‘Waiting for Superman’ takes school system to task

Published 12:45 pm Friday, October 1, 2010

Oscar-winning documentarian Davis Guggenheim, who directed “An Inconvenient Truth,” tackles a subject in his new film that feels at least as troubling as global warming.

It’s a big one: When it comes to education and its measurable results, why are American kids lagging so far behind students in other countries? And what can be done about it?

In “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” Guggenheim (who guiltily admits in his opening narration that his own children go to private school) shrewdly follows a collection of different children through the travails of modern U.S. schooling.

All of the kids, most of whom are from challenging social situations, face lotteries at the end of the movie to try to get into a charter school. Many parents see this as the difference between their children getting a shot at the next rung up the ladder or staying down in a dead-zone school.

The lottery structure allows the movie to get away with a suspenseful climax, but quite rightly the focus is on what comes before that: the experts weighing in to talk about the problems.

One big target is the public school system’s reluctance to get rid of bad teachers. The film offers a statistic to dramatize the situation: In Illinois, 1 out of every 57 doctors loses a license, but only 1 out of every 2,500 teachers gets bounced from the profession.

The movie argues that this is the result of a tenure system that keeps bad teachers afloat and that the system is maintained by the teachers unions. Union honcho Randi Weingarten is one of the few voices heard in the movie defending the current organization of teachers — and this puts the movie out of balance. It needs a few eloquent voices as a counter-argument.

The central argument is delivered by people such as education reformer Geoffrey Canada and Washington, D.C., school chancellor Michelle Rhee — both familiar faces from the debate about the future of public schools.

Canada rides herd over a charter-school experiment in the Bronx that has completely contradicted the idea that some kids — from poverty or problem families — can’t excel at school.

Rhee has been swinging the ax in D.C., or trying to, in a controversial effort to clear out the dead wood. Her theories include financial incentives for outstanding teachers.

On of the film’s shortcomings is describing how, for instance, such incentives would be determined and who would determine them. And we don’t hear enough arguments about the possible downsides of that approach.

But “Waiting for ‘Superman’” does well as a wake-up call and as a measure of how the political climate’s priorities are skewed. Surely education should be a prominent issue in the national mind, instead of the trivia that lawmakers blather on about. As a way of putting the subject back in the public eye, this movie is well-timed.

“Waiting for ‘Superman’”

The director of “An Inconvenient Truth,” Davis Guggenheim, tackles the troubled state of U.S. public schools. The movie feels like it could use a few articulate voices from the ranks of teachers, but it does stir the pot in a provocative way.

Rated: PG-13 for language

Showing: Neptune, Pacific Place