MOVIES ‘Waiting’ takes close look at the American school system Waiting for ‘Superman’ (PG) ★★★★ ★ BY MICHAEL CLARK Movie Critic
At the beginning of “Waiting for ‘Superman’” (“WFS”) co-writer/director/narrator Davis Guggenheim drives by three Los Angeles public schools and points out that while he could enroll his own children in any one of them, he and his actress wife Elisabeth Shue will instead go the route of a private school. In the space of 30 seconds and probably without intending to do so, Guggenheim overstates the obvious. If you’re well-to-do, you don’t have to send your kids to public school and likely ruin their future. For 100 or so minutes, Guggenheim lays out statistics that most people with a working brain have already heard: the nation’s public schools are failing and if we don’t do something about it soon, the U.S. as a whole is in BIG trouble. Because of his soothing honey-rich high baritone and steady, measured delivery of material, Guggenheim never comes across as the typical sky-is-falling documentarian (read: Michael Moore). This cool, detached approach allows the audience to fully soak in the information with being distracted by a grandstanding narcissist. Guggenheim
lets the facts speak for themselves and, as you might guess, they are scary. In the context of a feature film, however, they are also more than a tad stiff and yawn-inducing. When not piling on the numbers, Guggenheim devotes his attention to five children, their families and two high profile school administrators who deliver the punch and drama the rest of “WFS” so sorely lacks. The children — all minorities — are trying desperately to get into charter schools — private and publicly funded enterprises that employ non-union teachers, and for the most part, churn out brilliant students. The animated and always engaging Geoffrey Canada is a trailblazer in the charter school movement and after setting up shop in one of the most rundown communities in the nation (Harlem), he proved that the system itself isn’t the problem. The nations’ two teachers unions are holding the system hostage and show no signs of loosening their arcane, vise-grip mantra. They are effectively doing to schools what the auto workers’ unions did to the nation’s car industry in the late 1970s. Backed with an unlimited supply of cash, these unions have more political clout than any other organization in the country and they fund the coffers of national Democratic and local Republican lawmakers who see to it the status quo remains undisturbed. With few exceptions, once a teacher attains tenure (two
years of employment), it is practically impossible to fire them, no matter how incompetent they might be. In Washington, D.C., Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of the worst public school system in the country, dared to take on the unions. She closed down 20 schools and dismissed hundreds of under-performing teachers and principals. People and the unions cried bloody murder but Rhee held her ground and as a result, students’ test scores and graduation rates skyrocketed. Go figure. Someone somewhere should make thousands of Rhee clones as soon as possible and send them to every other school district in the country. In the film’s final sequence, Guggenheim practically negates everything he’s accomplished by pulling a Michael Moore. Close-ups of those five children and their families are shown as lottery numbers for admission to various charter schools are announced. Very few of the children applying to these schools ever get in, and like another type of lottery many adults play, they get their hopes up too high. Guggenheim’s invasive camera work and tabloid level of journalism here borders on the repugnant. It is the moral equivalent of a slow-motion carwreck with actual carnage being replaced by dashed hopes, emotional despair and the resignation of future failure. It’s a sad end to an otherwise enlightening film. (Paramount)
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FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2010 • WWW.GWINNETTDAILYPOST.COM • PAGE 19