Waiting for Superman...And a Whole Lot More

Jenna, in September, teaching at a private school in Calcutta.

Admittedly, I feel a bit like Rip Van Winkle in regards to the debate over American public education that has exploded since Jenna and I came to India more than half a year ago. The release of the documentary Waiting for Superman, the controversy over Michelle Rhee’s dismissal as DC Schools Chancellor, and now the protests in Wisconsin, have all passed us by rather tangentially here in India. (To give you a taste of our perspective, an Indian paper reported a few days ago that teachers were holding “Egypt-style rallies in Wisconsin’s state capitol”; I thought that was taking it a bit far.)

With all that in mind, Jenna and I finally got to see Waiting for Superman earlier this week, when we downloaded it off iTunes. After having heard so much about it on our friends’ Facebook profiles and skimming reviews in the Internet media, we finished watching the movie rather nonplussed. We thought the movie heart-rending for its portrayal of five young children and their families trying to gain admittance to public charter school programs. Yet, we also felt a deep sense of mystification at the movie’s lack of realistic policy solutions.

This blog is not the proper forum, I think, for a more detailed delineation of my thoughts and criticisms of the movie. Yet, I wanted to talk about one point the movie made that gets raised frequently in this ongoing furor over the declining state of American public schools. That is, the fact that America seems to be slipping relative to the rest of the world in academic achievement.

At one point, Waiting for Superman brought up the well-known fact that America suffers in math and science scores in relation to our global competitors. The movie points out that in recent data compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the US ranked 25^th in math and 21^st in science scores out of 30 industrialized countries. In the movie, the statistics were accompanied by the requisite stock images of Chinese youngsters doing calisthenics and brainy-looking Indians poring over math problems and microscopes.

First, the images paired with the statistics were disingenuous because China and India were not measured by the OECD’s rankings. However, those two countries are usually identified as America’s stiffest future competition in terms of innovation and economic might. Second, my experiences in India over the past six months led me to immediately question these facts and the polemical motivations behind their presentation.

In our day-to-day lives in India, we have commented frequently about how it is surprising the number of students we see not going to school in India. Beggar children in Calcutta roam the streets asking for change at all hours of the school day. Young kids work busting up rocks on the highways leading to Sikkim. Teenagers help run chai stands and small grocery stores in Kerala. Whether it is because they are socially and economically marginalized or because they simply have begun the necessary cycle of work in a country still building its industrial base, it is distressingly common to see children engaged in activities that take them away from school.

Statistics back up our anecdotal evidence. A World Bank study released in 2009 showed that only 40 percent of Indian adolescents were enrolled in secondary education. Think about that: the majority of Indian teenagers, then, do not go to school. The world average for secondary enrollment at the time of the study was 67 percent. For the United States—the country that engineered the modern system of universal education—gross secondary enrollment stood at 94 percent. (China’s figures, incidentally, showed 76 percent of its teenagers were enrolled in secondary education.)

This was the crux on which my experience broke with the doom-laden statistics I heard on Waiting for Superman. These world rankings get carted out all the time as a way to raise the anxiety and urgency of the debate about what to do about American public schools. In Waiting for Superman, unfortunately, they were also used as a way to blame public schools for the state of America’s academic standing in the world. But I wonder whether the US is being judged fairly, when one of its main rivals does not even enroll most of its teenagers in school.

The tests administered by the OECD to compile the statistics used in Waiting for Superman are administered every three years to a random group of roughly 5,000 15-year-olds in each country. When those tests are administered to Indian children, the lowest (and unluckiest) 60 percent of students—the ones likely to not do so well on a standardized test—are not even enrolled. The results, then, are drawn from the portion of the population of Indian children that are performing at a high enough standard already to have the motivation (and finances) to continue in their education.

In America, nearly every single child is still enrolled in school when they are 15. Therefore, the test measures the results of children drawn from a very diverse socioeconomic spectrum—kids with stable home lives and two college-educated parents to kids who may be practically homeless and living in foster care.

I am still convinced that the latent power (and beauty) of the American public education system lies not in the height of its standardized test scores but in the breadth of its demand that all children go to school. I think this inclusive and democratic philosophy does, indeed, hurt our relative academic rankings. Especially when we are compared to countries and societies that are more homogenous and less equitable than ours. I have seen India’s system first hand, and I can still say I much prefer the American way.