Documentary on Michelle Rhee soon to hit the airwaves

Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of the Washington D.C. schools and now the CEO of Students First, will be featured in a Frontline documentary in January. Find more details here.

Rhee's now Sacramento's First Lady, and remains a controversial figure in education. She received much praise for what were perceived great gains in the D.C. schools during her tenure, but those gains came into question later when it was discovered that the erasure rate in exams throughout the district was higher than normal.

Rhee was featured in "Waiting for Superman" and promoted "Won't Back Down," a dramatization of parents taking over a school. She's a personality worth knowing, so mark your calendars.

More on Diane Ravitch and inconvenient truths

If you missed the first of CSUMB's President's Speaker Series featuring Diane Ravitch, you will be able to listen to it in the upcoming days at KAZU (I'll post the broadcast time as soon as I find out it's been scheduled). If you don't want to wait, you may want to read her critique of "Waiting for Superman," the fall blockbuster that portrays the charter school movement as the savior of the education system of the good USA. Those who attended her presentation Wednesday will find the review oddly familiar.

Ravitch is a strong critic of the charter school movement, and she ripped Superman to pieces. Much of her criticism I've read before, but it was the first time I heard many of Ravitch's gems. That Geoffrey Canada's "miraculous" Harlem Children's Zone (one of the saviors in "Superman") kicked out an entire class of middle schoolers when they were not improving their test score and were going to make his funders look bad. That Locke High School (another Superman savior) did not produce much better test results than the surrounding schools in Los Angeles. That the SEED boarding school in D.C. (the fourth savior) spends $35,000 in spending per child. Like Ravitch says in her review: "Those who claim that better education for the neediest students won’t require more money cannot use SEED to support their argument."

A movie in response to "Waiting for Superman" -- aptly named "The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman" -- is in its final stages of production, but my guess is it won't have as wide distribution as Superman did. You can look at the trailer here.

Separate and unequal?

From the "no kidding" department comes a new report that says minority children are segregated into high-poverty schools, away from wealthier white peers. DiversityData.org, a project of Harvard University that tracks indicators of diversity opportunity, quality of life and health for various racial and ethnic population groups, has just published Segregation and Exposure to High-Poverty Schools in Large Metropolitan Areas: 2008-09. The report ranks racial/ethnic segregation and exposure to high-poverty schools for public, primary school students in the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, and reveals that black and Hispanic children attend very different schools than do white children and are disproportionately concentrated in high-poverty schools. Read the report here.
School segregation comes from housing segregation, and we don't have to go too far to find some shining examples locally. Carmel Unified: 74 percent white, 10 percent low income. Alisal Union in Salinas: 94 percent Latino, 79 percent low income.

And speaking about an educational system that does not provide equally for everybody, the buzz heralding the opening of "Waiting for Superman" is growing louder. Directed by David Guggenheim of "An Inconvenient Truth" fame, Waiting is an exploration of the current state of public education and how it's affecting U.S. children. It opens in Los Angeles and New York this Friday, and nationwide in October. For those of us who care about the public education system, it's an absolute must see.