Waiting for "Superman" Review: A System of Failure

Academy Award-winning documentarian, Davis Guggenheim, is back with a new documentary that explores the current state of the American education system, Waiting for “Superman.”

Guggenheim follows five students on their paths of education: Anthony, Francisco, Bianca, Daisy, and Emily. These kids live all over the United States, from New York City to Washington, D.C. to California, and in all kinds of neighborhoods, from the poor inner city to wealthy white suburbia. The common links between these children are that they are all bright students and they all work hard. They all show a great deal of promise and have ambition. And they are all screwed. Because the schools they are going to end up in will take that away from them and rob them of their opportunities.

Waiting for “Superman” is an exhaustive look into the problems that plague the modern American education system. One of the biggest being that is isn’t modern. Our system of education is still working under the methodology of the academic needs of the 1950s. Well, in the 1950s, not everyone went to college, because not everyone needed to go to college. There was still a large agrarian population. Well that doesn’t exist anymore. As one interviewee grimly put it, “If you don’t go to college in America, you’re kind of screwed. And America is kind of screwed.”

But our education system doesn’t reflect this need, still favoring a tracking system in most instances, whereby students are placed on tracks that decide where they will end up: college, managerial positions, or manual workforce. But the methodology isn’t the only problem.

Teacher’s unions struggled to get rights for teachers. And they succeeded. In fact, they have been too successful. In public institutions, after two years a teacher has tenure. After that, it is literally impossible to fire them. What this means is that unlike every other profession, success isn’t merit based. Teachers can’t be promoted. They can’t get raises, not based on their skill level or success with students anyway. All the teachers have to be kept on a level playing field. Fighting this is just shy of impossible as the unions are incredibly powerful and maintain a fierce stranglehold on that power. Because of this, it is impossible to recognize the good teachers and get rid of the bad ones.

What Guggenheim’s film shows is that money and budgets aren’t the major problems plaguing the education system. They are problems, and big ones to be sure, but you can pour all the money you want into a broken machine, it’s still going to be broken if you don’t look for a way to fix it.

This film is not without hope, for Guggenheim offers solutions. Or rather, he goes to the places where solutions are being offered. He finds Geoffrey Canada in New York City and others across the country that are implementing a new type of school: charter schools. These schools institute a philosophy that school needs to be made as important a part of a child’s life as possible. This means extending school hours and holding children accountable for their work and actions. The results? Students at these schools not only outperform their neighboring schools, they outperform everybody. However, there is a catch.

These charter schools have a limited amount of space and a limited window to apply. Hundreds of children will be vying for a handful of spots, sometimes as little as ten. The names of the children are taken and placed into a lottery. A drawing is held to decide who gets admission.

Guggenheim follows Anthony, Francisco, Bianca, Daisy, and Emily as they go to school. He asks them what they want to do with their lives. They all have ambitions. Some of them even know that the odds are stacked against them. Guggenheim also interviews the parents, and they all know the odds are stacked against their children. He watches as the parents do the best they can for their children, helping them with homework, and ultimately getting them in the lottery systems for the charter schools.

The brilliance of Guggenheim’s of film is that he doesn’t just ask why the system is as broken as it is, he shows it. He shows that it isn’t a game of statistics. Kids that are poor and minorities aren’t dumber than kids that are rich and white. They are failing because they are trapped in a broken system, a system that where failure is the norm and success is the exception. But Guggenheim shows solutions. He shows ways to change the system for the better. He goes and finds the people that are making a difference and shows how they are doing it. The solutions are simple. And Guggenheim presents them simply, with a bit of heart and humor. This is a problem that can be fixed and needs to be. If we just turn our heads and look away, hoping that everything will work itself out, we might as well be waiting for Superman.