We rented several films this weekend. Even without the older two child actors, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was a lot like the previous two films in the Chronicles of Narnia series. The whole point of the Narnia series seems to be that those who worship Aslan must battle unbelievers. Killing them is fine, but while boys may stab or hack at them with swords, girls should demurely shoot them with arrows. By chance I happened to watch the old Dino de Laurentiis flick Barrabas today on TCM. Anthony Quinn was great as the spared unbeliever, and his practical willingness to stab his enemies would certainly please Aslan. 

Our video store, one of the few remaining, was pushing the runaway train thriller Unstoppable because part of it was filmed in nearby Tyrone PA. Unstoppable was great.

Megamind's trailer looked like a ripoff of The Incredibles, but a lot of adult friends said good things about it, so we got it to watch with my daughter. Without giving anything away, the first fifteen minutes were very clever, the rest was more predictable, but still about as watchable as The Incredibles.

I had been waiting to rent Waiting for Superman (WFS) for quite some time, had read a lot of reviews and definitely went in as a skeptic. The children interviewed were adorable, and thirsting for knowledge. The parents interviewed were devoted to the education of their children. The teachers interviewed ... well, there were no teachers interviewed. They interviewed Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, but no ordinary classroom teachers, good or bad. There were brief video snippets of very engaged-looking teachers, and other snippets of teachers reading newspapers instead of teaching, and languorous shots of teachers that (we were told) were so bad that they were paid to do nothing.

They did interview Geoffrey Canada, a former teacher that founded a charter school, Harlem's Children Zone, in New York City.  Canada is also on the board of The After-School Corporation, a non-profit advocating changes in education. They also interviewed Michelle Rhee, founder of the New Teacher Project, and former Chancellor of Washington DC public schools. Rhee departed when DC Mayor Adrian Fenty failed to be renominated, and is now promoting a non-profit called Students First. They interviewed Bill Strickland, founder and CEO of the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild,  a non-profit that focuses on art and music education. They also interviewed education guru Eric Hanushek and Microsoft founder and major donor Bill Gates. But the teachers didn't get to speak.

They talked a lot about teaching, and while Canada and Rhee talked about the bad system, what they called the "Blob," it seemed clear they blamed the teacher's union for keeping bad teachers on the job for most of the bad outcomes - which they called the "dropout factories." While it would seem reasonable to entertain other potential causes, like inattentive parents, broken homes, drugs, etc., Waiting for Superman keeps it simple. 

There was one chart presented indicating that overall spending on education was increasing while overall test scores remained stagnant. Neither the spending nor the test scores were broken down to see if the same relationship held at the bad schools. What if most of the spending is at the better schools? 

I was chatting with my sister-in-law, a teacher's aide, today. They just took their daughter out of public school, where she was in a class of 32, and put her in a private school where class size is 12. Now she feels like a rock star. Although the public school classrooms in WFS looked much more crowded than the charter school classrooms, there was no discussion about relative class sizes - a real political football. You can scan the internet and find all sorts of stats such as those at American Progress, The False Promise of Class-Size Reduction  and rebuttals such as at Class Size Matters. Anecdotally, I hear a lot about classroom sizes of thirty or more, while the charter schools that I have worked on were to have perhaps 15 students per classroom.

In short, even though it has gotten good reviews and awards, Waiting For Superman was mostly an emotional appeal with little to substantiate its point-of-view. I don't feel that I know much more about the problem from watching this documentary.