Where Are You Superman?

     So, I just watched Waiting For Superman last night, and honestly it inspired me. What the producers showed with their particular movie was the state of our public education system and it’s flawes. What they showed, were hundreds of students in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Redwood City, struggling for a decent education, one that I’ve taken for granted my entre life. I don’t think typical high school students realize how gosh darn lucky they are when they don’t have to depend on a lottery to determine their future education in a district that is overpopulated. For example, charter schools in Harlem have no less than five hundred applicants for only twenty available spots. That to me is a serious flaw that should be considered. The most emotional topic of the movie was the discussion of the national teachers union. Washington D.C’s new superintendent began her term by shutting down twenty-three public schools and firing her own child’s principle. Even she admitted that to easily piss someone off, that’s one way of doing it. Why go through the trouble of taking on the immense persona of the national teacher union? For one, she wanted to increase teacher’s annual salary to that of six digits (100,000+ dollars). At first I thought that was outrageous, but after her explanation I agreed. She thought that by paying the best teachers six digits, we could improve our ratings. But for some reason I’m still not fully grasping, the unions turned her down, outraged at the very thought of pay for performance. My parents commented after the fact that they (being the teachers) think it’s their god given right to teach. Their comment in itself made it a tad easier to understand, but still I wonder why people would turn such an idea down, I mean we want to give our children the best possible education we can give them right? The movie also included an interview with Bill Gates, which allowed me to grasp his opinion on the topic. In short, he said that by as early as 2020, our country will have available twenty million jobs in the math and engineering fields, or somewhere around there. Though we will have those twenty million openings, the U.S. itself will only be able to secure twenty to thirty percent of them. Where will the other openings go, well take a guess. Overseas, Asian schools are pumping out amazing amounts of engineers each year, and those engineers will take that remaining seventy to eighty percent. That also shows how our public education system again is flawed. So with that, I can’t stand the fact that teachers unions are preventing us from getting a high education. And to tie in the recent budget repair bill here in Wisconsin by Scott Walker, that is why there’s so much hype. Scott Walker is attempting to go for the teachers union, and preventing it from collectively bargaining, which in my opinion is awesome, the fact that teachers are so upset over this issue, and even to skip a day of school to protest shows how stuck in their ways they are. Another topic discussed was tenure, and how it is basically impossible to get rid of a failing teacher. In order to, one must go through a twenty-three-step process that could take years to get through. So, basically tenure is the immortal benefit a teacher gains when they’ve taught for more than two years. After about two years, they gain tenure, which originally was designed to protect college professors for losing their jobs due to clinical illness, etc. But now it is implemented into the public education system, and proves a very difficult barrier when getting rid of failing teachers. In New York, they have such places named “rubber rooms” in which they place the districts failing teachers that are waiting for hearings to get rid of them. These hearings don’t usually happen for one to two years, and cost the state about six million dollars a year. Even in Milwaukee, at their public schools the principles of the public schools have a “dance of the lemons” each year to distribute their failing teachers amongst each other in hopes of improving their teaching skills at a different location. It’s absolutely crude that we have developed this image of the “immortal teacher” and basically giving them their jobs for life, when the private sector does not have that luxury. Really I didn’t intend this brief synopsis to turn into a full-blown bash of teachers unions. I can easily say that teachers are a vital part of our lives, now and in the future. Key issues with our education system include the national teachers union, as well as the benefit of tenure. Without looking at those aspects of our education system, we can never hope to improve the percentage of those available openings for our children, and heck even ourselves. So I pose a question for those of you that do get this far in my blurb, where is our superman? Who will step up to the plate and take on some of the toughest challenges that face our society today, and help those several hundred applicants get into college, rather then those twenty?