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“Waiting for ‘Superman’” director Davis Guggenheim has repeatedly denounced criticisms that his film stakes a ground that is pro-charter school and critical of the teachers union. But a lobbying group with exactly that agenda is using the documentary to spread its message to the general public.

The campaign, called “Done Waiting,” represents one winner in the ongoing debate inside the education world about how to transform the attention the film into a coherent “call to action” for agitated movie-goers.

The answer put forward by Education Reform Now, the group leading the “Done Waiting” campaign, is to use the film as a springboard for making specific political changes.

The group’s favored changes include expanding charter schools and changing the way teachers are evaluated and granted tenure. Paid canvassers waiting outside movie theaters across the country hand movie-goers literature, direct them to a campaign-style web site, DoneWaiting.org, and encourage them to add their e-mail addresses to the group’s mailing list.

(Education Reform Now was also the group behind the massive public relations campaign that preceded New York’s charter cap lift in May, and the advocacy component to the political action committee Democrats for Education Reform.)

The campaign has not been endorsed by the film’s movie studio and production company, Paramount Pictures and Participant Media, which is running its own, less explicitly political outreach campaign around the film. (more…)

A new report is urging school districts across the country to beef up their methods of evaluating teachers, which the report describes as so slipshod as to be “largely meaningless.” The report, by a nonprofit group that has clashed with teachers unions in the past, describes the poor evaluations as “just one symptom of a larger, more fundamental crisis—the inability of our schools to assess instructional performance accurately or to act on this information in meaningful ways.”

The report goes on:

This inability not only keeps schools from dismissing consistently poor performers, but also prevents them from recognizing excellence among top-performers or supporting growth among the broad plurality of hardworking teachers who operate in the middle of the performance spectrum. Instead, school districts default to treating all teachers as essentially the same, both in terms of effectiveness and need for development.

The report, conducted by The New Teacher Project, a nonprofit founded by the lightning-rod D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, calls on districts to develop more robust teacher evaluation systems that reward successful teachers and easily identify less successful teachers.

The report comes amid a growing push to improve teaching quality across the country. President Obama has said that teachers who are not helping students learn should be removed from classrooms, and even the national American Federation of Teachers union is working internally to build a new method of evaluating teacher quality.

The report bases its findings on surveys of thousands of teachers and administrators across four states and 12 school districts, plus a scouring of the districts’ evaluation records. New York City was not one of the districts studied. (more…)