Popularization of background
In 1852, Massachusetts passed the first decree on compulsory education for children. In 1867, the Federal Bureau of Education was established with an annual funding of 13,000 US dollars. In 2011, the Obama administration gave the Department of Education a budget of 49.7 billion U.S. dollars, an increase of 3.5 billion U.S. dollars over the previous year. Earlier, the House of Representatives had just passed a bill to cut the government’s annual budget of 61 billion U.S. dollars. Education was one of the few areas that received additional budgets. Although the U.S. Department of Education has entered the Cabinet, it has few employees and low power, which is equivalent to a service coordination agency.
In education, the United States does not implement "centralization". The federal government delegates educational power to various states, local governments, and education committees at all levels, following the principle of "who pays, who has the final say". Taking 2011 as an example, the total investment in education in the United States was about 800 billion U.S. dollars, the federal government only spent less than 50 billion, and the remaining more than 700 billion was spent by local governments. Therefore, the Ministry of Education cannot say anything about education policies that are going to be formulated at the local level, and can only stand aside.
If an American child wants to go to school, he can choose to go to a public school or a private school. Public middle and elementary schools can provide 10 years of free compulsory education (usually 6 to 16 years old), while private schools need to pay. If the child is an immigrant, he can go to a bilingual school, or the school will provide ESL (English as a Second Language) courses. Private education in the United States is developed. As far as universities are concerned, the well-known Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are all private universities; relatively, the more powerful public universities such as the University of Virginia, University of Michigan, and California Names such as the University of Berkeley are not so loud.
In the United States, education is loose and tight. Elementary and middle school students are more relaxed and can enjoy a more pleasant childhood. When they arrive at university, they will enter the university with lenient entry and strict exit. Of course, it’s not for elementary and middle school students to let it go. It is necessary to lay a solid foundation for reading and calculation. Americans attach great importance to the two courses of reading and mathematics. The quality of education is measured by whether students have proficient reading and numeracy skills, and the results of these two courses are used as the first threshold for students to enter the university.
Unscrupulous
The film focuses on public education in elementary and secondary schools in the United States. Davis Guggenheim tracked and photographed the roads of five elementary and secondary school students, interspersed with the educator Goffrey Kanada and the highest public school in the District of Columbia. Interviews with the person in charge Michelle Rui and other education experts, senior editors of "The New Yorker", Bill Gates and other celebrities. The director has precise calculations for the selection of the film crew. Four of the five students are of color. They are: Anthony, a black boy, lost his father and lives with his grandmother; Daisy, a Latino girl, whose father is unemployed, and his mother is a hospital cleaner; and Francisco, a black boy, is from Family with many children; black girl Bianca, whose mother lost her job and relied on her part-time job for her to go to church school; - They represent the disadvantaged group, and they are a group of people who have a strong desire for education Yulu Enze; the only white student is the middle school student Ai Mi Li lives in a wealthy area as a frame of reference for the first four students. And two people promoting education reform, one is a private educator and the other is a government official, representing the rescue of the declining public education by the private and the government respectively.
A Chinese who immigrated to the United States talked about his son's elementary education: students can laugh loudly in class, let them play for at least two hours a day, and go home before three o'clock in the afternoon. This kind of learning environment is really relaxed, and the picture of elementary education in the film is also true. In the classroom, the placement of student desks is very random, one for the east, one for the west, or a small group here and a small group. The teacher is integrated into the students, not like classroom teaching, but like a family gathering. The freedom and freedom of the classroom atmosphere is really amazing; among them, there is a magical elementary student who actually touched the table directly against the blackboard. Not to mention that this would hinder the teacher’s writing on the blackboard. The student would not be too tired to look at the blackboard with his neck up. However, the student felt that this was a matter of course. The teacher also ignored it, so casually. Sex, so there is no "rules", this is a fantasy in the eyes of Chinese elementary school students who are used to "sit in rows and eat fruits" and "sit upright with their backs on their backs". Such an educational environment is in line with the nature of children, and it makes people praise the United States as a paradise for education. But, wait a minute, watching the fire from the other side is always pleasing to the eye. Once you get close and take a closer look with a microscope and a magnifying glass, many embarrassment and embarrassment will be blown away. Come. In this film, under a fairly peaceful lens, various shocking facts about public education in the United States are revealed.
Viruses and vaccines
At the beginning of the film, Anthony, who was about ten years old, struggled to figure out the difficult problem of "Eating two biscuits with four biscuits eats 50%". The director went straight to the subject with a math test at the beginning: Our public education is worrying. Afterwards, the director showed that in a unified national test, only 12% of the students in Washington, the capital of the best, have proficient calculation and reading skills. Plant dragons and harvest fleas.
Public education in the United States is declining and accelerating. To find out the bottom line, the director pointed the finger at low-quality teachers. The director inserted a video: The teacher was bored reading the newspaper during class, and kept looking at his watch (why the get out of class was still not over); some teachers even pressed the student's head into the toilet; some teachers did nothing and let it go. Let the students chat and play. An education official angrily fired several teachers who had failed in their duties in the video, but had to make up the outstanding salaries and hire them back a year later. According to the Chinese logic, it couldn’t be easier to deal with low-quality teachers. The quality of education is not good enough, easy to handle, warnings, serious warnings, demerits, demerits, expulsion from public office, the board is finished, and the work ends. Lu Xun once lamented that China is a so-called ancient civilization. After a long time of contamination, there will be many famous people. Even moving a table will bleed. It is too difficult to do something. The United States, as a democratic country, actually has to move a table very hard, and even if it is hard, it may not be able to move the table at all. In dealing with unqualified teachers, it is absolutely impossible to follow China’s practice. It's an impossible task to expel the teachers who had a vegetarian meal.
Those rubbish teachers are undoubtedly a stumbling block to education, but they just can't move them because they have "someone above them." American teachers have two powerful labor unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. They were originally created to protect the rights and interests of teachers. Later, they gradually became bigger. All issues related to teachers' rights, such as teacher welfare, promotion, scientific research, and ethics Standards and sanctions must be discussed with and approved by the teachers' union. The two major trade unions connect with the federal government and the lower union state government, and they dominate the education policy of the country. American elementary and middle school teachers, with these two powerful umbrellas, as mentioned in the film, "as long as they breathe for two years", they can get tenure and will never be expelled. In the end, public education formed a vicious circle: associations kidnapped the government, the government protected teachers, teachers kidnapped students, and students had to suffer.
Those unqualified teachers may enter the transfer center, wait for two or three years with nothing to do, and then reinstate, or transfer in various public schools. Their inexhaustible stringing of posts is called "dancing lemon", "passing garbage", "Turkey Run" and other jokes, with a cheeky look of "what can you do to me". The government and the private sector naturally have people of insight who are ashamed of the poor state of public education. After taking over the education, Michelle Rui, the top head of the District of Columbia Public Schools, carried out drastic reforms and listed a long list of unqualified principals and teachers. , And tried to use high salaries as the bait to achieve the goal of partially abolishing the tenure of teachers, but in the end, iron and blood and Huairou were ineffective against the stubborn stone. The educator Govry Kannada went the other way. He focused on mediating the establishment of charter schools, using public money to run the school, but he ran it independently, gained greater discretion, and managed more teachers. Powerful, for students to extend the school hours (quite with Chinese characteristics), the quality of teaching is guaranteed, and the public education that has lost its credibility is striving for a sigh of relief.
After the selective blindness
"Waiting for Superman" was released, Ms. Randy, the chairman of the Teachers Federation who appeared in the film, expressed her dissatisfaction: "Don't just let individual teachers be scapegoats, or emphasize a part of the education system." And the Education Association. Chairman Locker accused the director: The film did not hear the voice of teachers at all and lacked constructive discussions on reforms; he said: "If you want to know how to make public schools better, you have to ask the teachers, not Hollywood." ---Looking at it neutrally, they are not arguing.
Michelle Rui, who has an oriental face, used Eastern tactics when implementing educational reforms. She proposed to double the salary of teachers who gave up tenure, in an attempt to induce differentiation of a solid teacher group. Putting political means aside, it is not difficult for us to see that the income of teachers is not high. In 2011, Obama proposed his education "Double Ten Plan" (in the next 10 years to train 100,000 new teachers in the fields of science, technology and mathematics), and Yale University professor Kazdin pointed out: I want to get good teachers' The biggest obstacle is the low salary of teachers. Davis Guggenheim tried his best to exaggerate the difficulties of education reform, but he did not say a word about the plight of teachers.
Davis Guggenheim is not as good as the others. It is also reflected in the fact that there is no more comprehensive analysis of the students' poor learning, and only the bad teachers are pushed. In fact, there has always been an anti-intellectual tradition in the United States. Unlike China, "everything is inferior, only high school". In the United States, the early cowboy spirit (Western spirit), which is rugged and bold, dare to think and do, has always been in the market, and those who are devoted to reading will be ridiculed as "nerd". Many celebrities in politics, business, performing arts, and sports have also proved that they are as successful as not reading books. Cheney dropped out of Yale and became an electrical worker and later became the vice president; Madonna dropped out of the University of Michigan to join acting, and later became popular all over the world; Gates and Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to start a business, worth billions; Tiger Woods dropped out of Stanford to become a top golf player. The power of role models is endless. The miracles of these celebrities have convinced American children that it doesn’t matter if they don’t go to school. There are many opportunities when one door is closed, there are thousands of doors and thousands of windows. With such a psychological bottom line, the heart to learn naturally fades.
The director’s determination to stand on the side of the egg is understandable. However, for the sake of the children, the teacher’s rights and interests may not need to be protected; in order to obtain better grades, the children may not need to work hard. Proof); when the director made sharp political criticism and moral condemnation, he forgot the deeper cultural reflection; these selective blindness made the film's directivity single and the logical chain was not thorough, and it was only natural to draw doubts.
Instrumental rationality and humanistic care.
When discussing the damage caused by the failure of public education, the director cited several financial accounts: the government will cost more to support a prisoner for 4 years than it will cost a child to complete a private high school; New York State every year It will cost 100 million U.S. dollars for teachers who stay in the transfer center to play poker and read newspapers; the failure of education will also lead to insufficient intellectual support for economic development. By 2020, there are 123 million high-tech and high-paying jobs in the United States, but about Only 50 million Americans can do the job, and the rest need to be recruited from the world. In addition, the director also used animated icons, old movie clips, old news clips, old documentary clips, animation clips, celebrity effects (in the director’s previous documentary "The Inconvenient Truth", former US Vice President Al Gore was the protagonist. , This film invites Bill Gates to "a reminder of education") and other means to make the film more enjoyable and persuasive. The information is detailed and the data is solid, which reflects the instrumental rationality that a good documentary should have.
In expressing the five students' yearning for excellent public schools, the director used lyrical means. Due to the limited number of good public schools, there are only three ways to choose lucky ones: colored ball lottery, computer random number selection, and lottery. At the lottery site, only the white girl Emily got her wish. Anthony, Little Daisy, Little Francesco, Little Bianca are all disappointed. In the lens, the parents' lonely expressions and the children's innocent and helpless eyes, ask who can not be touched. The director finally used the dramatic reversal of the movie. Anthony was finally able to enter a good middle school because of the increase in the number of Said middle school. Who can not be happy for him. Although the documentary is based on calmness and objectivity, the director's feelings of "knowing me and knowing that I am worried" in this film are understandable.
The director's summary statement is based on: Superman does not exist, and it is better to ask for yourself. It is really very simple, but no one has a panacea for all diseases, so it can only be that. In fact, the heads of government, officials, scholars, educators, social elites, and directors of this film who are full of worry about education are working hard to improve public education. They are supermen with some underwear in them. At the end of the film, Davis Guggenheim reveals a vague hope: one day, those children will not have to wait in the audience for fate to come with fear and panic.
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