Melissa Bailey Photo
Superman never came to rescue Patra Drury. Now she has found hope she might still learn something at school.
Drury (pictured), who’s 18, was one of dozens of parents, students and educators who filled a theater at Criterion Cinemas on Temple Street Thursday night for a private screening of Waiting For “Superman.”
The documentary, which has been embraced by school reform proponents nationwide and sparked national outcry from teachers unions, was brought to New Haven for an invite-only sneak preview hosted by Connecticut’s Black Alliance For Education Options. The film
resonated with the New Haven audience, and sparked discussion about how it fits into the city’s school reform drive. The movie opened Friday in select Connecticut theaters, including the Criterion.
Drury, a high school senior, identified with the students in the movie, though her story has a more hopeful ending than the one she saw on screen.
Paramount Vantage/Participant Media
On screen, she watched the tales of five students who, frustrated with the offerings of their mainstream public schools, try their luck in lotteries for public charter schools. The narrative centers on kids with uncertain futures, one whose father died from drugs, another whose parents never finished high school. The film sets up the viewer to root for the kids in a climactic scene as they wait for their numbers to be pulled so they can escape from a system that’s failing them. The viewer watches as one girl, crestfallen, fails to make the randomized cutoff.
The movie offers a heartbreaking view of the challenges these children face — and a broad-brushed solution. It paints teachers unions as downright diabolic. The only way out of a failing system that bad teachers have run into the ground, it argues, is to win a highly competitive admissions process at an elite charter school. The assumption: If these kids don’t get into a KIPP school, or a charter boarding school, then they’ll be doomed.
Drury said as she watched the film, she identified with the kids. Earlier this year, she was waiting for Superman, too. As a high school junior, she was stuck in a notoriously low-performing transitional high school for kids who get booted from mainstream schools. The school, New Horizons School for Higher Achievement on Hallock Avenue in the Hill, suffered sky-high truancy rates.
“It was horrible — no textbooks, no supplies,” Drury said. “I can’t name 10 things that I learned from one school year.”
Drury said she landed at New Horizons after being kicked out of Wilbur Cross due to poor attendance. After one year at New Horizons, she sought desperately for a way out. Through the city’s school choice program, she applied in the spring to three well-reputed, small-scale high schools: New Haven Academy, High School in the Community and Coop (Cooperative Arts and Humanities Interdistrict Magnet).
Drury moved to New Haven five years ago from Bridgeport. In applying to a better school, Drury said, she was “trying to get out of New Haven and make something from myself.” If she graduates, she’ll be the first one in her family to finish high school.
Her own story was featured in a documentary called Lost In Translation made by fellow teens at Youth Rights Media. Waiting For “Superman”, which is directed by Davis Guggenheim, who also made An Inconvenient Truth, mirrored her story in some ways.
Paramount Vantage/Participant Media
In Guggenheim’s film, the kids are shown waiting, fingers crossed, as a school official rolls a lottery ball, or draws slips of paper from a hat. Drury said her process was “even tougher.” New Haven has a closed application process. Applicants submit paperwork, but don’t see a public drawing. Drury equated the process to “playing phone tag” to see where you get into school.
Like one child in the film, she ended up fifth on a waiting list at one of her preferred schools, New Haven Academy. And as for some of the kids in the movie, Superman didn’t come. She never made it off the waiting list.
“It was a huge disappointment,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do.”
Here, however, her story diverges from the film’s projected storyline.
Her “horrible” public school, New Horizons, got dramatically overhauled this year as part of a citywide school reform drive. A new principal, Maureen Bransfield, arrived from an ACES program for troubled kids, and revamped New Horizons. She spread purple paint on the walls of the dingy cement bunker. She brought in a slew of new teachers, as well as students from the ACES program, which folded due to budget issues. The city started investing more in the school, including hiring two behavioral therapists who help kids with extra-curricular problems and even visit them at home.
Drury said the school got more resources: “now we have textbooks, brand new teachers.” It’s changed for the better, she said.
For another member of the audience, school reform activist and banker Jeff Klaus, the movie resonated in a different way.
Klaus (pictured) said the film “points out that there are still far too few schools that are excellent,” and the admissions process is mysterious. While New Haven is making strides with school reform, progress needs to move faster, he added.
Klaus is a founding member of a charter school of the type that the movie applauds. In 1998, Klaus was part of a group that set about founding a new charter school called Amistad Academy. Klaus said before setting up Amistad, his group met with David Levin and Mark Feinberg, who set up the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) in 1994. A year later, Amistad opened with a new model based partly on KIPP, which is heralded in the film as a way to rescue Los Angeles kids from hopeless academic sinkholes.
Through a not-for-profit entity called Achievement First, the Amistad model has been replicated into a network of 17 public charter schools serving 4,500 students in Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven and Brooklyn, NY. Achievement First is now a nationally recognized charter group; it’s partnering with KIPP and Hunter College on a new teaching university in New York.
Students and teachers at Achievement First schools plan to gather together during the school day to watch the film as a community, Klaus said.
Much is made in the documentary about how hard these high-performing charter schools are to get into. There are applicants for a small number of seats, sometimes a ratio of 20 to 1. Their lots are pulled in public lotteries.
By comparison, New Haven’s admission process has become cloudier, Klaus noted.
Klaus said like the KIPP schools, Amistad used to hold public drawings for admissions lotteries. After doing so for three years, Amistad merged its admissions process with the city’s, Klaus said. The goal was for kids applying through the public school district to see Amistad as one of their options, instead of having to seek out a separate lottery.
Achievement First runs five public charter schools in the city.
Under the closed lottery system, the number of students who apply to those schools is not made public, according to Klaus. While he’s no longer involved directly with Achievement First, he is married to its CEO and president, Dacia Toll, and is heavily involved in school reform.
Klaus said with an open lottery draw, parents are able to “trust the system.” The current system is less transparent.
Parents scramble to get their children into select few schools, including charters as well as high-performing neighborhood schools. At schools like Edgewood and Worthington Hooker, the process is anything but easy to understand. Parents get up in the wee hours of the morning to physically wait in line to get on a list, then are told to keep calling back to see if they’ve made the cut.
“People believe the system is rigged,” Klaus noted.
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Klaus said the city is beginning to address some problems identified in the movie, through a new school reform drive that brought in portfolio management of schools, will build leadership skills, and is introducing a new way of evaluating teachers based on student progress.
“The issue for New Haven is no longer are we going in the right direction,” Klaus said, “but how fast we are going. Velocity matters. We need to urgently close this gap.”
In a brief public discussion following the film, several people echoed that call.
Jerome Richardson, a senior at Wilbur Cross High School, said the movie “opened my eyes” to an urgent need to make schools better.
“If you have to wait to get a better education, what’s the point of sending your kid to school?” he asked the room.
Damaris Rau, New Haven’s director of instruction, stood up to defend the district’s reform drive.
“It was a great film,” she said. “It’s a shame that any student would have to wait in a lottery.”
But New Haven is making “solid promises,” she said — including a soon-to-be-rolled out program called Promise, which will offer college scholarships to district kids who keep up good grades and finish high school. The city’s new teacher evaluation program was arrived at “collaboratively” — not with unions standing in the way, as depicted in the film.
“Nobody wants a bad teacher — not the union, not the parents, not the administrators,” she reassured the crowd.
She closed with a pitch for the crowd to get involved with the city’s reform effort. “Visit our website,” she urged.