At the beginning of “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” (“Superman”) co-writer, director, and narrator Davis Guggenheim drives by three Los Angeles public schools and points out that while he could enroll his own children in any one of them, he and his actress wife, Elisabeth Shue, will instead choose a private school.
In the space of 30 seconds, and probably without intending to do so, Mr. Guggenheim overstates the obvious. If you’re well-to-do, you don’t have to send your kids to public school and risk ruining their future. For 100 or so minutes, Mr. Guggenheim lays out statistics that most people with a working brain already know: The nation’s public schools are failing, and if we don’t do something about it soon, the United States as a whole is in big trouble.
Because of his soothing, honey-rich high baritone and steady, measured delivery of material, Mr. Guggenheim never comes across as the typical sky-is-falling documentarian (read: Michael Moore). This cool, detached approach allows the audience to fully soak in the information without being distracted by a grandstanding narcissist.
O Canada
The animated and always engaging Geoffrey Canada is a trailblazer in the charter school movement. And after setting up shop in one of the most rundown communities in the nation (Harlem), he proved that the system itself isn’t the problem.
The nation’s two teachers’ unions are holding the system hostage and show no signs of loosening their arcane, vise-grip stranglehold. They are effectively doing to schools what the United Auto Workers union did to the nation’s car industry in 1970. It was then that 400,000 General Motors employees went on strike for 67 days. This work stoppage, in tandem with a perceived decline in the quality of American-made cars, opened the door for European and Asian companies to permanently claim a large chunk of the market share.
Rhee to the Rescue
In Washington, Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of the worst public school system in the country at the time of filming, dared to take on the unions. She closed down 20 schools and dismissed hundreds of underperforming teachers and principals. Citizens and the unions cried bloody murder, but Ms. Rhee held her ground. As a result, student test scores and graduation rates skyrocketed. Go figure.
In the film’s final sequence, Mr. Guggenheim includes close-ups of those five children and their families as lottery numbers for admission to various charter schools are announced. It is at once uplifting and heartbreaking. A handful of children, purely by the luck of a random draw, are handed an avenue to a greater future while many others are left in the dust. This shouldn’t be the way America chooses to educate its children.
Left Blowback
Within weeks of the movie’s 2010 release, unfounded and exaggerated hit pieces from the militant left media targeting Ms. Rhee and Mr. Canada littered the internet. The lumbering teachers’ unions reacted as expected, yet they could not offer any substantial arguments in their defense.In the years since “Superman,” the situation has only gotten worse. A 2023 report indicated that 13 of Baltimore’s 32 public schools had not one student proficient in math.
The people we trust with our children’s education have collectively dropped the ball. They have no intention of doing anything different. Unionized teachers work within a system where merit and achievement are marginalized, and the loss of employment because of poor performance is unlikely, if not impossible.
Is this the system under which you want your children’s future to be shaped?
