The most interesting
thing about the recent box-office bomb of Won’t Back Down wasn't just how big-money ideologues backed such a dog of a movie, but that audiences handed a resounding
“two thumbs down” to this attempt to alter the time-tested teacher-as-hero
formula that has been so profitable to Hollywood over the years.
In the 1980s
and 90s, movies about troubled schools had a common theme: get tough on students. Stand and Deliver, Lean on Me and Dangerous Minds, for instance, reflected the common
wisdom that charismatic educators could force those unruly urban (and usually
minority) kids to shape up, allowing the US to compete with Japan in the global
economy.
But the
heroic teacher myth has recently been flipped to the teacher-as-villain, as
indicated by a new crop of films that pounce on teachers for not improving the
inner cities. Recent Hollywood movies
such as Won’t Back Down and Bad Teacher are buttressed by documentaries like Waiting for Superman, The Lottery and The Cartel
in promoting the notion
that education failure is due primarily to bad schools and, more specifically, to
those who teach in them. In this
narrative, without finding ways of identifying, sanctioning, and firing
ineffective teachers (who all happen to work at schools with lots of disadvantaged
kids), the US will be unable to compete with India and China in the new global
economy.
This embrace of
teacher effectiveness and rejection of student disadvantage as the primary
factor influencing student outcomes has become something of a theme with the
self-described “reform” crowd, as when Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels made the amazing
claim that “Teacher quality has been found
to be twenty times more important than any other factor, including poverty, in
determining which kids succeed.” The “Rhee-formers” believe that good teaching trumps the “demographic determinism” of bad background factors.
Improving
teacher quality is, of course, a laudable goal.
But what does the evidence actually tell us?
Going back at
least to the Coleman Report of the mid-1960s, researchers have
consistently found that non-school factors are the primary — if not
overwhelming — consideration in predicting student outcomes (see, e.g. here,
here, here, here,
here). Decades of research suggest that school-factors
may explain perhaps one-third of the variance in student achievement, while
teaching itself may influence one-fifth, at best. And it’s not at all clear that exceptional
teaching has the sustained impact over time that we might wish. Great teaching can make a difference, and it
does for many students. But for many
more, the environment soon re-asserts itself.
Certainly, it’s
much easier for policymakers to mandate better teaching than it is to mandate
better parenting. We can’t legislate
that all parents care about their child’s education, take prenatal vitamins, or
limit exposure to lead… and that wouldn’t make for a very good movie.
But what we
see in Won’t Back Down is a willful
disregard of evidence in favor of Rhee-formist idealism — the appeal of
simplistic solutions to complex problems. This is not to say that we shouldn’t try to
improve the educational experiences of poor kids. But idealism and ideological desire cannot
counter data. Without a foundation in
facts, any reforms are likely to go the way of the many other efforts that are
based on good intentions and ideological assumptions, but which ignore
evidence. (Recall the Gates Foundation’s expensive and ineffective foray
into smaller schools.) There will be little
overall impact on academic outcomes from reforms that neglect the primary
problems… outside of schools.
Divorced from
evidence, idealism may make for a good movie, but it is not the best strategy
for improving educational outcomes.
