Ignoring Inconvenient Truths in 'Waiting for Superman'

By Melissa Anderson 
Wednesday, Sep 22 2010
http://www.villagevoice.com/related/to/An+Inconvenient+Truth/

Davis Guggenheim's call-to-arms documentary on the
failures of the U.S. public-education system-thoroughly
laudable in intention if maddening in its logic and
omissions-originated with his own guilty conscience. An
Academy Award winner for 2006's An Inconvenient Truth,
the director-whose debut doc, 2001's The First Year,
heralded the dedication of five public-school teachers-
now drives his own children (mother: Elisabeth Shue)
past three crumbling public schools on their way to an
expensive private one. "I'm lucky-I have a choice,"
Guggenheim, who narrates throughout, admits, before
asking an important question: What is our
responsibility to other people's children?

Maybe, for starters, demanding a stronger, securer
social safety net. But macroeconomic responses to
Guggenheim's query-such as ensuring that all parents
earn a living wage so that the appalling number of kids
living below the poverty line in this country is
reduced-go unaddressed in Waiting for Superman, which
points out the vast disparity in resources for inner-
city versus suburban schools only to ignore them.

Ducking thornier, more intractable problems (and
relying too heavily on animated graphics), Guggenheim
instead comes up with a proposal that no one could
possibly take exception to: We need better teachers.
But the biggest impediment to firing incompetent
instructors and replacing them with excellent ones, the
film argues, is the teachers' unions; Randi Weingarten,
president of the American Federation for Teachers, is
made to look especially villainous, shown in a clip
rousing her members by proudly proclaiming the AFT as a
"special-interest group." (Weingarten has attacked the
film on the Huffington Post and in the September issue
of the AFT's newsletter.)

Again, few would disagree that the unions' bloat and
bureaucracy have often had a deleterious effect on
public education, nonsensically protecting the rights
of people who have no business being in a classroom. As
Michelle Rhee, the take-no-prisoners chancellor of D.C.
schools and a reformer hero, puts it, "There's this
unbelievable willingness to turn a blind eye to the
injustices that are happening to kids every single day
in our schools in the name of harmony among adults."
But Guggenheim's insistence on not engaging with the
injustices that children of certain races and classes
face outside of school makes his reiteration of the
obvious-that "past all the noise and the debate,
nothing will change without great teachers"-seem all
the more willfully naïve.

In addition to Rhee (who, after the results of the D.C.
mayoral primary last week, may not stay in her job),
almost all of Guggenheim's saviors of education support
or have started charter schools, which can hire
nonunion teachers and receive public money but are not
subject to the rules and regulations of public schools
(and which do not have high success rates, a fact
Guggenheim refers to only in passing). But the charter
schools that the filmmaker champions-like SEED in D.C.
and the Harlem Success Academy-all rely on lotteries, a
system in which a child's future is determined solely
by the luck of the draw, and one decried, rightly, by
the filmmaker in the beginning.

It is precisely these acts of sheer chance-picking a
numbered ball or a name from a computer-that Guggenheim
spends too much time documenting, as he tracks the
plights of five bright, adorable, determined children
who are hoping to get into charters. These kids, four
of whom are black or Latino and live in impoverished
urban neighborhoods, give the film its real emotional
(and moral) heft, talking about their favorite subjects
and academic dreams. To film their-and their parents'-
agony as they wait to hear their names called (and the
crushing disappointment when they don't) doesn't really
advance Guggenheim's arguments so much as work against
them-and provide borderline exploitative melodrama.

Will heartbreaking scenes like this drive an audience
(or Academy voters) to action, as Al Gore's global-
warming presentation, supplemented by a cartoon polar
bear, seemed to in An Inconvenient Truth? "Great
schools won't come from winning the lottery. They will
come from YOU," the final credits announce, before
exhorting us to text "POSSIBLE" to 77177. For a crisis
so dire, this palliative comes across as absurdly glib.

_____________________________________________

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