Where’s the Kryptonite?

(Young Spartacus pages)

The premise of the newly released—and much hyped—documentary Waiting for “Superman” is the director’s “discovery” that the real cause of the ghastly performance of American public schools is...the teachers! Directed by Davis Guggenheim, who also directed Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and the biographical film about Barack Obama made for the 2008 Democratic National Convention, this lavishly produced anti-union propaganda piece has been hailed by the bourgeois press and politicians internationally, including Barack Obama, who endorsed it as “heartbreaking” and “powerful.”

This screed argues that if teachers had no protection against firing, U.S. schools would perform as well as those in Finland, which are rated first internationally in math and science. Guggenheim neglects to mention that Finnish teachers are unionized and have tenure, in addition to state-funded training programs, high salaries and short school days—all fine by us.

The film promotes the non-union charter school operator Harlem Children’s Zone as a model. At Harlem Children’s Zone schools, students’ standardized test scores are above New York City’s average in math. One way these schools raised math test scores was by dismissing an entire grade of students for not performing well enough! Although Guggenheim insists that school performance has nothing to do with funding, money has everything to do with Harlem Children’s Zone, where spending dwarfs that at NYC public schools. Two-thirds of the charter’s $84 million operating budget comes from private donations.

One of the film’s heroes is Michelle Rhee, who as Washington, D.C., schools chancellor all but gutted union rights and protections, backed in this effort by Mayor Adrian Fenty. Rhee is portrayed as the champion of black school kids and their parents for her offensive against “incompetent” (read: unionized) teachers. In fact, it was mainly black teachers and black neighborhood schools that got the ax under Rhee, whose restructuring effort touched off a sharp racial polarization in the city. Rhee resigned on October 13 after Fenty lost a Democratic primary election, one of a number of officials across the country who have been booted out in reaction to their attacks on public schools and unions.

As president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Randi Weingarten is the film’s main villain, despite the enormous concessions she helped to extract from the union, including by personally intervening to negotiate the contract in D.C. that caved in to Rhee’s demands. Weingarten’s response to the anti-union frenzy in the press has been to stress how much effort the AFT has put into “trying to reform”—including by giving up seniority protections, expediting firings and embracing charter schools. This craven prostration only further endangers teachers and schools. What is needed is a class-struggle fight to defend union protections and for quality, integrated public education for everyone.