Waiting for "Superman"

Waiting for "Superman" surveys the landscape of the American public school system and doesn't find much to celebrate. Test scores reveal our kids are losing ground to the rest of the world, teachers accountable to no one have abandoned their duties, and even schools in lush suburban surroundings can't produce enough students to meet demand for high tech jobs or exceed the proficiency goals created by bureaucrats. Director Davis Guggenheim begins the film on a personal note: As he drives past public schools to take his daughter to a private school he ponders what has led him to betray what he and so many others hold as a cherished idea, the supposed level playing field of the public education system. Guggenheim follows several young children making their way through public schools with varying degrees of success. One first-grader has a teacher who won't respond to requests for a conference from the boy's mother. A California teen could attend an above average public high school but chooses instead to try her luck in a lottery for a charter school that doesn't slot students into tracks based on testing or other factors.

Back to those children in a moment. The negative response to Waiting for "Superman" from the likes of David Denby and most notably Diane Ravitch has centered around the idea that the film is a manifesto for charter schools and privatization at the expense of public schools. Describing Waiting for "Superman" as a film about charter schools is a bit like calling Titanic a film about designing a boat. Guggenheim does feature charter school success stories like that of Geoffrey Canada and his Harlem Children's Zone as well as a testimonial from charter school advocate Bill Gates, but he also acknowledges that not all charter schools succeed. A case is made that what success charter schools do have can be attributed to the ways they differ from public schools, most notably in their freedom from a relationship with teachers' unions. The tragic hero of Waiting for "Superman" is former Washington, D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, whose partially successful attempts to improve the D.C. school system is undone by the failure of a plan to eliminate teacher tenure and institute merit pay. The teachers' unions are portrayed here as great self-perpetuating behemoths, untouchable due to their heavy campaign contributions and unyielding in the refusal to hold their members accountable for performance. There is no solution presented to the problem of the unions' death grip on public education; a chance assignment to the wrong class means a wasted year for unlucky students.

Ravitch criticizes Guggenheim for not raising the issue of how poverty affects student performance, a criticism so unimaginative as to be depressing. All manner of things would be different if poverty were alleviated, but Guggenheim wants Waiting for "Superman" to ask a different question. Yes, schools would perform better if we fixed our urban neighborhoods,  but what (Guggenheim asks) will happen to the neighborhoods if we don't fix our schools? What the system is not prepared to do, we're told, is to aggressively get to the students early on who need the most help and to hire, pay well, and retain qualified teachers who are held accountable for results. The best charter schools have figured out how to do both these things on a smaller scale, and thus we should take what lessons we can from their success.

Waiting for "Superman" uses the children hoping for charter school admission as its dramatic hook, with everything leading up to the state-mandated lotteries at which the kids learn their fates. While I wanted to know the results I 'm not sure that I needed to see the actual process by which the names of admitted students are selected, or that seeing the kids turned into contestants is as important as hearing from some public school advocates. Yet trying to put a human face on the problem is a forgivable misstep, and I can only hope that Waiting for "Superman" will bring the education conversation home in the way Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth did for awareness of our planet.