Once Superman Leaves

by Collin Hitt Trib columnist Clarence Page got some $@%^ with his recent book purchase: “Oh, that (expletive) movie is so full of (expletive),” the young woman [who worked at the bookstore] muttered. “Waiting for Superman,” said the book’s title. Page was purchasing the companion book to the movie of the same super title. “Waiting for Superman”...

by Collin Hitt

Trib columnist Clarence Page got some $@%^ with his recent book purchase:

“Oh, that (expletive) movie is so full of (expletive),” the young woman [who worked at the bookstore] muttered.
“Waiting for Superman,” said the book’s title.

Page was purchasing the companion book to the movie of the same super title. “Waiting for Superman” set the education debate ablaze (albeit temporarily or permanently, nobody knows). The film revolves around a a group of parents seeking better schools for their kids – which they’ve found in charter schools, but their kids may or may not get in because of limited seating. A random lottery is held for all applicants to decide who can enroll.

The lottery provides riveting, edge-of-seat suspense as a metaphor for America’s educational tragedy: The quest for good schools is a game of chance.

And if we Americans think only poor kids are penalized, the film notes, we’re fooling ourselves. The U.S. ranks 25th among developed countries in math and 21st in science, the movie reports, and if you count only the top-performing 5 percent of students, we rank last.

In a similar piece in today’s Trib, the University of Chicago’s Timothy Knowles and Paul Goren point outthat movies, in the end, are going to accomplish very little.  It’s smart school management that matters.

Yet, there is a crucial message in the film that nearly gets lost amidst the narrative’s sound and fury. Characters in the film say repeatedly “we know what works,” and indeed we do. The film’s characters don’t explain the factors that drive schoolwide improvement, but research tells us what they are.

The Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago has identified “five essentials” of school reform that reliably lead to better schools: instruction, school climate, parent involvement, professional capacity and leadership. Schools strong in three of the five supports are 10 times more likely to achieve substantial gains in reading and math than schools that are not. And a sustained weakness in just one of these supports virtually guarantees stagnation.

Knowles, in his post at the U of C, oversees a group of charter schools.  Some of them are very good.  But, he says, charter schools are not a silver bullet.  Of course they’re not – but charter schools are the only coherent school reform strategy that consistently produces superior results for low income students in public schools from coast to coast.  And virtually every robust study of charter schools in Illinois – including a paper funded by the National Education Association – finds that charter schools in-state outperform public schools with similar demographics.  Charter schools are far more likely to implement the best practices that Knowles and Goren laud, because the schools’ administrators don’t have to fight daily with interest groups who threaten hellfire for any punitive action taken against underperforming or ambivalent adults.

If Illinois is to have reliable system-wide change, then we’ll have to adjust the incentives throughout the entire system. No doubt, we need more charter schools, and we need more reforms than just charter schools. We can start by doing what Florida is doing.