Waiting for Superman (2010)
Directed by Davis Guggenheim
Written by Documentary
Starring Geoffrey Canada
Release Date September 24th, 2010
Published November 15th, 2010
We should be ashamed of ourselves. The documentary “Waiting for Superman” from Oscar winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim should make us all ashamed to look our children in the eyes. It’s our fault. We let this happen. Years and years of neglect and an inability to adjust to the times combined with an intractable group of teachers who we’ve allowed to slouch toward tenure have turned more than a third of the schools in the United States into what one expert calls ‘Failure factories.’
“Waiting for Superman” begins with an idealistic Davis Guggenheim looking back at the amazing, dedicated teachers he met while making his first documentary more than 10 years ago. A decade later Davis has kids and this fact has forced him to reassess his opinion of public schools. The fact is that with a little research Davis finds that the best place to assure his kids of a good education is a private school, even if this flies in the face of his liberal ideals.
Yes, Davis Guggenheim does not hide his political leanings, never has; he won an Oscar with Vice President Al Gore for “An Inconvenient Truth.” Politics aligns Guggenheim with the teacher’s union, a group whose funding of the national Democratic Party has lead to the party being called a ‘wholly owned subsidiary of the teacher’s union.’
Yet, it is also this union that is a big part of what is sinking our schools. A scourge of bad teachers shirking their duty to kids are leaving generations of our children unprepared for the road ahead of them. These teachers pass on kids who lack the skills needed to move forward only to get them out of their classroom. Then, this teacher is bounced from one school to another in the vain hope that the next bad teacher won’t be as bad as the one he/she replaced.
Not all teachers are bad and not all of our problems can be blamed on the teachers union but, Davis Guggenheim and “Waiting For Superman” make a persuasive case that teachers acting in their own self interest and union leaders who put bad teachers ahead of children, are driving schools into the ground to protect the jobs of teachers who deserve to be fired.
The best example of this in “Waiting for Superman” is found in Washington D.C, the single worst school district in the country. A reformer by the name of Michelle Rhee was named Superintendent in 2007. Her goal was to cut through the bureaucracy and move the millions of dollars that the district wasted on administration out to the schools. Once she began that shift; Ms. Rhee found that not only was bureaucracy dragging down D.C schools but an intractable union, braced by a tenure agreement was passing on generation after generation of unprepared and ill-educated children.
Michelle Rhee set about changing this as well and seemed to have a solution. She offered an exchange; teachers could get exorbitant pay increases, six figure salaries, if they gave up tenure.
Giving up tenure would allow the Superintendent to fire the failing teachers and reward the teachers who deserved it. The teachers union refused to even discuss the idea, giving up tenure would mean losing members and losing members equals losing power. D.C is the ultimate example of adults choosing their best interest over the interests of children. “Waiting for Superman” is not all criticism of the teacher union and the despair of lost children; there are heroes to be found here. Jeffrey Canada was an idealistic New York teacher who rose through the ranks to become an administrator in New York. Canada believed he could change the system that was creating so much poverty in Harlem, New York. Then he ran up against the teacher’s union.
Stymied by a union which wastes more than 100 million tax dollars per year on failing teachers, Jeffrey Canada moved to start a charter school, a non-union school that would select a small group of students and educate them in new and progressive ways. Jeffrey Canada’s Harlem Success Academy is changing the way kids are educated. Harlem Success Academy catches kids before they lose hope, before bad teachers rob them of their love of learning.
Jeffrey Canada is joined by other heroic educators who also have started charter schools and are showing astonishing results. In Texas and California; KIPP, Knowledge is Power Program, is delivering kids who are prepared to compete in the changing global economy.
In Los Angeles, Seed Academy is pulling kids out of impoverished homes and placing them in a boarding school that separates them from the violence, crime and apathy of the streets. Each of these schools has been around for nearly a decade and the results have been staggering. Unfortunately, thanks to the teacher’s unions, these charter schools can only take on a small number of kids.
Year after year these charter schools hold state mandated lotteries during which they choose 40 or 50 applications from hundreds of struggling parents desperate to rescue their child from the education system that, in most cases failed that parent in decades passed. Davis Guggenheim follows several families from Los Angeles to D.C to New York as they pray for a space in a charter school.
“Waiting for Superman” ends on a heart rending note as we watch several ordinary and sometimes extraordinary kids facing what could be the defining moment of their lives. If these kids do not get into Harlem Success, KIPP or Seed they will end up at failing middle schools and high schools. The most despairing example is an exceptionally bright, 6 year old Latina girl who if she loses out on the KIPP lottery in Los Angeles will be turned over to one of the worst schools in the country because that’s the district in which her struggling parents live.
These lotteries play like Sophie’s Choice on a massive scale. At one charter school we can save 60 students at another charter we can save 150 students and at still another charter we can save 10 or 20 students. Davis Guggenheim is very specific in choosing the families he chose to follow, kids who are in failing school districts who will end up at some of the worst schools in the country because of geography.
One might guess that only inner city schools are failing but that is not the case. Guggenheim travels to a posh suburban school in Silicon Valley that has nearly as many failing students as any inner city school. Even with a school that looks like a University parents are eager to get their children out and into a charter school that has shown an uncanny knack for sending kids to college and prepared to actually be in college.
This suburban palace school you see has a curriculum based on what is called tracking. Tracking is a system created during World War 2 and was meant to quickly identify traits in kids that could predict how their skills could be put to use in a very different workforce. The economic changes of the last 60 years have shifted the ground beneath us. We have evolved from a manufacturing economy to a thought economy that values a very different set of skills and yet schools continue tracking kids to jobs that are no longer relevant.
On the hopeful side, Guggenheim demonstrates quite clearly that kids are not failing in school, we are failing them. At Harlem Success Academy and KIPP and Seed, kids who in the past would have been written off as being incapable of learning or kids who would have been tracked into irrelevance and despair, are thriving and striving toward College and success.
“Waiting for Superman” is an act of bravery, a desperate cry for help and for change. It’s not about throwing more money at schools but about changing the way schools are set up. Teacher’s unions are protecting bad teachers for their own self interest and in doing so they are abandoning generations of kids to lives of despair, poverty and struggle.
We need to be embarrassed. We should be outraged. We tout the US as the greatest country in the world and yet we rank in the 20’s in terms of education worldwide. China, among others, is well ahead of us in math. When the companies in Silicon Valley go looking for Engineers they look to India because US schools are not turning out kids with the skill level to handle these exceptionally difficult and well paying jobs.
It is an embarrassment and an outrage. Republican or Democrat, you cannot watch “Waiting for Superman” and not come away outraged and ashamed. See “Waiting for Superman” and get involved in changing this abhorrent situation. There is still time to save several generations of kids but we must act now.
