Detention Hall

As a new school year begins, teachers’ unions find themselves very much alone.

On a warm night in June, filmmaker Davis Guggenheim premiered his latest documentary in front of a packed house at the Silverdocs Documentary Festival in Silver Spring, Maryland. Waiting for “Superman” rolls out in theaters this month; its subject matter–education reform–is a good fit for the season. Guggenheim chronicles the lives of a handful of schoolchildren scattered across the country who, like too many American students, are stuck in mediocre, even awful, schools. Life supplies the suspense: Guggenheim’s subjects are signed up for local charter-school lotteries, that new annual rite of hope and cruelty, in which parents desperate to help their kids have little recourse but to rely on bouncing balls or randomizing computers to gain admission into charters with limited spots.

Waiting for “Superman” aims to do for the burgeoning school reform movement what An Inconvenient Truth did for climate change: elevate a liberal activist cause to the top of the national agenda. This being the movies, it aims to popularize some new heroes in the public mind–advocates like Geoffrey Canada, president and CEO of Harlem Children’s Zone; Michelle Rhee, the D.C. public schools chancellor; and the KIPP schools, a charter management organization with more than 80 outposts throughout the United States. And where there are heroes, there are villains, and the movie anoints a new progressive bAªte noire: teachers’ unions.

After the screening, Guggenheim had a discussion with two of the film’s stars, Rhee, whose battles with the D.C. union have been well documented, and Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers. Here was an interesting moment. In a theater full of presumably good liberals (who else, after all, goes to see policy-reform documentaries?), the head of America’s second-largest teachers’ union was greeted with polite applause. Then, right behind her strode her nemesis, the union-taming Rhee–and the response was loud and enthusiastic.

For Weingarten, the scene must have been discomfiting, if not unfamiliar. Has any interest group taken as much of a beating as the teachers’ unions have in the past year? Last year, Steven Brill wrote a devastating piece in The New Yorker reporting on the now-infamous “rubber rooms,” where teachers accused of incompetence or wrongdoing would await their hearings, sometimes for years, while still collecting a paycheck and benefits from New York taxpayers, an emblem of union power run amok. (The city and union officials, embarrassed by the attention, closed the rooms in June.) Brill followed up with another piece in May in The New York Times Magazine, “The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand,” a headline that summed up the article’s grim take. Op-eds and editorials have gone on the attack as well, castigating unions for standing athwart reform yelling “Stop!” Meanwhile, Waiting for “Superman” isn’t even the only documentary bashing teachers’ unions to appear this year: Two other movies, The Lottery and The Cartel, beat Guggenheim to the punch a few months ago.

It’s not hard to see why the media and the movies have turned their attention to the teachers’ unions and the larger issue of education reform. In recent years, school reform has become the liberal cause du jour. New cohorts of elite-college graduates have made teaching a popular destination for the idealistic achiever. Teach for America, which recruits recent graduates to commit to teaching for two years in urban and rural schools, this year saw a record-breaking 46,000 applications for teaching slots across the country, accepting only a meager 12 percent. (Some of that bump can attributed to the poor economy, but there’s no disputing the program’s growing popularity.) Meanwhile, a new class of reformers has stepped forward and joined the achievement-gap battle, bringing fresh ideas with them: charter schools, merit pay, data-based performance assessments, expanded learning time, to name a few. As Kevin Huffman wrote in these pages last year, “There has never been a more innovative time in modern American education, particularly in high-poverty school districts.”

But the biggest factor in the rise of the reform movement is the arrival of a like-minded Democratic administration that has sought to harness and direct activist energies. President Obama’s data-driven, pragmatic brand of progressivism tracks closely with the reformist ethos, and his signature education initiative, Race to the Top, may well go down as one of his greatest accomplishments. The $4.3 billion program is classic Obama: Rather than a top-down law ordering school districts to change the way they do things, Race to the Top dangles the money in front of the states in a competition to see who can institute the most meaningful and far-reaching reforms. From Massachusetts to Tennessee to Colorado, states have pushed through reforms–more charters, greater power for superintendents, allowing longer school days–that unions have fought for years.

Thus do unions suddenly find themselves facing off against an Administration they had worked so hard to get elected. For years, teachers have been one of the most loyal constituencies in the Democratic fold. One out of every ten delegates at the 2008 Democratic National Convention was a teachers’ union member. But that relationship is now fraying. When the National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest teachers’ union, this summer held its annual convention, where Obama spoke two years in a row as a candidate and Education Secretary Arne Duncan spoke last year, the union didn’t invite a single representative from the Administration. The rhetoric that came out of the event couldn’t have been more bitter. “Today our members face the most anti-educator, anti-union, anti-student environment I have ever experienced,” said NEA President Dennis Van Roekel.

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