Conservatives are loathe to admit it, but director Davis Guggenheim’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth impacted the national dialogue on global warming.Posted on 10/17/2010 12:04:32 PM PDT by Kaslin
Alternately heartbreaking and joyous, the film is a testament to the power of education and a critique of the adults who too often stand in the way.
Conservatives are loathe to admit it, but director Davis Guggenheim’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth impacted the national dialogue on global warming.
And all Guggenheim had to work with was a PowerPoint presentation led by a charisma-challenged former vice president.
Now, Guggenheim has turned his attention to our failing public school systems, a staggering amount of raw material for the Oscar-winning director.
He leverages every factoid for a movie far more persuasive than Truth. It’s a film both sides of the ideological aisle can embrace if viewed with an open mind.
Waiting for ‘Superman,’ now playing in select cities to brisk ticket sales, sounds the alarm over what it describes as a thoroughly mismanaged school system. We see children praying for the chance to attend charter schools, their parents teary eyed at the thought of another year in the current system.
Meanwhile, the powerful teachers’ unions retain the status quo at all costs.
It’s alternately heartbreaking and joyous, a testament to the power of education and a critique of the adults who too often stand in the way.
Guggenheim takes a personal approach to his latest film, but not in that intrusive way Michael Moore brings to his polemics.
The liberal director describes the internal dialogue he had regarding public education as he drove his children to private school. Other progressives might rationalize their actions, much like Al Gore must do when buying another energy-gulping home. Instead, Guggenheim investigated why he bypassed the public school system and why so many parents don’t have a choice in the matter.
The documentary introduces us to five children eager to leave their current public schools. They’re sunny-faced lads brimming with optimism, but their guardians know better. ‘Superman’ inundates the audience with sobering stats on dropout and literacy rates, figures sure to alarm anyone with a child near school-age.
Educational reform has been tried in some form by every president over the last 30-plus years. Even when President George W. Bush reached across the aisle to work with Sen. Ted Kennedy on “No Child Left Behind” legislation the results disappointed.
The film heaps much of the blame on tenured teachers who can’t be fired without the schools jumping through endless bureaucratic hoops. Some schools put bad teachers on hiatus, a process that stretches on for months while they enjoy full salaries and benefits. In New York, that process costs the state $100 million annually, the film reports.
We also see teachers caught on tape ignoring their students and other unforgivable actions, and even they can’t be easily dismissed.
The endless spools of red tape encouraged by teachers’ unions gives way to some startling practices. Consider “The Dance of the Lemons,” the process by which one school will pass off its lousy teachers to another school while taking that school’s rejects.
For years educators felt students from struggling towns could never match the scores of their more affluent peers. Failing neighborhoods yielded failing students, and even the best teachers couldn’t make a dent in the problem. Or so the conventional wisdom said.
Some modern charter schools trashed that belief system, offering hope for reformers willing to try a fresh approach.
A key player in ‘Superman’ is Michelle Rhee, who recently resigned as schools chancellor in D.C. One of her predecessors, a decorated war veteran, fled the job after 16 months, and six others took a crack at the near-impossible gig over a recent 10-year span. But Rhee made remarkable progress in a short amount of time. She fired flailing principals and shuttered under-performing schools. Student test scores spiked as a result, but the local teachers’ unions struck back — hard. They prevented Rhee from bringing merit pay into the system, one way reformers say can help bring accountability to the public schools.
Waiting for ‘Superman’ offers poignant vignettes, droll animation, and a soundtrack adroitly suited for the material. But it’s far from perfect. Guggenheim doesn’t give charter school critics their say, nor does he let American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten defend what seems like indefensible tenure policies. Weingarten is interviewed here, but she doesn’t fully address the glaring flaws ‘Superman’ spots in the system.
And some of the emotional notes hit when dealing with the five children feel off topic, as if the film demanded some heartfelt subplots and forced them in without concern for the narrative at large.
The “Superman” in the title refers to the Man of Steel, the hero who always arrives at just the right moment to save the day. The film thinks we’re all Supermen, citizens with enough courage to change a system that sometimes appears hopeless. Man once believed the sound barrier couldn’t be broken, but a brave pilot named Chuck Yeager proved otherwise, the film notes.
Waiting for ‘Superman’ is as persuasive as any documentary you’re likely to see, a stunning indictment fused with a credible call for action.
Charter schools and the other “solutions” proposed in the movie are ridiculously expensive. How much more are you willing to pay in taxes so that a minuscule percentage of low-IQ children do not grow up to be criminals?
Let’s face some cold hard facts: the underclass produces these little monsters far more quickly than our advanced society can absorb them. When you subsidize breeding, you get a lot more breeding. This is why they put a “DO NOT FEED THE BIRDS” sign in the park.
A more practical solution to the problem is requiring Norplant for all recipients of public aid. Let the “stupid gene” breed itself out of the population, once and for all.
Allowing public sector unions to exist in any form has been one of the most monumentally stupid things we have done as a nation.
This is one of the most worthwhile things you can spend your money on. It will give you just a glimpse into the black hole created by the unions and the very real lives that are sacrificed into that hole every year. I watched it with an overwhelming sadness and an anger that has been hard to contain.
I was listening to the interview with the director of this movie on Cinemagic.
He’s a confirmed lefty and was just shocked! Shocked, I tell you that the teacher’s unions weren’t the slightest bit interested in student welfare and were a huge impediment to education by protecting incompetent teachers and preventing any kind of meaningful reform.
The only problem with Norplant or some other form of birth control is it is not permanent. I would go for spaying and neutering of people who continually suck off the teat of welfare. How many more generations of useless people can we continue to afford to care for?
Some people think spaying and neutering welfare recipients is an extreme solution but the problem is that they still have significant strength in numbers. Only when their ranks are whittled down by attrition can welfare finally be abolished.
Question: Why are kids required by law to attend school?
Answer: So that politicians can get laundered, taxpayer funded campaign contributions filtered through the public school teachers.
Kinda neat, in a third world banana republic way.
Social Security, MendeleCare, TSA, government unions... It's all money laundering.
The unifying term I use is "indentured constituency."
I’ve always thought that the primary reason was to keep kids out of the labor market.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.