Quick Movie Review: Waiting for Superman (2010)

Waiting for Superman (2010)

Bottomline: Good documentary that makes you think and want to react.

Note: The director, Davis Guggenheim, also directed An Inconvenient Truth (2006), which made Al Gore a green superstar and brought climate issues to the fore with the general public. In 2001, he also directed a documentary focusing on first-year teachers entitled The First Year.

Great Idea: The documentary demands action. There is a number to text. The text response directs you to a great website where you can get involved and in some small way help the education of our young people. The website that supports this documentary is highly interactive and incredible useful. . . http://www.waitingforsuperman.com.

National Education Association: Here is a link to the National Education Association’s official response to the documentary: http://www.nea.org/home/41286.htm

QMR Review: I’ll begin this review with a quick note: This documentary is not about denigrating or insulting teachers. In fact, Guggenheim considers good teachers victims of the system.

Waiting for Superman starts with a simple premise – the public school system of this great country of ours is broken. Now, if you don’t agree with this premise then the rest of the documentary will be entirely lost on you. However, Guggenheim does a good job of backing up his premise with facts and figures that clearly show the American public education has fallen woefully behind other countries by any measure – except one. That one is the incredibly high confidence American school children have in their own abilities. They may not be good in math. They may not be good in English. But they are very self-assured.

This documentary is intensely personal as Guggenheim wrestles with the decision to send his children to private school. He then sets out to discover what’s wrong with American public education by focusing on the academic lives of select children who want to succeed through education but are denied that opportunity.

It’s a heartbreaking and heart wrenching thing to see – young people who want to do well in a country that supposedly provides every opportunity only to see their dreams dashed because the education system has failed them. This personal flavor of the documentary goes off the rails a bit because it essentially becomes a treatise by Guggenheim for what he sees as the clear solution to the problem – charter schools. While extolling the virtues of Charter Schools, he glosses over some of the challenges they are having.

In addition, it is clear that there is no love lost by Guggenheim over teachers’ unions. It would not be wrong to walk out of this film with the clear understanding that the primary challenge facing American public education is its teachers’ unions. There is something to be said for that and Guggenheim makes that case, but, at the same time, teachers’ unions have done some good on behalf of teachers (e.g. better pay), but this film does not show any of that.

It’s not a perfect documentary if for no other reason that Guggenheim spends a lot of time talking. It borders on preaching. I am not a huge fan of documentaries that feature the documentarian and this one gives us that in spades. However, whether you agree with what Guggenheim has to say or not, it sparks needed conversation about the state of public education in America. It’s broken. We need to fix it.