Waiting For Superman

The experience of watching something in a theater instead of my small computer screen felt very weird. Being a child of a life-long teacher, I was really interested in what this movie had to say. I knew I was going to cry a little bit, so I was prepared for that. It was good, but I also had some problems with it.

The great stuff. I love putting the focus on education in this nation. How can we call ourselves a superpower and yet in a study done by the Program for International Student Assessment, we're ranked 24th out of 29 (TWENTY-NINE!) countries in math skills? And similarly in English. This obviously a problem that needs attention, and that's what documentaries are for and that's what this one was doing...by making you cry hard.

This sort of reminded me of a sort of Spellbound, but with a school lottery. They took a while to build up to the lottery at the end of the movie. They introduced us to the characters and we got to know the families and their struggles. I thought they balanced the kids families, the statistics, the (really fun) graphics, and Michelle Rhee's struggle really well. They sent us through this first before they tore our hearts out. At the Charter school lotteries each character we'd spent time with was put into a lottery in their respective schools districts and picked, or not picked, to have a better future in a better school system. A school that, the movie implied, would care more about their success.

Some things I had problems with are some of the race related things. Most all the graphics used, not racially ambiguous drawings of people, but white people when clearly, the movie focused on all young children of color until they introduced the girl in San Francisco half way through. And on that note, I didn't really feel like she was necessary at all. I see what they were trying to do by introducing tracking in schools and how that can harm a child's education as well, even in a school that wasn't as bad as some of these inner city schools, but to see the stark contrast between her future public school and the road ahead for some of these other students, was a little jarring. Especially in the end. Which I won't ruin.

And speaking of the end, I really didn't like the fact that there was no follow up, as most documentaries have. I think the theater was surprised that we didn't catch up with a few of these kids a few months later and see if they're doing okay and still on the right path.

And overall, the thing I found most interesting is that in this film, we place the problem with the schools. The schools aren't teaching our kids and they're holding them back and failing all these students. I feel like that may be a little unfair because the problem isn't as easy as that. Blame can't always be placed on just the schools. In a large majority of those schools with all those failing students, standing right behind them are failing parents. As my dad says, the worst thing about this country, the number one thing that's a problem in this nation is piss poor parenting. That can funnel into just about every other aspect of our lives. Including education.

It was very well done though.