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Waiting for “Superman”
Studio: Paramount Studios
Year: 2010
US Rating: PG – For Some Thematic Material, Mild Language and Incidental Smoking
Film Length: 111 mins
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 – Enhanced for Widescreen TVs – 1080p High Definition
Audio: English and Spanish 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio
Subtitles: English, English SDH, French, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese
Release Date: February 15, 2011
Review Date: February 13, 2011
“Now we know what works…”
Introduction
Noted Civil Rights activist Roy Wilkins once said that “Nothing should be overlooked in fighting for better education. Be persistent and ornery: this will be good for the lethargic educational establishment and will aid the whole cause of public education.” His prescription for achieving a better education for African Americans sought not only equality in education, but a higher quality public education system in general.
Today, statistics show that the system of education in the United States of America continues to produce students who, when compared against students from other industrialized nations, fail to adequately compete. In 2007, the Program for International Student Assessment, in conducting its tri-annual test, found that “U.S. 15-year-olds trailed their peers from many industrialized countries” and that “U.S. students lagged behind those in 16 of 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development”. These results alone present a worrying indictment on the American education system and its ability to prepare students to compete nationally and internationally in the highly regarded fields of science and engineering. But these are not even the most stunning or worrying of statistics; the drop-out rates, the epidemic of lagging reading comprehension, and the scramble of so many families to escape from being chattel in a failed arrangement of education, provide additional reason for serious concern.
Waiting for “Superman”pulls the known and agreed upon issue of education in America out into the open with some strong opinions on what the problems are, but with an eye more toward raising the question of what can be done about it.
The Film: 4.5 out of 5
Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, the director of the Academy Award winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, stepped into the murky mess that is public education – a prominent rail of American politics and social discourse. Through the auspice of a future America unable to staff the highly skilled positions that are expected, and through the prism of families struggling to survive poor schools (and the random chance for something better), this documentary successfully weaves statistics and emotion into a powerful call to arms.
In the exploration and indictment of the stalemate of America’s education system, which is rampant with bureaucracy, entrenched union positions, failed political leadership, and a systemic failure of courage to try something new, we meet the faces of the struggle. We meet Anthony, a 5th grader in Washington, D.C., at risk and heading to a middle school where students are likely to fall two to three grades behind. His grades have improved after some tumult in his life (his father died from drug related problems), and he and his Grandmother with whom he lives are pinning their hopes on attending a SEED charter school.
We meet Emily, an 8th grader in a wealthy neighborhood in Silicon Valley whose state of the art local high school pales in academic achievement to a preparatory charter high school in a less affluent area. Struggling in mathematics, her hopes of avoiding the churn of failure are pinned on a 24% chance of being selected for the other school.
We meet Daisy, a sweet 5th grader who hopes to be the first of her family to actually complete high school one day, but in her neighborhood, 60% of students don’t nake it across the line. She has hopes of becoming a doctor one day, but that is at grave risk if she is unable to make it to the highly regarded Kipp LA Prep School. Her hopes are pinned on the random chance of a lottery system for attending. Her chances of making it to that school are just 14%.
We meet Francisco, a 5th grade boy in the Bronx whose mother is told that he has issues with reading comprehension, but tutors at a local college disagree, and his mother’s attempts to speak with her son's teacher to discuss are ignored time and time again. His hopes of escaping a poor school and inattentive teacher are pinned on a 5% chance of being accepted into the Harlem Success Academy.
We meet Bianca, a young girl in kindergarten whose mother struggles to afford the Catholic School ($500 a month), and whose hopes of surviving the drop-out academies and failure factories that line one possible future are pinned on acceptance to the Harlem Success Academy. Her chances are just 5% of getting in.
We also meet pioneers within the system attempting to forge new paths and alter the framework of the 'old' against high odds. Individuals like Geoffrey Canada, an energetic former teacher and now reformer running a charter school in Harlem, who does not simply lament the failures of education, but lambasts it with an infectious rigor and verve. Canada petitioned to start his charter school in a disadvantaged Harlem neighborhood and took in children who were not only several grade levels behind in the fundamentals of math and reading, but living below the poverty level as well. His success belies the resounding voices who claimed the differences that he is making could not be achieved. Another pioneer fighting within the system is the plucky Michelle Rhee, who was appointed as Superintendent of the abysmal D.C. school system as an unlikely choice. She is not a PhD, had never been a principle, vice-principle, or run any school system in her life. A teacher for just three years, she managed to hoist the ugliness of the system to the forefront of area politics, ruffling more than a few feathers when she fired nearly 200 teachers and closed schools. Rhee has since resigned her position (following the loss of Adrian Fenty, the mayor who hired her, in the 2010 mid-term elections).
Guggenheim does not shy from parading the issue of poor teachers or the incredibly difficult roadblocks to make changes in contract provisions such as Tenure, where the worst of the worst are able to keep their job regardless of their failings simply because they had earned tenure (being in place for at least 2 years). The unionization of teachers is explored; the noble, humble, and incredibly important beginnings (women teachers being paid less than male counterparts, etc.), and the Teachers Union is displayed as a key inhibitor to reform in the film. We are reminded of past Presidential rhetoric exalting the importance of education; how important it is and why ‘we’ must act. We are confronted with astonishing statistics of how average spending per student has doubled over the decades but the product of that investment is that more students than ever drop out, fall behind, or fail completely. The issue is worse in poorer neighborhoods. A study conducted by the Education Trust in 2005 found that students in poorer districts with a greater concentration of minority students were receiving, on average, $907 less per student. This lack of equality in funding for students in poorer neighborhoods results in lower pay for that districts teachers and a shortage of resources and programs necessary to aid in a sound education. This paints a grim picture of education for those already with the least.
Beyond the alarming statistics are exposés of the laughable outcomes of the dysfunctional system, such as the movement of terrible teachers from one district to another - shifted and traded from school to school by principles exchanging poor teachers in hopes that what they get is better than what they’ve offloaded (known as the ‘Dance of the Lemons’ in some states).
Waiting for “Superman” raises many serious concerns facing the foundational infrastructure that is the American public education system. While it favors a particular prescription for the ailing system – that of charter schools – it introduces several other symptoms of the failure, but not all, there are omissions. Consider the inadequacies of education for certain minority groups over the dominant Caucasian culture. For example, in 2002, a study conducted by the National Education Association and the National Center for Education Statistics found that, despite 17% of students nationally being African American, only ten percent of teachers were African American. This is touched upon lightly in Guggenheim’s documentary, but remains a serious concern worthy of greater expoloration.
Not all of the pervasive issues touched upon in this fascinating documentary are soluble through funding or changes in the paradigm of school system infrastructure. Some are more basic. Consider the veracity of most curriculums. Standards not only appear lower than international systems, but what is included, and what is excluded (or ignored) represent as serious a condition. Again, focusing on disparities felt by minorities in the U.S., the displacement and slaughter of Native Americans is reduced to mere footnotes on history, and while there is ample celebration of the fight for independence, there is little transparency about the dark side of the nation’s origins. Despite the significance of the slave trade in the foundation of America, most curriculums discuss the slave trade, and its abolition, only in reference to the Civil War. Even then, the legal and systemic inequalities that have existed for well over 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, with the pervasiveness of ‘Jim Crow’ laws that, despite being described as ‘separate but equal’, created a major imbalance in wealth and opportunities, are routinely absent from courses of study.
This film does focus on the achievement gap in underprivileged and underserved neighborhoods, replete with kids placed on a track of lower expectations – some may say written off – that given the paradigm of poverty in America is unfairly populated with minorities. Such disparity becomes predominantly a minority concern, though the film is quick to illustrate that it is not just a minority issue.
I have two main criticisms of Waiting for “Superman” and they’re not on what is included – as the evidence is convincing to what the barriers to change are – but they are of what is not covered. The first is related to class size, student conduct, and the escalating issue of violence in schools – none of which are sufficiently mentioned. It may be that they are merely symptoms rather than causal factors of the issues that are described, but they warrant discussion. The second criticism I have is related to the struggle of teachers outside of the unnecessarily complex governance and contractual landscape. This is only barely referenced, and the disparities in facility and quality between more affluent areas, where funding per student is considerably higher than poorer neighborhoods, are not touched upon at all.
In research for a recent college paper, I explored the failings of the education system as it related to minorities in America. Though the bipartisan bill 'No Child Left Behind' is called out as failing to deliver, the reasons why it has failed are not explored. Studies have shown that African American students in particular are likely to face unfair difficulty when taking tests, which have been found to place them, and other minority students, at a disadvantage. This was the main argument used in a lawsuit in Texas, where, according to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) sued the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) for constructing its tests using a system that is inherently biased against non-white students. The judge in the case dismissed the suit; however, he did not disagree with the MALDEF assertion that the technique did indeed have a racial bias. This example provides for an interesting case study, not in whether there is bias in how tests are constructed--using a commonly employed point-biserial correlation to determine which questions should be used, and which should be excluded from the test, but in what is done when such inequality is discovered. At the heart of MALDEF’s case against the commonly used test design mechanism adopted by TAAS, is the process of ranking and sorting ‘correct’ answers, placing them higher than others – that produces a greater emphasis on questions that relate more readily to the social and cultural experiences of whites while negatively impacting non-whites who will be subjected to the same test.
When failings are uncovered, precious little is – or it seems, can - be done about it.
Waiting for “Superman”addles between impulses. Between the head-scratching statistics that paint a paradoxical and depressing picture (brought to life through moving illustrations), the film places a human face to the statistics, the stories of drop-out threats, and the echoing failure of empty rhetoric. It is valuable that under the scope of this documentary is the amassed multitude of labyrinthine systems – community, local, intra-state, state, and national governance systems, boards and bureaucracy that stifle progress and defy logic. I suspect most American’s are unaware of just how complex the system of education is in the national and State spheres.
Politically, Waiting paints a grim picture of both the left and the right, reminding us of what appear to have become the value of empty promises or failed solutions. The potential of ‘No Child Left Behind’, the bipartisan work of President George W. Bush and Senator Ted Kennedy, now several years into its implementation, appears to not have turned the tide of America’s education, and campaign pledges to reform, rebuild, remake, and reposition the American education system from many past presidents seem hollow now when we contrast the language of then with the reality of now.
Repeatedly we hear of children pushed through the system, being neglected and deposited into neighborhoods that are becoming increasingly dire and that feed systemic poverty and crime levels, which in turn lowers the possibility of the schools in those areas getting improved funding (better teachers, books, equipment), to help turn that around. It is the anti-ouroboros of the insane underserved public education system; instead of beginning a new, reborn with a cyclic regularity, the public education system is mired in repeating the same dance, spiraling into an ever-worsening state.
The absurdity of where the states direct their funds is disheartening. Consider that the cost in Pennsylvania for the average incarceration of four years is $132,000 – kids who were failed by the public education system cost the state this much to keep them, but 13 years of private schooling at $8300 per year, would cost less ($107,000) for their entire pre-college schooling life. The question of when and where the state expends its funds is a question of investment vs. reaction.
But there is reason to hope according to Guggenheim – and according to the many subjects of his documentary such as Bill Gates, as we witness some successes in spite of powerful skeptics. Recalling barriers of the past that many said could not be breached, like the sound barrier, the possibility of what can be achieved by the dedicated and passionate are bright spots in what in aggregate may at first seem like an end of the world message. The Kipp Academies are a prime example and a powerful example of hope in a system seemed doomed to collapse.
Some have claimed that this documentary sees Charter Schools as a silver bullet, and that is certainly a part of the potential prescription this documentary favors, but beyond obvious ideas lies a deeper question – what are ‘we’ going to do about it. In the end I see Waiting for “Superman” painting a grim picture, highlighting some successes that come from different ways of doing things, but ultimately seeking to merely have the immediacy of the issue brought to the forefront of conversation. Davis Guggenheim and his producer Lesley Chilcott show us what most of us already knew, the system is broken, but also show us that attempts to fix it are met with resistance from players within the system, and as highlighted by the struggles of Michelle Rhee, by parents and communities as well.
The Video: 4.5 out of 5
Framed at 1.85:1, Waiting for “Superman” is presented in 1080p High Definition and looks excellent. Rich, natural colors pervade the homes and schools, clean animation highlighting statistics, and deep blacks in naturally lit rooms are frequent. Flesh tones are very natural, and despite being filmed with different HD cameras in different and somewhat uncontrollable locations, with internet and library stick footage included, the balance and consistency maintained is remarkable (thanks in large part to the Digital Intermediary, and colorist Stephen Nakamura). This film looks gorgeous, with superb cinematography.
The Sound: 4 out of 5
With a DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio track, the sound is near flawless – especially given the many environments in which interviews are conducted. Christopher Becke’s soft score elegantly play throughout the front channels and pick up in the surrounds on occasion, and the voices of the many people interviewed are precise in the center channel. Some ambient noises – echoes in school hallways, city traffic and the like – are occasionally present in the surrounds also. This is a very, very good audio track and entirely appropriate for the subject matter.
The Extras: 3 out of 4
Changing the Odds (HD) (5:34): A brief look at the public school system and the challenges that are faced by teachers and students alike. This highlights some successful programs that have been implemented to attempt to enact some of the much needed change the documentary covers.
Updates: Another brief, but important special feature, which appears as text on screen that you navigate with your remote, serves as an addendum to the film, updating the audience in changes in the education system since the film was produced.
A Conversation with Davis Guggenheim (HD) (1:44): A very short conversation, animated and entertaining, with the director/co-editor/co-writer, which in essence summarizes the underpinning belief that the education system can and must be changed.
The Future is in Our Classrooms (HD) (2:00): This extra, again through animation, plays like a cross between an PSA and a campaign ad, posits (rightly so) that the major issues facing the nation, the primary response begins with an improved, solid foundation of education.
The Making of “Shine” (HD) (7:02): Written for this film by John Legend, the song ‘Shine” comes from the artists passion for the subject and the documentary film, and this special feature follows him back home for inspiration for the song
Deleted Scenes (HD) (31:15): Four deleted scenes with additional real-life stories of several students and teachers – each are equal in power and emotion to anything contained within the film’s final product.
Commentary by Director Davis Guggenheim and Producer Lesley Chilcott:Both Davis and his producer, Lesley, are clearly passionate about this subject. Not a wall-to-wall commentary, but filled with enough interesting backstory, inspiration, and continued desire to address a failing system. Some relatively long periods of silence aside, there is enough here to warrant re-watching with their additional thoughts provided here.
Final Thoughts
Waiting for “Superman”should be a rally cry – a call to action. Documentaries have been instrumental in recent years in raising issues to the national consciousness in ways that other avenues have not. 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth created a wave of discourse on the issue of climate change, for a time at least, with media, political, and action groups focus directed at least in some measure to defending or dismantling assertions and claims raised in the film. But where is society with respect to climate change now several years on? Waiting for “Superman” received high praise during its theatrical run, was featured on the Oprah show, and performed relatively well at the box office, but it does not seem to have ignited in the social consciousness; it did not become a discussion point in the 2010 mid-term elections or last year’s lame duck session of Congress. So where will this conversation of education be five or ten years from now. In the same place as it is now, perhaps?
Waiting for “Superman”is at once shocking and terrifying, hopeful and inspiring. It’s a terrific documentary and a shame that it did not make the cut for best documentary at this year’s Academy Awards. Whether you agree with all of what is offered as a root cause, or how unions, teachers, and political promises are portrayed, the statistics highlighting the current and trending state of the education system are hard to ignore. Ultimately the complex problem has a simple solution – do something. To help with that, this blu-ray comes packaged with a $25.00 gift card to DonorsChoose.org so that we can, each of us with or without children in the system, ‘do something’.
Overall Score 4.5 out of 5
Neil Middlemiss
Kernersville, NC
