Waiting for Superman in the Race to Nowhere

I watched the Sundance Film Festival award-winning documentary "Waiting for 'Superman'" as homework to hear Geoffrey Canada, CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone, speak last night. He is passionate, articulate, and will not be taking a back seat on the importance of educating our children anytime soon. He believes all children can and do learn when they are taught by teachers who care. He is shaking up the traditional public education system by challenging schools, teachers, administrators and teacher unions to find solutions to the dysfunctional systems.

If you have not seen "Waiting for 'Superman'," it has multiple stories that form the documentary, including following three lower-income children and their families who enter the child into a lottery for a spot in a charter school to escape the dead-end public schools they currently attend.  It is a difficult movie to watch — especially from our Silicon Valley/California perspective. While our schools in California rank quite low, there still seems to be plenty of opportunity for a reasonable high-quality education. Contrast that to the extremely dire circumstances children face at public schools in Harlem, the Bronx, Watts, Detroit, inner city Chicago and other pockets of low socio-economic status where kids are often treated by their communities as future recruits for gangs. Thousands of kids out there waiting to be future contributors to — or burdens on — our society.

Mr. Canada is looking at the issue through a long lens toward the future and what this country will need to provide so that its citizens are productive, contributing members of society, rather than a drag to it through the medical and penal systems. He is also visionary about the skills that workers will likely need in an increasingly technological society.

He made so many good and logical points in his talk, including:

• The current education system is not incentivized to improve because it has no competitors. Charter schools are starting to threaten the status quo, but in terms of overall numbers, they are few and far between.

• What other business/system in our society expects results when we take a 3 month break? Students’ learning retention drops dramatically when they attend schools that take June - August off. Why not extend school through July to remedy this well-known problem?

• What other business/system in our society allows its employees to continue in their positions when they are not meeting objectives? Teachers whose students do not demonstrate learning through testing or other means are not penalized or eliminated from their positions. Would you stand for this if your employee(s) came to work with this attitude? Would you keep them on if they did not achieve objectives?

I also was fortunate to see a screening of "Race to Nowhere" last year. Equally heart-wrenching, this movie is centers around the suicide of a 13-year-old girl who was having difficulties coping with the self-induced, parental, and societal expectations around tracking to attend college.

The school kids profiled in "Race to Nowhere" are in the opposite conditions to those in "Waiting for 'Superman.'" They are in socio-economically successful area of Northern California (Danville) where they have every opportunity, and the attendant expectations, to do well in school and attend then college.

There is a small, slight overlap that connects the two movies: Woodside/Redwood City. "Waiting for 'Superman'" points out that Woodside High School (WHS), a public high school in one of the most affluent parts of the United States, prepares less than 50 percent of their senior graduates for college. They contrast WHS to nearby Redwood City’s Summit Preparatory Charter High School where graduates claim a 96 percent admission rate to college. Like the subjects in "Race to Nowhere," Woodside is likely a school where parents place a high degree of emphasis on their children being college bound, though this is an assumption on my part. Woodside and nearby Atherton are home to some of the wealthiest and innovative Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

Redwood City is near East Palo Alto (EPA), one of California’s most crime-ridden and economically challenged cities.  It’s not clear from any information I can get my hands on how many students at Summit are from EPA. If there are a significant number from EPA, then this school serves a population at a unique intersection of the two issues:  kids from middle and upper middle class families have access to schools that tend to prepare them better for college and they have additional parental and peer support (or pressure) to go to college.  Kids from lower socio-economic backgrounds have access to a charter school that claims to be preparing them better than their assigned public school for college. They may or may not have the parental and peer support that encourages them to actually attend college.

As a parent of four children, three of whom have graduated high school in the East Bay (Castro Valley High School), I am not sure how I feel about this whole debate. I know that for the amount of property, income and personal taxes I pay, I absolutely expect a good public educational system for my children. I have always steadfastly kept my kids in public schools as a vote of confidence in the public school system. And with all the classes and teachers my children have been exposed to in the 75 student-years they have been attending public school, there are less than five teachers and/or principals I have any complaints about.

That said, none of my older children (ages 27, 27 and 23), have yet completed college. They are products of two professional engineers, one with an MBA and both educated at Cal-Berkeley. Our youngest, now a high school senior, is in the College of San Mateo Middle College program and set on a four-year college track for herself. Though her assigned high school, , is academically a good school where she felt challenged and also did well, she did not like the fact that most kids were not taking school seriously.

The older kids dabble with college classes one course at a time, while they work. They struggle to find the time and money to attend classes and buy obscenely expensive textbooks. They are all smart kids, but have each found the college system challenging to contend with — fighting for classes, deciding on majors, and sometimes either intellectually challenging or not challenging at all. I agree with Geoffrey Canada that preparing children for college is a laudable goal. I’m not convinced they actually need to attend to succeed and be happy.

• I want to continue to believe that what makes the United States an amazing place is that you don’t need a college education to succeed, wildly. I want to believe that for those who do not intend to enter a profession such as teaching, law, medicine or engineering, college can be an expensive distraction to getting on with life.  Four-year college for all may be unrealistic, to "Race for Nowhere’s" point.

• I want to believe that we are re-entering a time when trade schools, technical skills and craft will be important, which I know is in conflict with what Geoffrey Canada said last night about where the jobs of the future will be. 

• I want to live in a country where if we are going to heavily promote the importance of college, it is equally accessible to all qualified children and decrease or eliminate the costs of attending like they do in Ireland and Europe.

Then, we will be walking our talk that we need children to be prepared for and attend college to make our nation stronger.

Until then, we need to prepare our children to read, do math, be literate about history and the arts, think critically, ask probing questions, and develop business-level analytical skills while we reestablish our manufacturing base in the US.

These are the people who will seize opportunities and avoid being a drag on our social systems, going on to succeed happily in life. Whether it be starting a business to groom dogs, running a thriving gourmet meal truck, installing solar systems, discovering a cure for cancer or AIDS, or engineering the next high-rise building, every child deserves at least these opportunities to contribute meaningfully to our great country.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on this subject. Please write them in the comments section below.