Movie Reviews of Waiting for Superman
- Waiting for Superman" is a film that is likely to leave you frustrated, fed up and angry.
Those, by the way, are the reasons you should see it.
Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, whose eclectic output includes guitar heroes ("It Might Get Loud") and global warming ("An Inconvenient Truth") is in full outrage mode here, exposing the U.S. education system as a broken machine whose solutions are at once simple and thanks to unions, red tape and an all-around attitude of defensiveness, insanely complex.
The idea, boiled down to its essence, is that great teachers work wonders in a classroom. The problem is finding them, retaining them and separating the wheat from the chaff, and once that's done, getting labor leaders to sign off on it. If there is a villain in the film, it's the unions, represented here by Randi Weingarten, the former head of the United Federation of Teachers. Characters are developed in documentaries as surely as they are in dramas, and Weingarten is wearing the black hat here, wielding iron-clad tenure for undeserving teachers as a weapon.
Of course, any good film, documentaries included, requires a good guy, as well, and Guggenheim has one in Geoffrey Canada, a South Bronx-born educator who established the Harlem Children's Zone, a group of charter schools that has had tremendous success, despite enrolling many students who come from impoverished homes. Canada is a star; the camera loves him and everything he says is compelling and wise, in a common-sense kind of way.
The film takes its title from one of his stories, about how disappointed he was as a child to learn that Superman wasn't real, not because he believed in super heroes, but because he realized there was no one coming with enough power to save us. Whether Canada's solutions, no excuses, with full responsibility on the student, working with strong support from teachers, could take hold or even be given a chance to is another thing. Guggenheim details dropout factories, in which students are basically geared to fail, and illustrates, with breezy, Michael Moore-inspired graphics and animation, how it's much more costly to house a prisoner than educate a child. In fairness, there is little said about the failure rate of charter schools.
Some of this we know already. Some of it is presented in more compelling fashion than we're used to seeing it, making it more likely to take hold in the imagination. But where Guggenheim really drives the point home is by following the lives of several students who are placing their hopes (and, it seems likely, their futures) on being accepted into high-performing charter schools. We meet them, learn of their struggles and their desire to succeed.
And then, in an excruciating scene, we watch with them as they wait to see if their names are chosen in a lottery for acceptance.
Yes. Their academic future hinges on having a ball with their name on it dropping at the right time. And the odds are not good, with numbers like 792 applicants for 40 spots at one school, 767 applicants for 35 spots at another. Without giving too much away, it's safe to say that many of these kids, and many, many more like them, could use the help of a hero. Failing that, 'Waiting for Superman" makes a strong case that they could use the help of families, teachers, administrators and the rest of us, as well.
|
