I’ll admit it right now, I took my education for granted. When I was actually paying for my schooling in the form of tuition, I took my education very seriously, and my grades reflected that. Yet, as I look back on my high school years, I see a wasted opportunity. I was fortunate enough to have gone to a high school that featured a team of teachers who cared about my mental upbringing. To repay them back, I often wasted my time fumbling about with my social life. Don’t get me wrong, certainly there where classes where I matched my potential and excelled, but I could've done better. I should’ve done better. My regret is exacerbated further after watching the emotionally resonant documentary Waiting for Superman. Like any good documentary, Waiting for Superman first establishes its cause with great clarity: education reform. Its goal is to demonstrate the horrid state our education system is in at the moment. Director Davis Guggenheim does a terrific job of laying out the system’s current grades through relevant and depressing statistics.
After being disappointed with Guggenheim’s muddled efforts in Al Gore’s soap box for An Inconvenient Truth, I was surprised by the wealth of damning knowledge that he presented. Granted, statistics should never be the sole indicator of a problem, for they can be easily manipulated, but they represent what can only be seen as the beginning to a blooming issue. From decreasing graduation rates to a dip in scores for standardized testing, it appears our nation’s children are regressing in a world that is progressing. What’s causing this educational decay in our children? Although we’d be silly to say there is one issue that is the root of the problem, Guggenheim lays out an assortment of obstacles that are persistently plaguing the educational process. From the support of “drop out factories” to lack of structure within schools, there is a lot to tackle. Yet, one such issue that the film will continually take heat for is the power of the teacher’s union. Like most unions, the teacher’s union is a group that wholeheartedly protects its constituents from wrongful termination as well as providing them with the benefits they deserve as workers. But, also like most unions, they make it extremely difficult to fire those who are not worthy of their job.
As a personal case, there was a teacher of mine throughout high school who was beyond absent minded. How she kept her job escapes my mental capacity, but she was constantly reported and detested amongst the student body and their parents. She had no business teaching anyone outside a drawer full of socks, and here she was trying to mold our minds. Needless to say, most of the classes she taught were a joke and devoid of any knowledge retention. For every good teacher that the union protects, there is a bad one. Thus we have a system that can’t reward teachers who impact a child’s life, nor can we fire a teacher whose lack of ability hinders a child’s right to a good education. I do admit that Guggenheim does the film a disservice by giving the teacher’s union very little time to defend itself, especially when they’re established as an antagonist to reform, but often as indicated in the film, they’ve turned the other cheek in working out the kinks in their own faulty system.
With that being said, what solution does Guggenheim offer? The idea of a charter school. It’s a type of school that is publicly funded without some of the mandated rules of a typical public school. Furthermore, charter schools have been proven in some instances to be superior to its public and private counterparts. It is from this solution that Guggenheim’s film evolves beyond arguments and statistics. More specifically, it’s from this point that we meet a collection of children from varying backgrounds who demonstrate what’s at risk. Guggenheim and his crew follow around a handful of kids who are looking to enrich their lives through a dependable education. Each kid, who’s on the verge of being spit out of a broken system, are attempting to find a way into a charter school. The problem is that these schools have such a low capacity that each year they can only enroll a select amount of children. So, in an attempt to maintain a semblance of impartiality, children are entered into a draft system. The children are assigned a given number in which they pin their education on. If their number is called, their future has the potential to be far more fruitful. If not, then disappointment trumps hope. Guggenheim wonderfully juxtaposes the children’s fleeting chances at a better education against the urgent desperation to fix a system that is unfortunately flawed.
Through candid conversations we come to know these kids almost as if they’re our own. Their aspirations, and startlingly their fears, are full realized. Although the kid’s parents do an admirable job describing the importance of a better education for their child, it’s in the kid’s response that we feel the most hurt. It’s in their responses that we become enraged that their future is being bantered around between political lines as if it’s game. These children deserve better and if anything, even if it may have some shortcomings, Waiting for Superman makes the effort to give the children an attempt to shout their displeasure. When it’s all said and done, whether you take Guggenheim’s stats verbatim or follow under the notion that a charter school is the solution to the problem, you’d be hard pressed to not feel some distress bubbling up from the pit of your stomach as the children impatiently wait for their names to be called come draft day. Despite your feeling on the film’s arguments, I think we can all agree that a child’s education shouldn’t be left to chance. Instead, it should be an undeniable right and Waiting for Superman brings that to the forefront.
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