Teachers’ union chief pushes back against ‘Waiting for Superman’

The head of the country's second-largest teachers' union is cast as a villain in a new education documentary that is the darling of the Obama administration, Bill Gates, and other high-profile educational reformers. But American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten is pushing back against that characterization, saying in an interview with the Daily Beast's Lloyd Grove that, though the film is emotionally moving (she says she cried), it misses the point.

"The movie seems to be saying that all you have to do is shake people up, and they will do a better job. But that presupposes that people don't want to do a good job. Teachers want to do a good job. They want to make a difference in the lives of kids, so we need the time and the tools to do that," she says.

In the movie — directed by Davis Guggenheim, who also helmed the Al Gore global-warming documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" — five kids try to get out of failing public schools by entering lotteries to join high-performing charter or magnet schools. But Weingarten argues that charter schools will never serve the majority of kids, so reformers' focus should be on improving public schools as a whole instead of on creating charters.

"It's easy to scapegoat and to demonize and to vilify. The much harder road is to collaborate and work together. I think teachers and unions are being vilified right now," she said.

Washington Post columnist Valerie Strauss echoes this argument in a piece published today.

"Demonizing teachers and traditional public schools, and showing charter schools as a solution to urban public education may make for great theater but it is a bad reflection of reality," Strauss argues. Strauss references studies that have shown charter schools do not outperform local public schools on average. (The same study did show, however, that charters serving low-income, low-performing students do outperform local public schools in improving test scores.)

Voters offered a rebuke to education reformers in D.C. and New York at the polls this week, so the movement must be hoping this documentary will convert more people to their side.

One of the documentary's heroes, D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, chastised those who voted out Mayor Adrian Fenty on Tuesday, in a primary election widely viewed as a referendum on her hard-charging reformist zeal.

"Let me not mince words and say that yesterday's election results were devastating — devastating," she said. "Not for me, because I'll be fine. And not even for Fenty, because he'll be fine, too. It was devastating for the children of Washington, D.C."

(Photo: AFT President Randi Weingarten/AP)