In 1994 my former wife and I were snowed in for three days at her teacher's convention in Hershey PA. Afterwards, someone had a t-shirt printed, "I Survived The Paradigm Drift." That was an in-joke because some greybeard had given a talk about his book advocating a paradigm shift in American teaching. Jaime Escalante had also spoken about his achievements in teaching higher math to lower class kids. The Montana Logging and Ballet Company (I got one of their tees, too) headlined the entertainment, although some male teacher sang while several female teachers danced in an impressive Vegas-type musical act (lest you cringe, had I not been told, I would have thought them professional entertainers).

At the opening banquet, we sat at a table with some teachers from another county. After the usual chit-chat, some of them had an interesting story about their school district. Someone from the school board asked how much a novice teacher earned, and upon hearing the amount asked if that was really enough to live on. Teachers were surprised, but a bit excited seeing improvements in salary as heading in the right direction. So the board submitted recommendations that salaries for first-year teachers be increased, with the support of the teachers, and the measure passed. The following year three or four first-year teachers were hired, all of whom were children or relatives of school board members.

It snowed steadily during that banquet. Lieutenant Governor Mark Singel gave a speech and drove away just before the state police closed the highways.

Adjustments were made, Montana Logging and Ballet sang another show, there was plenty of food, etc. We attendees had nothing to complain about, but after a few days, the corridors of the convention hotel became all-too-familiar. It never occurred to me that it was a strain on the hotel staff, who couldn't get in or out either. Some of the teachers, though, decided to take up a collection to reward the staff for taking care of us, and I suppose all of us put in something. At the final banquet, representatives of the staff tearfully thanked us for thinking of them. I think there were tears all around, and I was frankly much more impressed with teachers coming out than I was going in.

In the years that followed, I read at length about Chris Whittle's Channel One - advertising and fluff news transmitted to a captive audience. Several years later my kid's teachers began warning us that they had no choice but to teach to the test under No Child Left Behind. A few years ago I ran across Lies My Teacher Told Me, about the tendency to only buy textbooks that Texans like. In short, there are a lot of problems in public education. There's a lot of money available and some of it goes to the wrong people.

Hearing about Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million donation to Newark Schools, I caught a snippet that it may all go to charter schools. It seems that Zuckerberg is entrusting the disposition of the money entirely to Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who reportedly favors charter schools, vouchers and merit pay. A teacher's blog, which I can't find again, urges people to drop their Facebook accounts in protest against Zuckerberg participating in the dismantling of public education, however indirectly. But the blog reserves it's fiercest criticism for the new flick, Waiting for Superman.

NY Magazine endorses the film:

“Superman” affectingly, movingly traces the stories of five children—all but one of them poor and black or Hispanic—and their parents as they seek to secure a decent education by gaining admission via lottery to high-performing charter schools. At the same time, the film is a withering indictment of the adults—in particular, those at the teachers unions—who have let the public-school system rot, and a paean to reformers such as [Geoffrey] Canada, [Harlem education activist,] and Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the Washington, D.C., public schools, who has waged an epic campaign to overhaul the notoriously dysfunctional system over which she presides.

The Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog interviewed director Davis Guggenheim, who also directed An Inconvenient Truth, and producer Lesley Chilcott.

The film seems to place a lot of the blame on teachers’ unions.

Guggenheim: I don’t want to get too much into the politics, but in the film, Michelle Rhee says it the best — the system is designed to create harmony among adults at the expense of kids. So the current structure is working for a lot of districts, but not for their kids and that [is] the source of the dysfunction.

Chilcott: There might be people who are entrenched in certain issues and policies, but we couldn’t find any parent who wouldn’t do everything for their kid and we couldn’t find any teacher that wouldn’t help. It’s just that a lot of them are caught up in this knot that can’t be unraveled. The most inspiring thing is that we now know what to do … but those people that are working inside the system need to come together to figure this out for our kids and put the adult issues on the backburner.

Historically, when did America’s school begin its current descent?

Guggenheim: The very simplistic answer is that our schools were pretty well run until the 1970s, but then all of these different factors started to build in. There’s a scene in the film that’s very powerful for me, where we show how today’s schools are still working the way they were designed 50 years ago. The country’s changed a lot, but our country’s schools — in terms of the way they’re built and designed — have not changed all that much. We don’t have the resources to help them adapt to a modern world.

Another blog, Education Notes Online, challenges the NY Magazine article:

The article retreads the well-worn points made by countless other articles in the mainstream media, predictably focusing on the teacher unions as the scapegoats, adds in the tired nostrum of how "adults" are being favored over the kids, ignores all the factors that go into low-performance in our urban schools, and drools all over Geoffrey Canada.
...

Geoffrey Canada's charter schools have class sizes of twenty or fewer in all grades, and yet the [NYC] administration refuses to reduce class size to similar levels.
The [Michael] Bloomberg/[Joel] Klein administration has consistently refused to provide class sizes comparable to those in Canada's charters, despite hundreds of millions in state funds supposed to be used for that purpose. Essentially, by Klein's own malfeasance, he is creating a system in which many charters will outperform the schools he is responsible for improving.
Canada also claims that teacher unions have not added anything to the quality of education, yet without unions, class sizes in NYC would be essentially uncontrollable -- rising to 30 or more in all grades. The only thing that is keeping them from exploding are the union contractual limits.
Charter schools enroll far fewer special education, immigrant, poor and homeless kids than the districts in which they are located -- another reason for their relative success. Teacher attrition rates at charter schools tend to be sky high, because of lousy working conditions. This is not a model we want to replicate, as experience matters hugely in terms of teacher effectiveness. Student attrition also tends to be very high. I doubt that the Guggenheim film explores any of these factors.

BTW, I've worked on a few charter schools, and they do have the lower class sizes mentioned - but some make provision to increase class sizes to public school levels. Teachers also point out that public school goals include educating everybody, while private schools can pick and choose.

I can't help but notice that the contention seems to revolve around unions, which represent a power base beyond the control of private interests. IOW despite hidebound textbooks, self-interested schoolboards and inadequate funding, the problem has to be unions and the solution has to be privatization. Where have we heard this before?