Waiting for Superman: A Review

We're shown an education system we don't want to believe is ours

In the documentary, Waiting for Superman from Davis Guggenheim, (director of An Inconvenient Truth) we are shown an education system we don't want to believe is ours.  It's preferable to look away, but closing our eyes and putting our fingers in our ears is never a good way to fix things.

WASHINGTON, DC (Catholic Online) - Some urban legends die hard.  Such as the one about how every child in the United States has a right to a good public education.  Perhaps that one is particularly stubborn because it once was true, or at least mostly true. It's not so much anymore.  People resist this notion because we are the leading industrialized nation in the world.  How could we have gotten here without a top-notch education system?  It's because we are living off the fat of the past and yes, there still are some good schools. But today, way too many schools are starving the minds of our children.

In the documentary, Waiting for Superman from Davis Guggenheim, (director of An Inconvenient Truth) we are shown an education system we don't want to believe is ours.  It's preferable to look away, but closing our eyes and putting our fingers in our ears is never a good way to fix things. Just as a serious medical diagnosis makes one want to run away, we know instead that the only way to survive is to fight it with everything we've got. The film is not entertainment, it is our very lives. For the health of our public school system will determine the health of our country's future.

Waiting for Superman gives voice to people who understand the problem.  Too often their voices are muted by the shouts of the teacher unions; the National Education Association (NEA) and The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) that protect our country's good and highly respected teachers.  Unfortunately they also cover our country's incompetent and lazy teachers with impenetrable contracts and tenure.  It is an ironclad protection unlike that of any other occupation. For instance 1 in 57 doctors lose their licenses to practice and 1 in 97 attorneys lose theirs.  The teachers, however, have even out maneuvered the lawyers when it comes to legal protection under the law. 

Only 1 in 2,005 teachers ever loses a job. Bad teachers, even with voluminous evidence of wrong doing, cannot be fired due to the tenure which makes their jobs almost an inalienable right, just behind breathing. Instead of getting fired, in New York City, bad teachers get passed around or sent to reassignment centers, known as rubber rooms. During the making of the film, 600 teachers were relegated to an average of 3 years in rubber rooms; passing the time, reading, sleeping or doing whatever while collecting full salary and accruing benefits to the tune of $100 million a year. Ouch!

It's About the Kids-Yeah, Really

But enough about teachers, let's talk about the kids-those whom our education system is (well, supposed to be) about.  In Waiting for Superman, we are told that it's been eight years since the "No Child Left Behind Act" was signed into law by President Bush to raise 100 percent of students up to proficiency levels in math and reading by 2014.  With only 3 years left to go, the average proficiency across the country is 20-35%.

Dr. Robert Balfanz, an educational researcher at John Hopkins University, contends that from grade school to high school, we lose many of our students. He refers to schools in which over 40% of students do not graduate, as "drop out factories."  Balfanz has identified over 2,000 drop out factories in the United States.  Locke High School, in Los Angeles, CA, is one of the worst.  The freshman class averages 1200 freshmen but by sophomore year, there are only 300-400 students. That's a loss of 800 kids.

In communities with high dropout rates, kids have little future and crime becomes more likely. For instance, in Pittsburgh, PA, 68% of prisoners in the state penitentiary are high school dropouts. They cost $33,000 a year to room and board for an average of 4 years per prisoner resulting in a total of $132,000 cost to tax payers per prisoner - more than the cost of 12 years of a private education.  Oh, the irony.

When it comes to comparing student test scores with students from other countries, well, trust me, you don't want to know.  Yet, tragically, our kids do score heads and shoulders above other kids in one area - self esteem.  When rating how they thought they did on a math test taken by students from 8 other countries, it was the U S students that thought they did the best.  Their scores were the worst.

Rays of Hope

Fortunately, lest we pull our hair out in agony, the movie includes interviews with leaders in educational reform, including Bill Gates. As the founder of Microsoft, helping the country educate our children is personal for Gates since filling job openings with qualified US candidates is getting tougher. 

A bright spot in the film is Geoffrey Canada.  Although he grew up poor in the South Bronx, he graduated from Bowdoin College and received masters from Harvard's School of Education. He returned to New York City as a teacher but eventually took it a step further, beginning a charter school in the heart of Harlem's worst school district. (Charter schools receive a mixture of public and private money and operate somewhat independently in exchange for achieving promised results.) 

In spite of supposed conventional wisdom that blames poverty for poor academic achievement, Canada made parents a promise, "If your child comes to this school, we guarantee that we will get your child into college. We will be with you and with your child from the moment they enter our school till the moment they graduate from college." The school consistently sends an average of 95% of its graduates to college annually.

Another bright spot is Michelle Rhee. This woman from Korean immigrant parents became Washington D.C's public schools chancellor in 2007. With the backing of the school board, she made sweeping, sometimes controversial changes such as firing and laying off over 200 teachers and principals and closing twenty-two schools. "There is an utter lack of accountability for producing results for kids," she claimed.

When Rhee began, only 8% of eighth graders were at grade level in mathematics despite having the third highest per student spending in the US.  Two years later, high school graduation rates increased 3% to 72%.   By 2010, reading pass rates had increased by 14 percentage points, and math pass rates had increased by 17 percentage points. In 2008, Rhee also sought to end tenure. In it's place, she offered teachers the chance to get paid up to $140,000 based on a merit system for student achievement. The teachers' union would have none of it, however, and refused to even vote on it.

It can't be fun to be Randi Weingarten, in this film. As head of the powerful American Federation of Teachers, she comes off as a villain, caring more about protecting union members than about children getting cheated out of an education. Go figure.

Lotteries and Loss

In between the statistics and interviews, five families with young children are followed.  Each of these children enters lotteries that are the only fair way to select from a large pool of applicants competing to fill scant openings at schools that produce results.   The suspense is intense because we have come to know and love these five young children who possess a hunger for learning. 

It is at this point where the message of the documentary hits the hardest.  What sort of a country have we become that even in well-to-do Silicone Valley neighborhoods, parents have to rely on luck or better-placed zip codes to properly educate their children?  Thus, with the tears of the losers, we come to understand that we are all losing.

Rhee stated, "There is this unbelievable willingness to turn a blind eye to the injustices that are happening to kids in our schools every day in the name of harmony among the adults."  This documentary opens our eyes with blinding realities.

Waiting for Superman is available on blu-ray and DVD beginning February 15. It comes with a $25 gift card you can donate to your local school. For information on the Waiting for Superman social action campaign to ensure every child receives a great education, go to waitingforsuperman.com and click on "take action".

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Patti Maguire Armstrong is the mother of ten children including two Kenyan AIDS orphans. She is a speaker and the author of Catholic Truths for Our Children: A Parent's Guide (Scepter) Stories for the Homeschool Heart and also the children's book, Dear God, I Don't Get It!" (Bezalel). She was  the managing editor and co-author of Ascension Press's Amazing Gracebook series. Her website is RaisingCatholicKids.com.

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