Waiting for "Superman"

2010 propaganda film

Rating: 9/20 (Jen: 7/20)

Plot: A scathing, one-sided attack on public education. Documentarian Davis Guggenheim half-asses his way through detailing the problems with public education and how charter schools can magically fix everything.

Please keep in mind one thing as you read this: An incredibly "bad teacher" wrote it.

Two days ago (one day after I watched this movie), we brought a guy named Jasper Partygarden (Note: That is not his real name.) into our team meeting. Jasper shows up to school late most days if he bothers showing up at all and has problems staying focused in class. In a lot of ways, he's a mature kid. He's street wise, has a car that was wrecked when he let a fellow 8th grader (a girl he liked) take it for a spin, and is a good-looking, older-looking dude who could almost pass as a young college student if you threw him on a university campus. At the same time, he acts really immaturely. He grabs things off people's desks, falls asleep in class, and teases other students in ways you'd expect more from an elementary school student. He eventually revealed to us that he's getting jumped almost daily by "Mexicans" in his predominately Latino neighborhood. He also told us that he doesn't get to bed until around 2:00 a lot of nights because his mother is sick, his step-father isn't around much, and he's got to help take care of the seven other children in his apartment, three who are under the age of two. We teachers realized that a lot of Jasper's problems, and the reason for a lot of his immature behavior, is because he's got to be the man at home. There's no room for Jasper to be a child so he acts out at school.

I'm not bringing up Jasper to make excuses for public schools, but there are a lot of Jaspers in the middle school I work, Jaspers with a variety of problems, a lot of them that you probably wouldn't even guess existed. Waiting for "Superman" frequently mentions the "best teachers" at the "best schools," contrasting them with "bad teachers" at "failing schools," and I just wonder how these "best teachers" would handle a classroom of Jaspers. Where Davis Guggenheim and his researchers are dangerously misguided is that they think the problem with the Jaspers of the world and why they aren't getting a quality education can be blamed solely on the public education system. In reality, it's a much larger and scarier problem than education. Jasper is the result of bad parenting in a broken country filled with arrogant and complacent leaders and citizens.

Thing is, you don't even have to pay much attention to catch the solution to all the problems Davis Guggenheim points out--most kids need to be taken away from their parents. For whatever reason, that's not the conclusion that Guggenheim comes up with. Instead, he's got an agenda, and Waiting for "Superman," likely from its conception, was his attempt to find anything that helps support that agenda.

And I'd like to think that anybody with a little common sense would be able to see the holes in this thing, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Guggenheim's documentary is sloppy myth-making and a textbook example of propaganda. You've got the same tired data that's been passed around for years and never questioned or actually broken down (reading scores flatlining, standardized test scores, Finland has better schools statistically, blah blah blah). You've got the use of buzz words ("academic sinkholes," "drop-out facilities," etc.), cutesy animated sequences, and red herrings that manipulate and distract. You've got faulty cause and effect like when our narrator tells us that an achievement drop-off from the fifth to the seventh grade can ONLY mean one of two things--kids get stupid or there's something wrong with public education. And you've got the stories (climaxing in a seemingly endless scene where they're hoping to be randomly drawn to go to the charter schools) of some kids who really want to learn and who, perhaps coincidentally, also seem to have really supportive parents. This documentary suggests that charter schools are the answer while completely ignoring statistics that show they are just as unsuccessful as public schools. No, it's not difficult to find some charter schools that have an astounding amount of success, but that's just not the norm. One could just as easily find public schools that have an astounding amount of success; however, that doesn't fit in with Guggenheim's plan. I also love how this compares and contrasts American schools with the rest of the world without really comparing or contrasting. Finland's at the top of the pyramid. Wouldn't it have been interesting to know why? Most Americans, I would hope, understand that a lot of those schools ahead of America are there because they don't allow all of their students to even get an education if they aren't succeeding early in their education. But no, Guggenheim just wants us to know that if we replaced our lower six percent with average students, we could be right up there with Finland. Whatever that means. Another statistic that I didn't really understand, likely because I went to public schools--"Bad teachers" only teach about 50% of the curriculum while "good teachers" can teach 150% of the curriculum. What does that even mean? Nevermind. Don't even tell me.

You know, this is so horribly misguided and misses the point (or worse, it invents its own point and hits a bull's eye) that I've decided that An Inconvenient Truth is also probably a bad documentary. I'm going to adjust my rating and stop inviting Al Gore to my parties.

2 comments:

cory said...

I'm guessing there isn't a single teacher in this country that likes this film. If a film came out attacking the airline industry and it's employees (way overdue, by the way), then I'm sure I would have many objections.

You could call this propoganda. Maybe politically driven. Probably unfair. I guess as a totally uneducated and sort of objective viewer I am looking at whether I connected emotionally to the film (I did) and whether I think it has some important things to say (I do).

I came to care for a lot of the kids in this movie. Their hope for a better future comes down to a lottery and I was pulling for every one of them. It made me think about how lucky I am and how much I want for my kids.

I also believe teachers are incredibly important, grossly underpaid, and disgustingly unappreciated. It is a very hard job. Educating children should be a real top priority in this country, not just a political football that gets lip service.

"Superman" paints things with pretty broad strokes, but I did feel it makes some contructive points that can be sifted out and should not be ignored (insert something about baby and bathwater here). More money in adjusted dollars are being spent and every President since Jefferson seems to claim this as important, but no improvement is occuring. Why? The film goes after layers of useless beauracracy and varying standards, as well as teacher's unions. You can blame the parents, but that's a societal problem that is a lot harder to fix. Are kids passed in certain districts until they can't be ignored. I don't buy into charter schools being the end-all solution to the problem, but the film reminds me there is a problem, and if squandered money, or unions and tenure are an issue(do any other jobs have tenure?)then I think it is worth discussing.

Waiting For Superman is less than two hours long, so it can't possibly cover the whole issue. It could have been better and probably fairer, but I still found it touching and enlightening. A 16.

I now look forward to seeing how much my comments tick you off.

Shane said...

Well, I'm not ticked off.

I might have connected with the children in the movie if it was a movie about karate or something. I just thought these children were being used to push an agenda.

I was reading yesterday about Indiana's budget. I forget the exact numbers, but the amount cut from education was something like 200 million dollars. And the powers that be have added 40 million to our budget for. . .wait for it. . .charter schools THAT DO NOT YET EXIST.

A Hoosier politician said (maybe accidentally) that the goal is to "fire" all public educators.

Recently, a legislator, the same guy who claims that every school should be judged the exact same way (standardized testing) called students who are on free or reduced lunch "inferior," claiming that those students shouldn't be where our money goes because they are "underachievers"...my school has almost 90% free/reduced lunch. That's not a typographical error. 90%. So out of one side of his mouth, he's saying that my school can't succeed because our students are inferior underachievers. And out of the other side of his mouth, he's saying that my school should be judged the same way that every other Hoosier school is judged.

So these people aggravate me. They're not in the classroom, and it doesn't seem like they really have a clue what's going on in our schools. We have a lot of guys (Governor Daniels likely will make a presidential run) with big aspirations who want to make a splash. If I thought these people making our budget decisions and pushing their agendas had honest intentions and our best interests in hand, I wouldn't have as much of a problem with it. I just don't see it though. And with this documentary, I sort of feel the same way. I just don't trust it. Same with the fire-happy superintendent in D.C. Jen told me she's not even in D.C. anymore. It didn't take her long to use her radical ideas as a springboard to something bigger and better...

Now the black bald guy (Johnny Tuesday?) with the successful charter schools...he's in the classroom, and I think he's got some terrific ideas. But the students in his schools have one thing in common that a lot of my students don't have--parents who actually care about them and their education. I'm a pretty lousy teacher, but I might even have success if all my students and their parents cared.

And yeah yeah, good teachers can make their students care. But when the middle school curriculum (the state standards and benchmarks) include things like sonnets and when you have to teach sonnets to kids who don't understand the language of much simpler, more (in my opinion) age-appropriate poetry, you're bound to have some tuning out.

I'm not going to defend teacher's unions or tenure. There are teachers who should be fired but who, for whatever reason, just linger. I think some of the examples they use in the movie are rarer than it makes thing seem. There are definitely problems in public education. But I just think those problems are the effect of everything else that's happening in society and not "bad teachers" as the documentary claims.

Where do these "bad teachers" come from anyway? I don't think anybody goes into the profession thinking, "I'm going to be a bad teacher. I'm not going to care at all." I think these documentarians would have you believe that just putting them in a public school building transforms them into bad teachers...who knows? Maybe that's what happened to me!

This is even more rambling than my usual writing...