LFM Review: Waiting for Superman

By Patricia Ducey. Waiting for Superman is an emotionally gripping and ultimately devastating critique of the American public school system, in the same vein as The Lottery or The Cartel and a host of previous education movies. Superman focuses on a half dozen children and their families – and their desperate quest to gain admittance to their city’s charter school. There are only a few spots in each school and many applicants; the filmmakers draw us in and–let’s be honest–manipulate us with the suspense leading up to what is characterized as a make-it-or-break-it day when the charter school chooses its next class by lottery. Will these children escape their neighborhood “dropout factory” and secure their futures?

Co-written with Billy Kimball, directed by Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) and produced by Jeff Skoll’s Participant Productions, this documentary possesses an authentic progressive pedigree. Skoll views films as vehicles for social change, a kind of “loss leader” that delivers butts in the seat to the alliances and activists he has already mobilized to capitalize on them (see here) and he hopes to do the same with Superman. Skoll greenlights pictures that conform to his own world view, as he is of course entitled to, and sometimes departs from expected liberal orthodoxy – as when he reportedly turned down Michael Moore for Sicko funding. The Canadian Skoll knows from personal experience the failures of nationalized health care. Superman takes aim at a few surprising targets, as well – like teachers’ unions and government bureaucracies.

The film opens with Guggenheim driving by three public schools in his neighborhood on his way to drop off his own kids—at a private school—and recalling his first education documentary of 1999,  The First Year. Nothing has changed since then, he muses with regret, and thus was born the idea of Superman.

Most of the children are poor in the film, and all of them are trapped in schools determined by where each family lives. One of the subjects of the present film, a fifth-grader named Anthony, is being raised in Washington, D.C. by his grandmother. His father is dead from a drug overdose; he never knew his mother. He wants to get a better education yet he doesn’t want to leave all his friends. He answers “bittersweet” when asked how he would feel if he really did win the lottery to get into SEED, a DC boarding school for inner city kids. This is what’s left for him, a child already burdened by loss, in DC, the film says, yet not one word about the voucher program in DC or President Obama’s phasing out of that city’s successful program.

But Superman does take on Democrat and Republic legislators alike and their alliance with what it considers the real enemy, the bulging PAC funds of the teachers’ unions. And the film praises bipartisan cooperation, too – specifically, that between the late Ted Kennedy and then President G. W. Bush that produced No Child Left Behind. Many people, though (including me) questioned that “unity” because it represented more government control – not less – of a problem that government itself caused.

This is where Superman goes irretrievably wrong. We endure the painful story of these beautiful children and their dedicated parents only to be urged on to … what? Send a text to Skoll’s website for mobile updates? Write an astroturfed letter to our governors, urging them to adopt a new blizzard of education standards? These have been formulated by Skoll’s assemblage of experts and appear to be a workaround for NCLB. I question how and why these experts arrived at their conclusions. The fact that they are unelected does not bode well, either, for future responsiveness to parents.

Superman has all the smart facts. Reading and math scores have not improved in 30 years; a number approaching 50% of our children do not graduate from high school at all. I would ask, then, why are solutions like distributing vouchers or dismantling the Department of Education (founded roughly 30 years ago) and returning schools to local and parental control considered too radical? Let it be said that I know many wonderful teachers and public employees, as well. I want to emphasize that the problem is mandatory union membership and union alliances with politicians and non-education groups. In Superman, we see placards at “teacher” protests against Chancellor Michelle Rhee from the ubiquitous ANSWER, for instance, indicating that something other than local education issues are at stake.

Slick websites and tweets and texts do not constitute a real answer to the problems presented by this otherwise moving film. Adding to the sticky quagmire of federal, state, and local rules and regulations for education, rightfully lamented by the film, will not cure the problem or force accountability. Freedom to choose just might. Why not reduce top-down solutions like national standards and national experts, and empower individual parents and local communities? Superman rightfully rues the lottery system, necessitated by the scarcity of truly effective charter schools now in operation. But how do we empower individuals? The voucher system, to me, represents a much quicker, more elegant solution.

Guggenheim is free to choose what he thinks best for his children because he has the money to pay for tuition. He feels terrible about it. But the Superman parents have money, too, available to them. It’s just that the government and their handmaidens – the education unions – mediate the transaction between family and school.

The only true accountability for schools will be realized when parents can vote with their kids’ feet, and take their voucher and their child to another school. The answer to bureaucratic failure is never more bureaucracy. The answer is freedom – because the answer is always freedom. I hope that the families who send their children to school every day know, like Guggenheim, that it’s ultimately their own free choice where they send them.

Posted on October 5th, 2010 at 10:36am.