Waiting for "Superman" (2010) (Saturday, February 26, 2011) (185)

The first act of Davis Guggenheim's documentary/polemic Waiting for "Superman" is a confusing mess. In voice-over he tells us about how he always supported public schools, but when it came time to put his own kids in school he chose to put them into a private school. Now he feels guilty about it and is making a documentary about how bad public schools are and what he thinks should be done to fix them. He introduces us to five kids, mostly in elementary school and one kid in 8th grade. One is in DC, one is in LA, one in Silicon Valley and two in New York City. All of these kids are at risk of falling through the cracks of the system and not getting good educations (except for the rich white girl in Atherton who is just dumb despite her parents being rich and white).

Guggenheim shows how over time public education has been a big policy point for presidents, governors and mayors and how over the past 40 years we have fallen behind other countries. He talks to dozens of education people, mostly heads of school districts and leaders of charter schools. He then starts assigning blame and comes to the simple conclusion that teachers unions are the real reason the whole system is broken.

When he's not directly assigning blame to unions (mentioning the New York City 'rubber rooms,' where bad teachers go to get paid and not teach... a classic and boring refrain from the anti-union side) he and his talking heads speak against them in code, mentioning the "establishment" or the "system" as being the problem. He then goes into a long and elaborate celebration of charter schools - places where teachers' unions are not in control and where administrators can rule absolutely (only very briefly mentioning that test results for charter schools on the whole are frequently as inconsistent as those from public schools).

True to his polemical style, Guggenheim never looks into the efficacy of charter schools and never compares their results across school systems. He never gets into things like teacher retention rates at non-union schools or funding issues. He certainly never examines how teachers are trained and mentored as they go along, how the families of the kids who struggle the most are frequently the most broken or how hard it is for kids to find their ways to the charter school lotteries he fetishizes. For him teachers are complete units out of a box that either work or don't work regardless of the environments in which they teach and socioeconomics of their students' families.

There is no noticeable flow or structure to the film, so as you jump around from one kid to another and from one troubled school district to another (he also talks a good deal about Milwaukee, Pittsburgh and Houston) it's just rapid-fire bitching more than any effective dissection of the problem. There are no chapters or themes that help to lead and no direction from one moment to another. The last 15 minutes are spent watching the five kids in lotteries in their towns trying to win a spot in the better charter schools. This is incredibly boring and totally shallow. We either feel happy or sad for the kids either getting in or not getting in to their schools - but what does that have to do with anything? That's not going to fix the system and is not really what this movie is about.

The movie is really about how unions are the problem and should be done away with (I guess). He celebrates Michelle Rhee of the D.C. school system who came into her job like a tornado and began firing people preaching testing and a more corporate results-based system for elementary schools (she lost her job when mayor Adrian Fenty lost his last November). He celebrates Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children's Zone, a successful socio-educational area in Harlem (Canada seems like a good guy working outside the public school system... but is the best example of a good charter school - they're not all like his). He condemns Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the two major teachers' unions.

He played so fast and loose with information and facts that I felt like I was watching a piece made for Fox News. The attacks on unions seemed even more awful considering the current standoff in Wisconsin between Republican governor Scott Walker and the unions and the democrats in the legislature (and those teachers have even agreed to change their contract). He never talks about how the Finnish teachers who have the best schools in the world are totally unionized and have many of the benefits (like tenure) that their American peers have. It's all very sickening.

If teachers and teachers unions are so bad, how on earth do we have any kids who succeed? (There's one expert quoted talking about how it's about 7% of teachers who are bad... so are those the only ones causing the problems?) Doesn't the federal government - or even state governments - have something they can do to help - like with give more money to the schools? Clearly the high school in Silicon Valley is nicer than the one in East LA, isn't that something worth examining? But Guggenheim doesn't examine anything.

There are clearly a lot of problems with education and there are hundreds of things that should be done to fix them (sure - get rid of the rubber rooms. Those are disgusting). Guggenheim suggests that without merit pay for teachers, there will be no change and growth. This is dumb.

I'm particularly upset that Guggenheim, now one of the best-known documentarians working today, would make such a sloppy movie. Aside from the unfair attacks on the unions, this film is impossible to follow and the cinematic equivalent of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. It's a total mess.

Stars; .5 of 4