Waiting For Superman - A Review

Waiting For Superman is a truly a remarkable film. Shot with careful narraration, interesting and dynamic cinematography, engaging real-life personalities, and beautiful music, it is no wonder it has won many awards.  Here is a brief description:

Every morning, in big cities, suburbs and small towns across America, parents send their children off to school with the highest of hopes. But a shocking number of students in the United States attend schools where they have virtually no chance of learning--failure factories likelier to produce drop-outs than college graduates. And despite decades of well-intended reforms and huge sums of money spent on the problem, our public schools haven't improved markedly since the 1970s. Why? There is an answer. And it's not what you think. From "An Inconvenient Truth" director Davis Guggenheim comes "Waiting for 'Superman'", a provocative and cogent examination of the crisis of public education in the United States told through multiple interlocking stories--from a handful of students and their families whose futures hang in the balance, to the educators and reformers trying to find real and lasting solutions within a dysfunctional system. Tackling such politically radioactive topics as the power of teachers' unions and the entrenchment of school bureaucracies, Guggenheim reveals the invisible forces that have held true education reform back for decades.

Some reflections after watching:

I am humbled and grateful that I was raised in an educational system that was, by and large, very healthy.  I have two parents who love me, a school system with teachers who cared about me, and enough resources to enable a wide variety of educational experiences.  This is certainly not the norm.  It's easy for me to sit back and think, "Come on, you just have to work hard and you'll overcome!"  But that is easy to say from the vantage point of a stacked deck.

Having no aspirations is a huge problem.  That is one of the dominant themes in this movie.  There are thousands of high schools in our nation that are simply dropout factories.  These kids just don't care and they don't have the emotional or mental development to see beyond the immediate.  Why?  The answer to that question is far too complex for a movie or blog post to answer but in some ways has to come down to lack of support.  Kids need support.  They are kids.  You leave them alone and they'll just default to stupidity.  Believe me, I know.  I have four of them.  They needs parents.  They need teachers.  More than anything, they just need people to love them and attempt to point them in the right direction.  I had this my whole life and millions of kids in our nation don't.

But kids also need vision.  If all you have ever had modeled for you is single parent families, jobs that do nothing more than kill your soul, and have had very few people shepherd you towards anything different, why would you have aspirations?

Any institution that enables dysfunction needs to be eradicated.  The movie does not paint a very pretty picture of teacher's unions.  As I type this there are thousands of people marching on the capital of Wisconsin for the right to maintain power as a teacher's union.  I'm not sure if there is a one to one connection between the issues with unions in the movie and the issues we are dealing with here in WI, but it is clear that one of the major factors contributing to the decimation of the school system in places like Detroit and Washington D.C. is due to zero accountability for teachers.  The unions hold the trump card over anyone getting fired.  It's called tenure and in most places if you work for two years and are breathing you can get it.

Unions were a great idea when it was a means to protect women from being abused with very low pay.  It is clearly not a good idea when a union serves to protect thousands of teachers who are completely incompetent and ties the hands of anyone seeking educational reform.  Don't tell me "it's all about the kids".  Bull.  It's all about being lazy and getting paid.  There are many poignant scenes in this movie that demonstrate this.  These scenes will break your heart and infuriate you.  The way that the unions are structured right now needs to go.  That is clear.

There is little discussion surrounding the epidemic of fatherlessness in our culture.  This certainly has to be a major contributing factor to the success or lack thereof in any educational system.  It seems to be a bit of a no-brainer that two adults supporting a child is better then one adult supporting a child.   I was disappointed that this theme was not drawn out more in the movie.

A great teacher can change the life of a kid but there are very few that are gifted in this way.  But there are many teachers who are pretty good or above average and couple them with a stable home structure and most kids will thrive.  But place a kid from a single parent family into a system that in many places is designed to protect incompetent teachers and it's not hard to figure out why our kids can't read beyond a 3rd grade level.  The theme of fatherlessness seemed to be missing in the movie and certainly needs to be addressed as a primary factor in the deterioration of our educational system in America.