More education talk: Waiting For Superman

  All the buzz this fall weekend is the new film Waiting For Superman. Everyone's excited: parents are supporting it, media are buzzing it and teachers and their unions are claiming it's false.
  The issue around this film and The Lottery is that charter school students do better than in public schools, particularly in hotbeds like DC, NYC and California. Poor minority parents in inner cities, in particular, want to have their child's name drawn for a seat in one of the few charter schools in their city.
  Obama has made clear his stance on charter schools; one of the first things he did was to withdraw (translate: CUT) government tuition funding for children to go to charter schools, including the school his children attend. 
  Bloomberg has an article from 2009 on this. It's heartbreaking and the film The Lottery might as well have been scripted around the children whose tuition Obama cut:

A spending law signed by Obama last month will end a program that gives low-income parents tuition vouchers of as much as $7,500 a year to send their children to private schools. Among 54 participating schools are Sidwell Friends, where Sasha and Malia Obama are students, and Ambassador Baptist Church Christian School, where Sherrise Greene sends her two daughters and had wanted to enroll Marquis.

  The Libertarian Reason has a video on families who wanted to remain part of the program and its effect on their lives. For them, it's a matter of survival, both physical and sociological. Obama himself was the "recipient of a scholarship" for school choice. 
  Note also the pledge Obama made to do what's best for children. More on school choice:

  Conservatives can scream all they want with these education issues, but it seems unless liberals make movies such as The Lottery and Waiting For Superman, no one listens and the issue is considered simply a partisan one. The truth is that if you seek truth, the party shouldn't matter when it comes to important issues.

  The gentleman who spoke in the video above speaks to failure of the educational system, addressing problems we have avoided for years and having the backbone to do what we know we've needed to do for years.

  That means this: the unions need to face their problems, fire people who don't deserve to teach, quit covering for issues and people who are part of the problem, and quit bullying the public into accepting their wage increases without results. 

• Yes, teaching is an important job. 
• Yes, teachers should be treated with respect and should be paid well enough to make it a real career. 
• No, if you are going into teaching to make money you shouldn't be doing it. 
• No, you don't produce or sell anything as a teacher so you need to be realistic about how much you get paid.
• Yes, tenure is a good idea to save careers in the face of unreasonable angry parents, some of whom happen to be on the board, but, no, tenure should not be granted unless a teacher has proven he/she can cut it in the classroom for the long term, not just long enough to get tenure.

  When education unions join with communists and code pink, we have a problem. 

  It'd help if: 

• teacher unions didn't promote Rules for Radicals
• teachers didn't bond with communists to march on Washington
• teachers didn't advocate social issues over teaching in the classroom
• education leaders didn't continually drive prices up, creating an education "bubble"
• educators didn't protect the rights of those who hate this country, while ridiculing and isolating those who love it
• they'd quit seeing children by their color, rather than their character
• they'd quit paying for everything and everyone, to the detriment of those who are truly talented and deserve grants based on that talent and not skin color
• they'd quit thinking taxpayers need to fund exorbitant pensions in a system that is going bust
• they'd quit tapping the feds for partying money

  National teacher unions have become simply a political and economic bludgeon, rather than a "union" to protect the rights of teachers in the classroom. 

  Michelle Rhee, a star of this film, is trying to do these very things to reform the DC schools. Teachers are fighting her and their unions have spent over $100,000 to defeat the mayor who hired her. Now the future of her employment is in doubt, as the teachers had their way in electing Gray, who is suddenly going on a "listening tour" to figure out what to do with her.

  He might try going to see the new film to help make his decision.

  A theme of this film is that "a great teacher is a work of art." This is true. But what, conversely, is a bad teacher then? And where does that teacher fit in the system? Or, better still, why does that teacher fit into the system?