A Small Act / Waiting for Superman
March 18, 2010 – 10:48 pmIf they have subtitles, I should probably watch these two movies someday, back to back, as Ebert did. They’re about education, and they sound… as if watching them will make you feel as if you’ve been punched in the gut, but sometimes that’s a good reminder of the reality of the world you’re working to change.
“A Small Act” centers on the life story of Chris Mburu, who as a small boy living in a mud house in a Kenyan village had his primary and secondary education paid for by a Swedish woman. This cost her $15 a month. They had never met. He went on to the University of Nairobi, graduated from Harvard Law School, and is today a United Nations Human Rights Commissioner.
“Waiting for Superman” studies the failing American educational system. Oh, yes, it is failing. We spend more money per student than any other nation in the world, but the test scores of our students have fallen from near the top to near the bottom among developed nations. Our scientific and medical institutions employ so many Asians for a clear reason: They must be recruited. There are not enough qualified American students.
Both films are powerful. Seen together, they are devastating. They both end in the same way, with a competition among young students to allow them to continue their education.
Greg borrowed a copy of Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities (about the brokenness of school systems) a few weeks ago; when I saw him in Raleigh he returned it, explaining that he’d stopped reading because it was depressing and gave no answer on how to effect change other than “more money here, please.” I thought about that for a while. Books that just go on about how things suck, about the gloom and doom, without a call-to-action… yeah, that’s probably suboptimal. Yeah, it’s maybe less immediately productive.
But you need to see and be aware of the problem before you can keep your eyes open for solutions. Just because a problem is unsolvable with your current toolset doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have it puttering somewhere in the back so you can hold it up against new tools you come across. And reading books like Kozol’s does do something for me; it makes me aware – at times painfully aware – of the privilege I do have. And I am reminded to be thankful, and to not take it for granted, and to use my opportunities as best I can, and to try and get as many other people as I can to have even more chances than I did, which sometimes also (belatedly) opens up those same doors to me and anybody else.
It’s why I teach – because I want to make the kind of world I’d like to learn in.
One Response to “A Small Act / Waiting for Superman”
My fuzzy recollection is this RAND essay suggests that: () yes, in a rich population, increased spending needn’t help; () international comparison data is very poor; () the gap between rich and poor populations[1] in the production of similarly educated students may be enormous; () but no, the much mentioned difference between the US and similar countries can be overstated.
([1] I’m emphasizing populations, rather than geography, after http://www.gapminder.org/ .)
One thing I liked about OLPC is it made you step back and look at the big picture. “A fix with a ten year latency will miss a billion kids”. Though multi-path reentrant education systems can soften that edge. “300k kids were born yesterday. 2.5 million last week. They all hit primary school in 6 years. Those schools suck. What can you deploy to help them?”. Stepping back makes the picture both more bleak, and more hopeful. It changes the scale of solution you look for.
For example. Science education research reports most K-13 science students remain unclear on most of the few concepts taught, for large values of most. Even at MIT. Most professors lack even the most basic knowledge of others’ fields. If your objective is a science education without these properties, then everyone is failing. Step back far enough to see the goal, and instead the performance picture being one of a tight cluster of rich populations, unmoving, plus a large tail of everyone else, improving, the picture is one of an only slightly differentiated blob, unmoving, quite some distance from where you wish to be. Figure out how to move the blob, and the difference between the US and Sweden, or perhaps even Kenya, may end up noise.
With Wikipedia-like effort, and FOSS textbooks, it might even be feasible. It’s not that we don’t know how to do it in the abstract. With escalating effort one can write better; fact check more thoroughly; scavenge similar work for ideas; incorporate “what actually works?” education research results; take ideas from the science education literature on how to better describe things; create new such ideas; reshape curricula around them. The problem is merely that the effort required is daunting, the organization a challenge, and the payoffs unclear. But it’s not like anything we face isn’t daunting, or that volunteers are unavailable. And the payoff may perhaps be nicely non-linear.
By Mitchell on Mar 22, 2010