Waiting for ‘Superman’
Davis Guggenheim has thrust himself into the spotlight as one of our best documentary filmmakers in the past few years. Whether it is the Oscar-winning “An Inconvenient Truth” or last year’s jam fest “It Might Get Loud,” Guggenheim gets right to the heart of his subject with intelligence and provocation.
This time around, he takes a personal and powerful look at our broken education system and the pressures it puts on children and adults alike. It’s his voice on the soundtrack, but it’s the faces of parents, students, and educators that linger longer in the memory: Parents who only want the best for their children, like a mother who is trying to stay afloat financially so her daughter can get a quality education; unfortunately, when money gets tight, she gets behind on tuition payments to the school, which deprives her daughter of the opportunity to graduate with her classmates. Students who have dreams like being a veterinarian or a doctor and who feel the pressure of getting into a good school. And educators, like Geoffrey Canada, who grew up hoping for Superman to come save the day, only to be crushed when he realized no one was going to save his world.
Guggenheim points fingers… but not just at teachers unions (who make it nearly impossible to reward good teachers and fire bad ones) or politicians (from presidents who promise change to superintendents who see the cracks in the system, but are seemingly powerless to mend them). In the end, we are all culpable. I remember getting a quality education from K-12 and through five years of college, but by not holding those people in charge responsible for the burdens they put on children and parents (some of whom are forced to hope for a lottery drawing to get into a charter school with better success than public schools), we have put more undue stress on those around us who just want to find the American Dream for themselves. Guggenheim gets to these truths with insight and sympathy, resulting in a film everyone should see for themselves.
