Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
Bill Gates
Michelle Rhee
Geoffrey Canada (who makes this list solely due to his name)
Directed By:
Davis Guggenheim
Ask any of the world leaders how we can cure the ills of mankind and they will all start to babble about one thing, education. But those are alcoholics promises dressed in a Tom-Wolfe-like white suit. In a world where people are intellectually awake and curious, no politician would ever be able to screw them over. Director of AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH Davis Guggenheim knows that and is looking to understand what's going on with the education system in the U.S. It's been free falling since the sixties and the numbers your average school has to show for themselves. What's wrong with our education system? That's the question Davis Guggenheim is trying to answer in WAITING FOR SUPERMAN, but unfortunately he doesn't quite get there. The school system is plagued by problems of such magnitude, David Guggenheim doesn't seem to know by what end he should take it.
Here's the thing. There are over two thousand schools in America, who could be rightfully called "dropout factories". By that, Davis Guggenheim is referring to the test scores in reading and in mathematics. In those schools, the percentage of kids who are up to speed with the program rarely exceeds forty percent. So Guggenheim goes on the field and interviews kids and families from the worst dropout factories in North America and follows the struggle of the parents to find a proper school for their children. It's hard, no doubt, so in between the hard-reality bits, Guggenheim is trying to understand the problem, where it comes from and why the future looks so grim. That's where I think his documentary went a little stale. There's a lot of exposition of the problem, but not a lot of effort made to understand it. Guggenheim follows too many afflicted families and doesn't follow the affliction enough.
He comes up with a few answers though and those are quite interesting. In fact, Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee come up with the answers, because they are two people who have been fighting to change the system. The education system model has been set-up in the postwar boom and has never changed since. The problem is that the world has changed a whole lot since. Back then, there were very few jobs that needed college education, so the system got engineered to make college very hard to enter. But according to the reality we're facing, over a hundred million jobs will soon be "high-skills, high-pay" and the education system in the U.S is currently unable to sustain that. The computer revolution makes most jobs unavailable to Americans, so companies like Microsoft and Google are importing a shitload of work force from other countries, including India. I mean, if India is able to produce an obscene amount of engineers and highly skilled workers, how hard can it be to do in the U.S, with less than one third of the population?
Another hint at the nature of the education system problem comes from Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the district of Columbia school system. She's a very courageous woman and not a career bureaucrat, so she came in with absolutely no fear or reprisal and pulled some of the boldest moves. See, being a teacher in a U.S high school is pretty much having job security for a lifetime. It's called "getting tenure". Given the toughness of the profession and the strength of the union, it turned a lot of teachers into shitty teachers. Guggenheim even shows the example of a teacher who put one of his student head in the toilet bowl and after being fired, was re-hired with backwards pay. Tenure is a powerful thing. Michelle Rhee is against that, because it's against the children interest. That turned her into a demoness for teachers because she threatened their job security. She even offered HUGE pay raises to teachers if they were ready to give up tenure. You know, performance boosters.
WAITING FOR SUPERMAN has good intentions, but it's a documentary that looks at its problem from way too close. Yes, there's a problem with U.S education (really, education in North America) and yes it's going to hit the continent (the world) in the balls sooner or later. But there's no need for a documentary that makes us stew in this problem and watch families hope for a charter school, only to brutally fail. I think we're passed that, now. Documentaries are supposed to empower the viewers with information and a burning, raging desire to change things. All I felt after watching WAITING FOR SUPERMAN is a sense of impending doom towards our future and a better understanding of why I had shitty teachers in high school. Don't expect this one to throw you off your rocker. To be honest, it's a bit how I felt after watching AN INCONVENIANT TRUTH also.
SCORE: 65%