I finally caught Waiting for Superman on DVD this week. I enjoyed the film, but despite all the attention that Davis Guggenheim's documentary has gotten, I have to admit that another recent school choice documentary, The Lottery, was much better.
There are two main problems with Waiting for Superman: 1) while it illuminates many problems, it is weak on offering solutions (the endorsement of charter schools was tepid at best) and 2) it didn't establish a strong emotion link with the children in the film.
To the first point, the film does a good job of identifying some major problems in the education system -- too much bureaucracy, too much union power, too hard to fire bad teachers, not enough options for parents who can't afford private school, etc. The film surely brought problems like "drop-out factories," "lemon dances," and "rubber rooms" to the attention of folks who had no idea that our public school systems are that bad. For that, Guggenheim deserves a lot of praise. But overall, the policy message of the film seemed muddled. In a nutshell: a lot of stuff is wrong, it's hard to fix, maybe the teacher's unions deserve some blame, and maybe charter schools are doing some cool stuff. There are little in the form of solutions offered. It's far from the strong endorsement of school choice that I was hoping for.
To the second point, the film doesn't build the personal stories well enough. Both The Lottery and Waiting for Superman feature climatic scenes of charter school lotteries when viewers finally know whether the families they've been following throughout the film will be accepted or not. That scene in The Lottery is very emotional. By that point in the film, you are invested in those children and you really want them to get in. Obviously I hoped that the kids in Waiting for Superman would get into their desired charter schools, but it was far less intense. The film simply didn't invest enough time in highlighting those kids' stories up to that point. That's probably a consequence of Guggenheim tackling too much in one film. The journey of those kids is a documentary. Michelle Rhee's quest for reform in DC is a documentary. The "lemon dances" and "rubber room" problems are a documentary (side note: I just saw that there is a new documentary coming out later this year about NY's Rubber Room, so be on the lookout for that). By tackling all these issues at once, the result was mediocrity.
On the positive side, the film's best moments are interviews with two education reform powerhouses -- Geoffrey Canada of Harlem Children's Zone and Michelle Rhee (formerly of DCPS, now of Students First). I have to appreciate any effort to highlight their great work on such a wide scale.
Verdict: Three stars
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