Education documentary heartbreaking, personal

Waiting for “Superman” illuminates the failings of compulsory public education

Leaving fate to chance: Anthony, a Grade 5 student from Washington, looks down at his lottery card in the hopes of winning a spot in a public boarding school in this scene from Waiting For “Superman”. Paramount Pictures

How would you feel if your entire future depended on a random lottery?

What if the difference between poverty and middle class, between constant struggle and comfortable routine, between a crap education and a real education, all depended on a random selection?

You’d probably be terrified.

Waiting for “Superman”, a documentary directed by Davis Guggenheim, director of An Inconvenient Truth, follows the lives of children whose fates will be decided by random lottery as a result of the failing education system.

The only successful schools in the United States have so many applicants and so few available spaces, that the decision as to who gets a good education and who will get lost in the system is left to chance in order to be fair.

Waiting for “Superman” explores some of the reasons that compulsory education is broken in order to understand why these kid’s futures must be left to chance.

There is a common belief that bad neighbourhoods produce bad schools, but Waiting for “Superman” suggests that it is the bad schools creating bad neighbourhoods. Failing schools – or “drop-out factories” as the documentary dubs them – do not produce successful citizens.

Failing schools have something else in common: teachers who don’t give a damn.

There is very little a teacher can do to lose their job; only 1 in every 2,500 teachers gets fired but every 1 in 57 doctors lose their license. Tenure is awarded to any teacher who has worked for two years and then all initiative and motivation becomes futile. Why make kids learn if you get paid regardless?

Although the film focuses on the U.S. compulsory education system, there are obvious parallels to Canada’s compulsory education system: we have bad neighbourhoods and useless pedagogues, too.

The film, although a strong introduction to the reasons behind failing schools, does not address many of the more complex factors plaguing the compulsory education system.

The displacement of print by televised and image-based mediums has lowered literacy rates even more than bad teachers have, and the compulsory education system has historically been set up to fail students, with a philosophy of education that dooms the majority to mediocrity.

Waiting for “Superman” addresses the failings of the school system at a heartbreaking, personal level, which will hopefully stir enough rage in audiences to prompt effort to learn more about the historical and systematic impediments within the school system and action in order to fix it.

If you want future children to succeed, you’d better find your cape.

Published in Volume 65, Number 18 of The Uniter (February 3, 2011)

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