The C.L.B. Report
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Waiting for ‘Superman’: America Can’t Exist on Muscle Alone Anymore
“In an episode of the 1950s TV show Superman, a school bus full of kids is threatened with disaster as it nearly topples over a cliff, when WHOOSH, the Man of Steel flies in and pushes the bus to safety. That was the fantasy that Geoffrey Canada, the South Bronx-bred boy who became a Harvard-trained education entrepreneur, hoped for as a child. All it would take to save school kids was muscle and a miracle.”
TIME Magazine article, Monday, Sept.27thBut America can’t exist on muscle any more. With manufacturing jobs a sliver of what they once were, and field-level farming jobs largely stocked with immigrant labor, the coming generation of middle-class and working-class Americans needs not strong backs but educated minds. The titans and geniuses, the Warren Buffetts and Mark Zuckerbergs, will still propel themselves from privilege to power. What we need are people to work behind the counter at Southwest, to keep a million offices purring efficiently, to oil the machinery of civil service. A blue-collar economy is yesterday; white-collar is today and tomorrow.
Americans also can’t afford the fantasy that we have the world’s best educational system.
The U.S. is near the bottom of advanced countries in math and reading scores. We may not pass sleepless nights worrying about Finland, but that country’s kids get a world-class public-school education, and ours don’t. Our problems are bigger and more systemic: that, in the world’s richest nation, a seventh of our citizens live in poverty; that the majority of African-Americans form a near-perpetual underclass; that the nuclear family has detonated into pieces, leaving many children with only one parent, if that, to love, instruct and keep an eye on them; that the culture of instant gratification convinces kids that studying is a bore, while the infinitesimal chance of making millions as a pro athlete or a rap star is worth pursuing. Surely the young deserve full-time parents, more realistic goals and inspiring teachers.
But maybe that too is a fantasy…READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE -
”More than 85% of U.S. teachers have an education degree. But many ed schools are fusty, politicized institutions that seem designed to turn out reliable teachers’-union members rather than reliable educators.
TIME Magaine Article, How To Recruit Better Teachers (September 23, 2010)
(Source: cierrelaboca.com)
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Excerpts from article, President Obama Moves To Change The Equation on Education, Not ‘Waiting For Superman’
By Dr. David Washington, HuffingtonPostToday at the White House President Obama is launching Change the Equation (CTEq), a unique and promising partnership coalition of over 100 companies ranging from Facebook and Google to Dow Chemical and Merck, all dedicated to improving science, math, engineering, and technology (STEM) education performance in order to solve America’s innovation problem.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote an Op-Ed a few weeks ago applauding “‘Waiting for ‘Superman’” for demonstrating that Harlem Children’s Zone founder Geoffrey Canada’s point, that “the only way to fix our schools is not with a Superman or a super-theory”.
No, it’s with supermen and superwomen pushing super-hard to assemble what we know works: better-trained teachers working with the best methods under the best principals supported by more involved parents.”
Another promising sign that suggests things might turn out differently this time around is that the President has been successful in inspiring the corporate community to step up in a highly coordinated and strategic fashion.
You can tell something big is happening when top companies — including Facebook, DreamWorks, Viacom, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, E-Line, Ogilvy, Tesla, Activision and Epic Games to name just a few — are all united around the single objective of improving the STEM performance and overall innovation prowess of our country’s children.
Read the full article here. -
‘Superman’, Can YOU Help Me Spread the Word About Education?
By now, a few weeks into this process, my readers are starting to get a clearer picture of what Cierre la Boca is all about.
Mainly, I don’t view the current state of schools through a single prism—because none of the issues actually exist in a vacuum. (It’s ALL connected!) I love to examine the full context of the issue(s).
I have this ‘crazy idea’ that somehow, someway, I can help people—of all stripes—become more interested in and more passionate about improving the educational system in America. It’s an “ideal” that I’m committed to and find virtuous enough to, as Geoffrey Canada candidly states, position myself and my views as a “threat to the status quo.”
But…no matter how much I believe this is my purpose in life, along the way, we all need a little help. This is where ‘Superman’ comes into the picture. He’s “Faster than a speeding bullet, More powerful than a locomotive, Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird…it’s a plane…no…it’s…”
My point is this: If Superman is indeed a true superhero AND he exists to protect the underdogs while fighting the injustices of the world AND he has an impressive resume’ of achieving results…well then, it must be worth my time and effort to seek out his assistance in this war to save America’s children. Sounds logical enough, right?
But, here’s the thing: No adults really believe in Superman. We all know that he’s simply one of the greatest mythical figures ever created. Despite our childhood fantasies about meeting Superman in person (or having him fly us around the world, fighting crime and saving people), he’s just…not…real.
What if he is though? And what if Superman actually CAN help me spread the word about the full context of education in America? Wouldn’t that be crazy?
And along comes….”Waiting for Superman”. Opening in theaters nationwide on September 24th, comes a new film that will “send shockwaves through the political debate on education” and “force the issue (education) for the November elections”.
What am I talking about? Davis Guggenheim, the director of ”An Inconvenient Truth”, will release his latest documentary about the poor state of public education in this country. The aptly titled, “Waiting for Superman”, denotes the anxiety that many adults and kids experience everyday, while waiting for the system to become more equitable, productive, and relevant.
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“Waiting for Superman”, The Movie
As excerpts from this New York-The Magazine article suggests:
Among leaders of the burgeoning education-reform movement, the degree of anticipation surrounding “Superman” is difficult to overstate. “The movie is going to create a sense of outrage, and a sense of urgency,” says Arne Duncan, Barack Obama’s secretary of Education. New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein concurs.
“It’s gonna grab people much deeper than An Inconvenient Truth, because watching ice caps melt doesn’t have the human quality of watching these kids being denied something you know will change their lives,” Klein says. “It grabs at you. It should grab at you. Those kids are dying.”
The excitement and agitation around “Superman” might seem hyperbolic, overblown. Yet both are symptomatic of a signal moment in the annals of American education, when a confluence of factors—a grassroots outcry for better schools, a cadre of determined reformers, a newly demanding and parlous global economy, and a president willing to challenge his party’s hoariest shibboleths and most potent allies—has created what Duncan calls a “perfect storm.”It’s a moment when debates are raging over an array of combustible issues, from the expansion of charters and the role of standardized-test scores to the shuttering of failing schools and the firing of crappy teachers. It’s a moment ripe with ferment and possibility, but also rife with conflict, in which the kind of change that fills many hearts with hope fills others with mortal dread—and which gives a movie like “Superman” a rare chance to move the needle.
For decades, the conversation about our schools has been the preserve of the education Establishment—and the result has been a system that, with few exceptions, runs the gamut from mediocre to calamitous. Waiting for “Superman” is no manifesto. It offers no quick fixes, no easy to-do lists, no incandescent lightbulbs to unscrew.
What it offers is a picture of our schools that isn’t pretty, but that we need to apprehend if we’re to summon the political will necessary to transform them. “Nobody ever wants to call a baby ugly,” says Duncan. “This is like calling the baby ugly. It’s about confronting brutal truths.”
Looking squarely at those truths will cause the blood of some viewers to reach a roiling boil. Fingers will be pointed, and they should be—directly at the adults who have perpetuated the grotesqueries that consign generation after generation of America’s children to failure. If that leads to some hellacious donnybrooks, so much the better.
“If you want to change public education, you have to do something that feels like a threat to the status quo,” says Canada. “If we don’t fight about this, if we can shake and be friends, we ain’t going to change. And if we don’t change, huge numbers of kids ain’t going to make it.”
“There is no Superman coming to save them. All they have is us.”
Read the full article here.
