Justin here with a look at the new documentary, American Teacher, playing as part of this year’s Starz Denver Film Festival.
American Teacher starts with Bil Gates speaking at a TED talk about research that his foundation did on what works in education. His conclusion was relatively simple. The one thing that can improve the education system more than anything is to pay teachers more and increase retention rates. That’s it. It’s a simple idea that makes a lot of sense. From there, American Teacher explores the lives of several teachers both current and former to show how hard their lives are. It’s a nice movie, that in a lot of ways plays like a 90 minute episode of This American Life. I’m just not sure who the audience is for it.
Practically everyone I talk to knows how difficult it is to be a teacher and has some amount of respect for the profession. There are a handful of people I’ve talked to who for some reason don’t respect the profession and actually think that teachers are well compensated. These are some of the Fox News or Tea Partier types. People who generally don’t trust government in the first place and either have their kids in private schools or want to. Maybe the movie is made for them.
I thought that maybe the movie was made for current teachers, but that didn’t make musch sense to me either. They know how hard their job is, and would be the first to agree that they need to be paid more.
The more likely explanation is that this movie was made to refute some of the arguments made by Waiting for Superman. I really liked that movie, you can read my thoughts about it here. However, I didn’t realize that it was a relatively controversial movie within the teacher community until I talked to one of my teacher friends about it. She read Superman as a call to abandon the public school model in favor of charter schools. I don’t necessarily think that was the case, but rather that until the public system is reformed, charter schools may be the best option. The other main thought in Superman was the destructive qualities that tenure can have.
American Teacher didn’t address this point at all. Overall, I thought the message of both movies was compatible if somewhat at odds. For instance, Superman would have you believe that there are qualified teachers trying to get jobs, but can’t because there are bad teachers locked into their jobs for life. I’ve witnessed this first hand. American Teacher points out the retention rate as a problem and discusses that most teachers quit within their first 5 years on the job.
Don’t get me wrong, I did like American Teacher quite a bit. I thought the stories in it were very moving, and I came out of the movie with even more respect for teachers. It just came off as preaching to the choir to me. In Denver this week, there was a ballot initiative to increase funding for schools and teachers. Unfortunately, this measure failed even though it would have amounted to a very modest tax increase for most people. Most middle-income earners would have ended up paying about $10 more per month as a result of it. I voted for the initiative. Maybe American Teacher is for the people who voted against it.
American Teacher is playing Saturday, November 12th and the following day. You can buy tickets here.