Waiting for "SUPERMAN": How We Can Save America's Failing Public Schools (Participant Guide Media) [Paperback]

Participant Media (Author), Karl Weber (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 14, 2010 | Series: Participant Guide Media

Each book includes a $15 gift card from DonorsChoose.org to give to a classroom in need.

 

The American public school system is in crisis, failing millions of students, producing as many drop-outs as graduates, and threatening our economic future. By 2020, the United States will have 123 million high-skill jobs to fill—and fewer than 50 million Americans qualified to fill them.

 

Educators, parents, political leaders, business people, and concerned citizens are determined to save our educational system. Waiting for "Superman" offers powerful insights from some of those at the leading edge of educational innovation, including Bill and Melinda Gates, Michelle Rhee, Geoffrey Canada, and more.

 

Waiting for "Superman" is an inspiring call for reform and includes special chapters that provide resources, ideas, and hands-on suggestions for improving the schools in your own community as well as throughout the nation.

 

For parents, teachers, and concerned citizens alike, Waiting for "Superman" is an essential guide to the issues, challenges, and opportunities facing America’s schools.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Karl Weber is a writer and editor based in New York. He collaborated with Muhammad Yunus on his bestseller Creating a World Without Poverty and has edited two previous Participant Media Guides, Food, Inc. and Cane Toads and Other Rogue Species.

Davis Guggenheim is a critically acclaimed, Academy Award®-winning director and producer, whose work includes It Might Get Loud, the 2009 documentary featuring Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White; and An Inconvenient Truth featuring former Vice President Al Gore, which won the Oscar® for Best Documentary in 2007. More recently, Guggenheim directed Barack Obama's biographical film for the 2008 Democratic National Convention, as well as Obama's 30-minute primetime infomercial. Guggenheim has also directed many television series including Deadwood, NYPD Blue, and 24.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: PublicAffairs; Media tie-in edition (September 14, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1586489275
• ISBN-13: 978-1586489274
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 0.8 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #181,084 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

93 of 98 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Children Come First September 24, 2010

By AdamSmythe

Format:Paperback

Let me start by stating what this book is not, and then devote the rest of my review to what this companion book (to the recently released documentary film of the same title) is. Although the book contains some criticism of teacher unions, it is not a biased bashing of teachers. One of the book's chapters is written by Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers. Two other chapters were written by Davis Guggenheim and Lesley Chilcott, the director and producer, respectively, of the film documentary. (Guggenheim previously directed Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," so I wouldn't call him an anti-union fanatic.) Additionally, a chapter is written by Bill and Melinda Gates, and others are written by a Stanford professor (who tried to teach me economics some 40 years ago), a leading education reporter, and Michelle Rhee, the reformer chancellor (at the time of this writing) of Washington D.C. public schools. There is a balance of viewpoints, as you might imagine. The book's editor, Karl Weber, and the various chapter authors make the point that there is much work to be done to improve our education system. Basically, they report and you get to decide.

This companion book begins by stating the case that we're all too familiar with--U.S. public education performance isn't what we'd like it to be. For example, among 30 developed countries, U.S. students rank 25th in math and 21st in science. High school graduation rates for minorities are barely 60%. (Some argue that access to a quality education may be the biggest civil rights issue of our time.) The majority of prison inmates are high school dropouts. (It costs a lot more to imprison someone for a year than to educate a student for the same time.) The average high school graduate will earn very significantly less than the average college graduate over a lifetime. You likely know all these rather depressing facts, so I'll move on.

"Waiting for `Superman'" describes (separately) the situations of five students striving (and waiting) to get a quality education, and each of their stories is followed by contributing chapters by the individuals I mentioned earlier. From different perspectives, the children's stories are fascinating, hopeful and heartbreaking.

So what can interested citizens do? Near the end of this fast-reading book there are a dozen or so pages devoted to how parents, students, educators and businesspeople can all help advance the cause of quality education. Further, for those who want to involve themselves further, there are over 30 pages of listings of web sites and organizations devoted to children, schools and progress in education.

In short, the issue at the heart of this book (and the movie) is vital to the success of our children and our country. (By the way, the movie premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and took home the Best U.S. Documentary Audience Award.) For those who want to understand the education situation better and perhaps make some contribution to improving education for all children, this book is a good first step.

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Opinion Piece December 5, 2010

By Ana Mardoll TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Paperback

Waiting for "Superman" / 978-1-586-48928-1

I haven't yet seen the documentary that this book is a companion text to; although it was recommended highly to me, I missed it in theaters and it hasn't come available to rent yet. Still, I was curious enough about the documentary and knew just enough to be dangerous about the subject material, so I bought this companion text and plowed right in.

Results are...mixed. This book is basically a compilation of essays from different people on the subject of American public school reform. Some of the authors have more expertise than others; wishing no disrespect, some of the essay authors seem to have experience limited only to specific charities or boutique schools, with very little scientific data to back up some of their opinions. In between the essays, each section contains a little "introduction" page for each of the children that were featured in the documentary, but these 2-page sections are largely unfulfilling since they just outline the bare bones of the child's tale and don't tell whether they got into their desired school or not (you have to rent the movie for that, apparently).

So we're left with the essays themselves, which are a mixed bag. In terms of factoids about the failing school system (particularly in comparison to other countries), this book is a rich resource - there's a lot of numbers on these pages that will shock you. However, when it comes to actually analyzing the source of these numbers, and how to fix them, the book falls a little flat. It's probably telling that the essay included here that I thought was the most powerful and best researched was the one that criticizes the documentary (and by extension the book) for (a) relying too much on largely out-of-date anecdotes about "bad" teachers and union problems and (b) (possibly inadvertently) pushing the notion that a few boutique schools will solve the problem.

It's this essay that points out for all the many pages spent here criticizing unions, there's not any actual strong data presented against unions - a pretty frustrating omission in a documentary! And focusing on the "bad" teachers ignores the more important (and less "sexy") issue that "bad" teachers often can become "good" teachers with the appropriate training and feedback; when the *only* feedback teachers get every year is whether or not they dress professionally and arrive on-time, they're not likely to self-identify their needed areas for improvement. Focusing on a cooperative method of evaluation and training seems, to me, to be more important than "fire all bad teachers!" which seems to ignore the problem of where their replacements are going to come from.

Moving on, other oddities in the various essays on display here include... An author who thinks it's admirable for a charter school principle to randomly threaten parents with "immigration authorities" if their kids miss a day of class. An author who argues against smaller classroom sizes because ze really doesn't seem to understand how scientific data is collected (to wit, halving a class size and handing off half to a new teacher, and then measuring the combined literary/math scores of both classes at the end of the year doesn't control for the quality of the new teacher; a meaningfully controlled study would measure 1 teacher with X students and compare that against the SAME teacher with X/2 students). An author who argues that principals need to be replaced with "CEO" figures because in a corporation, when something goes wrong, everyone knows the CEO is responsible - an assertion that makes me doubt the author has ever WORKED at a large corporation. An author who wants to reform the school system to resemble the American HEALTH CARE system because - and I swear this is true - it's just so gosh-darn *efficient*. I don't really know what to say to that.

Moving on, there's also a very nice article that says, basically, that it doesn't *matter* if most charter schools do worse than the public schools they are meant to replace because that's the POINT of charter schools - to experiment with new things, keep what works, and close down the charter schools that don't. From a scientific standpoint, this isn't a terribly bad plan, but I can't help but feel sorry for the children that got lost in the system as part of the scientific experiment - at the very least, surely these numbers (and the implied risk!) should be made transparently clear to the parents as part of the enrollment process for new charter schools?

I feel like I've been very harsh in my review thus far, and I want to stress that this is a VERY interesting book, with lots of fascinating viewpoints. I started the book with a healthy understanding of the school system problem, and I feel like I came away with broadened horizons as the various authors here discussed different possibilities and solutions for a hugely difficult problem. And, as I say, there were a couple of articles that I thought were incredibly spot-on, and I respect that these articles were included even as they made solid criticisms of the documentary. I do recommend this book if you're a fan of the documentary or if you're interested in the subject matter, but I *do* think that people should read these opinion essays for what they predominantly are: opinions.

~ Ana Mardoll

39 of 50 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A Compelling Call to Action September 21, 2010

By Donna Wilson, Ph.D.

Format:Paperback

I gave this guidebook 4-Stars. The guidebook (companion to the documentary film) is clearly written and uses stories that illustrate the need for improving learning and teaching in schools and communities today. Additionally, a variety of stakeholders are interviewed such as students and parents, selected researchers/practitioners and leaders from the field of education, and executives from private foundations. In terms of the book's usefulness and ideas for practical application, it offers a number of ways that citizens might choose to support education within their local communities.

Education is a vast and complex field. Therefore, obviously this book does not include some of the key areas of research that hold promise for improving student learning, nor is it a simple one solution step-by-step guide for what to do to improve teaching and learning in America's schools. However, the text achieves its goal as 'an inspiring call for reform' as stated in the product description.

Hopefully this book will serve as an urgent call for all Americans to focus on creating school systems where all students can reach their true potential. Students arrive at school full of potential, but with a broad range of readiness for learning at school. For example, some arrive one to two years ahead of grade level in reading and some arrive one or two years behind. Therefore, the school system needs to accurately assess where students are academically as they enter the system. Then the system must ensure that students receive the intensity of high quality instruction needed to get to grade level with their peers. The system also needs to ensure that teachers get the high quality education, training, mentoring, and support they need to develop the knowledge and skills to teach students today. A key to teacher success is to be able to align instruction with the growing research base on how students learn.

There are many passionate teachers in classrooms across America in all types of schools. However, few get the support they need. For example, often, new teachers who enter the profession leave teaching due to lack of such support. In fact, some studies indicate 30 -50% leave in the first few years. Often these teachers would stay if they had the support to create learning opportunities for students, because seeing their students learn is what keeps good teachers motivated to stay in the field.

We hope this book is a catalyst for more Americans to explore ways in which they can help school systems transform into places where every student has the opportunity to reach their true potential. Parent and community involvement is critically important as students spend 80-90% of time in the home and community (outside of school) prior to the end of their high school years. It is a time for communities and schools to create a system of education that works for all students. Schools cannot do it by themselves.

Donna Wilson, Ph.D.