Every 26 seconds a kid drops out of high school. American public schools once produced 100 Nobel laureates and 10 Presidents. Now we’re struggling to produce graduates, period. What the hell happened?
Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) tackles this question in his documentary Waiting for Superman, along with the even tougher issue: now that we’ve screwed up, what’s our game plan for damage control and revival? Alternately following the academic ambitions of five children and the wider dilemma of how to fix our broken education system, Waiting makes one thing very clear: our schools need some serious saving.
Just how bad is bad? Well, in California only 24% of 8th graders are proficient in math. In our nation’s capital, only 12% of 8th graders are proficient in reading. These kids grow from America’s students to America’s leaders: our rocket scientists, our doctors, our Presidents. Yeah, it’s really bad.
You probably know someone who, like Guggenheim does for his children, drives past a crappy public school on the way to private school every morning. Waiting features kids who can’t afford that luxury, depicting boys and girls whose futures are determined by charter school lotteries.
The film might make you feel more daunted than determined. Still, the documentary fires up the audience while taking some impressive risks, like offering the ballsy accusation that the bad guy here is the American Federation of Teachers. School House Rock-style animation keeps all the statistics from being too confusing, even for English majors who barely passed “Ideas in Math.”
Waiting compellingly portrays the status of American education and is a call to action. Perhaps students enrolled at Penn are the future Supermen this country needs.
WAITING FOR SUPERMAN
Directed by: Davis Guggenheim
Rated PG, 102 min.
