From the director of An Inconvenient Truth…
The NYTimes:
Consider the following statistics cited in the film: the annual cost of prison for an inmate is more than double what is spent on an individual public school student. Eight years after Congress passed the No Child Left Behind act, with the goal of 100 percent proficiency in math and reading, most states hovered between 20 and 30 percent proficiency, and 70 percent of eighth graders could not read at grade level. By 2020, only an estimated 50 million Americans will be qualified to fill 123 million highly skilled, highly paid jobs. Among 30 developed countries, the United States ranks 25th in math and 21st in science.
It’s open in NYC and LA now and goes into wider release next weekend. Critics love it. Tech types, too. TechCrunch:
[T]he brilliance of “Waiting for Superman” is in how it breaks the problem with education down into mostly one simple problem: Bad teachers can’t be fired, good teachers can’t get rewarded for being good, whether that’s promotions or merit-based raises. Two of the most shocking scenes depict both sides of this coin. One showed a “rubber room” where teachers awaiting disciplinary hearings– accused of crimes as extreme as sexual assault– get paid a full salary to do nothing for as long as eight months. Another told the story of Michelle Rhee, who proposed that teachers in DC could double their incomes if they swapped to a merit-based rather than tenure system. It was so threatening that the labor unions wouldn’t allow the issue to come to a vote. Equally shocking was something called “the Lemon Dance” where public schools in one district just swapped their horrible teachers they couldn’t fire in hopes of getting a less-worse lemon. It’s absolutely antithetical to the way Silicon Valley — and America’s private sector at large– operates. And that’s the biggest reason a hoard of Silicon Valley big-wigs have gotten behind the film. Ali Partovi of iLike saw it at Sundance and immediately Tweeted it was the best documentary he’d ever seen.
Not surprisingly, the AFT is less enthralled:
Just as “An Inconvenient Truth” was faulted by some climate scientists who said it exaggerated the catastrophic effects of global warming, “Superman” makes its case in highly dramatic terms, sometimes underplaying important nuances.
Randi Weingarten, the president of the 1.5-million-strong American Federation of Teachers, issued a public response Sept. 9, calling the film “inaccurate, inconsistent and incomplete” and faulting Mr. Guggenheim for “casting two outliers in starring roles.” Specifically, she objected to his portrayal of charter schools — only a fraction of which have produced outstanding results — as the saviors of education, while painting teachers’ unions as villainous.
In a telephone interview Ms. Weingarten allowed that Mr. Guggenheim “is a superb film director, and not only has he told a great story but a poignant story about five kids and their parents looking for a better way.” But she objected that the film “affixes blame rather than fixing public education.”
In a related move, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is donating $100 million to the Newark public school system. Announced on Oprah, he says he wanted to do it anonymously. And Bill Gates, still the richest person in America, has apparently emerged from the “evil’ penalty box at least in part for his philanthropic activities related to education.
On my reading list for the film — The Nation, Grading ‘Waiting for Superman.’ NYMagazine, Schools: The Disaster Movie.
To make the money spent on your ticket do something about the problems in our schools, buy tickets at Fandango or MovieTickets.com and you will get a $15 gift card to make a donation to the classroom of your choice via DonorsChoose.org.