Josh Reviews Waiting For “Superman”

Director David Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) has assembled a powerful new documentary, Waiting for “Superman,” about the deep problems in the United States’ public school system.  These problems may seem extraordinary and insurmountable, but Mr. Guggenheim’s film argues that the solutions are actually fairly clear, if the public and our leaders have the will to enact them.

The situation in our schools is a deeply depressing topic, and that might cause many to skip this film.  (Who wants to go to a movie theatre to be bummed out?)  But I encourage you to give Waiting for “Superman” a try.  Mr. Guggenheim has crafted a film that is never boring, and while he covers a lot of ground in the film, the narrative zips ahead at an energetic pace, assisted by several clever techniques.  Mr. Guggenheim utilizes some simple but interesting bits of animation to help illustrate his arguments.  The film’s narration (spoken by Mr. Guggenheim himself) keeps the documentary on target and focuses our attention on the points Mr. Guggenheim is trying to make, without falling into bombastic rhetoric or frustrating oversimplification.  (While Mr. Guggenheim is never a character in his film to the degree that, say, Michael Moore is in his films, I appreciated the way that Mr. Guggenheim wasn’t afraid to include himself in the film.  We hear him asking questions of many of the interview subjects, and he doesn’t shy away from discussing how and why he and his wife chose not to send their children to public school.) 

But most of all, the film succeeds because Mr. Guggenheim has chosen to focus on several engaging individual subjects.  Rather than making the movie solely about vast statistics and broad national problems, he grounds his film in the stories of five children (and the parents trying to find the best schools for them) as well as on two controversial figures attempting broad reform to the public school system.  These small stories help illuminate the larger problems before us.

The kids featured in Waiting for “Superman” are well-chosen.  They are from different parts of the country, and from different ethnic and social backgrounds, but each of them (along with their families) are faced with the same dilemma.  All five are good kids who have an interest in learning — but all five are located in districts with public schools that, to put it mildly, are not known for excellence.  In more blunt terms, these schools are “failure factories” — one of the many nick-names for these sorts of public schools that can be found across the nation, from which the vast majority of kids fail to graduate. 

I defy you not to fall in love with these kids.  It’s heartbreaking to listen to their parents describe their hopes for their children, in light of the looming reality that if their kids go to the local schools, they will not be able to reach many of their dreams in life. 

The nail-biting hook of the film’s story comes in the form of the lottery in which all five families participate, in order to enroll their children in better-quality schools found elsewhere in their areas.  The parents feel (and the evidence clearly supports them), that their children’s entire futures rest on the result of random chance — the drawing of a numbered lottery ball, the information generated by a computer, or whatever random selection method the schools use to decide which out-of-district children they can enroll, and which they can’t. 

Mr. Guggenheim provides some hope to the story through his spotlight on two much-in-the-news (and somewhat controversial) school reformers.  Geoffrey Canada is the fast-talking, charismatic founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone Project.  This project was described by the New York Times in 2004 as “one of the biggest social experiments of our time.”  Mr. Canada and his partners targeted what they felt were the twenty-four toughest blocks in Harlem.  As the Times describes:

Canada’s…program combines educational, social and medical services. It starts at birth and follows children to college. It meshes those services into an interlocking web, and then it drops that web over an entire neighborhood. It operates on the principle that each child will do better if all the children around him are doing better.

Mr. Canada is blunt, funny, and quite engaging.  He provides the title for the film, when he recounts his shock, as a child, when he learned that Superman wasn’t real and so wouldn’t be coming to help him and his friends and family in their tough neighborhood.  The energy level of the film picks up any time it cuts back to Mr. Canada. 

Mr. Guggenheim’s second spotlighted reformer is Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of the Washington, DC Public Schools.  By most measures, Washington, DC has the worst public schools in the entire country, and Ms. Rhee has drawn a lot of attention (and also a lot of criticism) for her bold attempts to reform the system.  In particular, she drew the ire of the American Federation of Teachers (the country’s largest union of teachers), and has publicly clashed with the AFT’s president, Randi Weingarten.  (Ms. Rhee was in the news again earlier this month, when she announced her resignation from the role.)

Overall, I found Waiting for “Superman” to be quite even-handed (though I know there are some who disagree).  I appreciated that the film did not cast all teachers as the villains.  Mr. Guggenheim takes pains throughout the film to praise the skill and devotion of most teachers, while heavily criticizing the teacher’s union.  My wife, who is a first-grade teacher, loved the film.  Her main criticism was that, while Mr. Guggenheim spotlights several very successful charter schools and presents them as a better alternative to our public school systems, there are also plenty of charter schools that fail just as miserably as some public schools.  Ms. Weingarten made the same point to the New York Times back in September:

Specifically, [Ms. Weingarten] objected to [Mr. Guggenheim’s] portrayal of charter schools — only a fraction of which have produced outstanding results — as the saviors of education, while painting teachers’ unions as villainous.

Whether one agrees with Mr. Guggenheim’s conclusions in the film or not, this is an important conversation to be had, and Waiting for “Superman” makes a sizable contribution to that national discussion.  It’s a strong film and an important one.  If it’s playing in your vicinity, check it out.