The latest effort from Davis Guggenheim, the Oscar-winning director of An Inconvenient Truth, is an equally accomplished, galvanising work, and the hot-button issue this time is the state of education, such as it is, in contemporary America.
American students rank lowest on international comparisons of maths and science standards, but in a cruel if unsurprising irony, they trump their contemporaries when it comes to rating their own abilities. The 'We’re number one!" mentality doesn’t bear up to the evidence, despite an historical conga line of bi-partisan Commanders in Chief having proclaimed themselves to be 'the Education President’. (Guggenheim highlights the generational nature of the problem with a clip montage that culminates in the evergreen tragicomedy of a Dubya flub).
The issues with public education in America are many and varied but in the main, classroom overcrowding, a top-heavy network of federal/state/local bureaucrats with competing interests, and an alarming rate of disengaged teachers are cited as the chief roadblocks to a quality education. The consequences are all the more profound for the fact that it is children of minority groups and low-to-middle income earners who suffer the most, given their inability to consider the alternative of expensive private school tuition.
Guggenheim first explored the crisis in public education in The First Year (1999), a television documentary which followed teaching graduates as they entered the Los Angeles area public school system. The film celebrated the efforts of idealistic and enthusiastic teachers as they negotiated the imperfections of underfunded, overcrowded schools in a bid to trigger a thirst for knowledge in their young charges.
Over a decade later, Guggenheim reveals his own inconvenient home truth in a personal revelation that flies in the face of his liberal views about supporting public schools; when the time came to select an education pathway for his own children, he chose the more reassuring private school option, and now drives past three public institutions on the daily school run.
To cut through red tape and statistics, he charts the real-world consequences of the crisis on children whose parents don’t enjoy the luxury of choice. We’re told that their early promise and enthusiasm for learning will be severely curtailed – if not extinguished – by the 'dropout academies" that they are destined for, in their local neighbourhoods.
The children are a variety of ages and ethnicities, who aspire to careers in medicine, broadcasting and science, to name a few. But the odds are stacked against them; statistically, many of them (and more besides) are more likely to know someone who’s been in prison than someone who’s gone to university. Their parents yearn to give them a better start in life than they had, and bank their hopes on a lottery-like enrolment process for the no-cost, independent 'charter schools’ that buck the downward trend.
The 'Superman’ reference relates to an anecdote from Bronx-based charter school pioneer Geoffrey Canada about his childhood realisation that the Man of Steel didn’t actually exist. As casually shattering as the news was to an eight-year-old growing up in a ghetto, he now cites it as a wake up call that inspired him to action. The implication being, that there’s no magic remedy for America’s flailing education system, so collectively, the US needs to get busy rather than wait for a superhero to come and tilt the world's axis and teach its children well.
The superhero metaphor enables some synergistic retro TV series footage but it doesn’t quite suit the argument, especially when Guggenheim lavishes a degree of hero worship on the now-grown Canada and his KIPP ('Knowledge Is Power Program’) charter school peers. And with good reason, too; the independent schools model is making immeasurable difference to the lives of those kids who need is most. The independent model is clearly changing lives when it works: the most successful schools cite a 90 percent college transition rate.
All superheroes need a villain and Guggenheim finds his 'Lex Luthor’ in the form of the monolithic teacher unions that are profiled as resistant to change. The American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association are accused of rewarding mediocrity rather than encouraging innovation, with the rock-solid guarantee of job security that’s fantastic if you’re a good teacher, but even better if you’re a bad one"¦ A 23-step performance review process demonstrates just how hard it is to fire a teacher in the US, and has led to a curious 'dance of the lemons’ phenomenon whereby principals trade their worst employees in the hopes of receiving a 'less worse’ alternative.
And the quasi-'Lois Lane' figure? Well, that’s probably the forthright, upwardly mobile schools administrator from the worst-performing state in the Union (you’ll never guess which one), whose early progress came unstuck when she locked horns with the all-powerful unions.
The personalities at the frontline of education reform are engaging and persuasive and certainly seem committed to shifting the emphasis back on a child’s comprehension abilities and less about a teacher’s long-term career prospects. Disappointingly though, Waiting for Superman offers no direct engagement with its villain; despite an on-camera interview with the head of the AFT, we don’t see Guggenheim seek comment on the accusations levelled at her organisation on stymieing the reform process, especially on the contentious issue of teacher tenure. Guggenheim also doesn't elaborate on the statistic that only one in five of the charter schools generate good results.
One wonders how well Waiting for Superman will fare with an Australia cinema audience, but those who do seek it out ought to find it thoughtful and affecting. I defy anyone to remain unmoved while watching the tense and traumatic numbers game that pits hundreds of children against each other in the charter school enrolment lottery. It’s heartbreaking not only for the collapsed faces of those whose numbers don’t come up, but all the more for what it says about their absolute lack of faith in the status quo.
