had to admit that he really was not educating his students. He knew how to school kids, that's for sure. But the six-hour shuffle during arbitrary hours of the day over nine months out of the year did not do very much for his students, unless Gatto went out of his way to break every rule in the book, including fixing holes in the ceiling without prior approval from administration or using real copies of Moby Dick instead of the reader-response versions designed with inane questions and useless pacing paradigms.

Superman is not coming to the rescue. Only individuals, public and private, who acknowledge that no one person can fix this monstrous system -- that apparently was never intended to improve the welfare of the student in the first place – only those individuals can manifest the needed changes, changes that will remove the waste, fraud, and decision-making from a small group of intellects and elites.

 I do believe that a growing interest in decentralizing the scope and power of public education is the best hope for at least offering families the choice where they choose to get their schooling. The leadership to effect such a change, however, must come from politicians whose greatest ambition is to direct the diminution of the state. Aside from Governors Chris Christie of New Jersey and Mitch Daniels of Indiana, there are not many executives who take pride in doing less and expecting government to do less, either.