Keeping up with the spate of education coverage fostered by the release of Waiting for Superman is an impossible task. But the story is not a new one….
This from Timothy Noah’s 10 part series on The United States of Inequality:
Throughout the first three-quarters of the 20th century a growing supply of better-educated workers met the demand created by new technologies. The 1944 G.I. Bill, which paid tuition for returning servicemen, played an important role; so did the Sputnik-inspired National Defense Education Act, which increased federal spending on schools at all levels and created (at the suggestion of Milton Friedman!) a student-loan program for colleges. With the passing of each decade, the average 24-year-old had close to one additional year of schooling. These gains virtually halted starting with 1976’s cohort of 24-year-olds. …
The abrupt halt and subsequent slowdown of gains in educational attainment began at about the same time as the Great Divergence. Before the Great Divergence, the country enjoyed at least three decades of growing income equality, an epoch that Goldin and Boston University economist Robert Margo have termed “The Great Compression.” Between 1900 and the mid-1970s, U.S. incomes became dramatically more equal while educational attainment climbed. But starting in the mid-1970s and continuing to today, incomes became dramatically less equal while educational attainment stagnated. Katz and Goldin believe this is not a coincidence.
With Waiting for Superman placing the blame for the deterioration of our schools on the teachers unions, I’m wondering if that will reverse the reaction to An Inconvenient Truth with liberals exaggerating errors and conservatives generally praising the film for affirming their deeply held beliefs. The tricky thing about that formulation for this particular filmmaker? He’s a self-described liberal:
In the Waiting for Superman companion book, Guggenheim writes about his struggle, as a lifelong liberal, over how to present teachers unions in the film. “Their role in education is not a black-and-white one,” he admits. “I’ve gotten to know union leaders who I think understand that the reforms we need will mean some serious adjustments on the part of their members, and that we need to rethink the rigid systems we’ve gotten locked into since the New Deal era. At the same time, these progressive union leaders can’t get too far ahead of their members. And they understandably don’t want to give aid and comfort to some politicians who are in fact anti-worker and are at least as interested in undermining the power of labor as they are in improving our schools.”
That from The Nation — admittedly from the left — grading Waiting for Superman:
The film presents teachers unions as the villains in the struggle to close the achievement gap, despite their long history of advocating for more school funding, smaller class sizes and better school resources and facilities. [The film’s director, Davis] Guggenheim represents the unions through Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.5 million–member American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Ominous music plays during some of her interviews, which are presented alongside footage of Harlem Children’s Zone founder Geoffrey Canada and former Milwaukee superintendent and school-voucher proponent Howard Fuller complaining that union contracts protect bad teachers.
But in real life, Weingarten is the union leader most credited by even free-market education reformers with being committed to retooling the teaching profession to better emphasize professional excellence and student achievement. …
In the Waiting for Superman companion book, Guggenheim writes about his struggle, as a lifelong liberal, over how to present teachers unions in the film. “Their role in education is not a black-and-white one,” he admits. “I’ve gotten to know union leaders who I think understand that the reforms we need will mean some serious adjustments on the part of their members, and that we need to rethink the rigid systems we’ve gotten locked into since the New Deal era. At the same time, these progressive union leaders can’t get too far ahead of their members. And they understandably don’t want to give aid and comfort to some politicians who are in fact anti-worker and are at least as interested in undermining the power of labor as they are in improving our schools.”
The movie, though, does not attempt any such balancing act. It presents [Washington, D.C. schools chancellor Michelle] Rhee as a heroine whose hands are tied by the union. Yet in April, after Rhee’s administration finally collaborated with education experts and the union to create a new, detailed teacher evaluation system tied to the district’s curriculum, the Washington Teachers Union and AFT agreed to a contract that includes many of Rhee’s priorities, including her merit-pay plan and an unprecedented weakening of tenure protections.
Read on for all the unions have done. Demonizing unions is good sport these days. Has been so for decades. Timothy Noah tells that tale, too, in his look it income inequality in the Unites States. One of his ten parts is dedicated to the question of whether the decline of the union contributed to income inequality. The answer is yes (and not easily summarized: read the full post!). Inequality can also fairly be blamed largely on Republicans. In this excerpt he quotes Paul Krugman quoting Larry Bartels from his book Unequal Democracy:
[T]he narrowly economic focus of most previous studies of inequality has caused them to miss what may be the most important single influence on the changing U.S. income distribution over the past half-century—the contrasting policy choices of Democratic and Republican presidents. Under Republican administrations, real income growth for the lower- and middle-classes has consistently lagged well behind the income growth rate for the rich—and well behind the income growth rate for the lower and middle classes themselves under Democratic administrations.
In fairness, Noah points out that Democrats have gotten just as bad in what he categorizes as The Recent Divergence. He also addresses those Republicans who dismiss the importance of income inequality.