"Blame tenure for bad education!" That is the claim made by a charter school leader in the controversial education documentary Waiting for "Superman". And he is not alone. For decades, education reformers and union critics have blamed the tenure system for making it nearly impossible to fire incompetent teachers. How to save our students from failing, if we can't flunk bad teachers? It seems like simple math. But it's not.
While children in Finland and Singapore are world champions in math, reading, and science, the American children rank alarmingly low. The United States, the global economic and military superpower, ranks only 25th in math and 21st in science. This is another "inconvenient truth" the Oscar-winning director Davis Guggenheim has put in the center of the documentary Waiting for "Superman". Michelle Rhee, the newly retired superintendent of Washington, DC schools, appears in the movie as one of the hard critics of
