Filmmaker Critiques Education Failure
Davis Guggenheim
Davis Guggenheim, who won an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary that got the country focused on global warming, now wants to engage the United States in another big issue: poor education. America spends more than any other developed country on education, but its students attain bottom-bumping test scores. Given that jobs of the future will rely on brain power more than muscle and sweat, that doesn’t bode well for American competitiveness.
But in Waiting for “Superman,” the villains aren’t easy targets like climate-change deniers. Instead, they’re America’s two largest teachers unions, reports Time magazine movie critic Richard Corliss. Guggenheim’s believes the country’s future depends on good teachers, but that its two “powerful unions” work too hard to protect mediocre teachers. Not surprisingly, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has attacked the movie as flawed and overgeneralized.
The heroes of Guggenheim’s film are Geoffrey Canada, who runs the Harlem Children’s Zone schools, and Michelle Rhee, the Washington, D.C. schools chancellor who has been known to fire principals and teachers deemed as underperforming. Corliss admits Guggenheim loads the dice by focusing on children passionate for education — instead of the many who consider school a hated chore — and by promoting charter schools, which have a mixed record of success. But he credits the director for kickstarting an important and necessary debate on a subject of utmost import. He concludes: “It is engaging and, finally, enraging . . . and as poignant as a child’s plea for help.”
Filed under: K-12 Education News
Tags: Education Policy, Public Policy
