I am not an expert on social policy in any way, shape or form. I took an elective course on education back in college, but I’m hardly knowledgeable on the subject. I’m not an activist or an idealist of any kind. I’m just a schmuck with a blog, some movie passes and way too much free time. And here I am, typing an entry on Waiting for “Superman”, a documentary about the broken educational system we have in America. I expect that a lot of the points I’m about to make will be incomplete and/or incorrect, but that’s to be expected on an issue this huge. Hell, people far more “qualified” than I have been bungling this issue for decades. You may disagree with some of the things I say on the topic, and that’s as it should be. The issue of education reform is multi-layered and all-encompassing. We’re all caught up in this to some degree and matters this huge never come without controversy. In fact, given the stagnation of our educational system, I’d say that some debate and a few new ideas may be what’s needed right now.

But before I get into the movie proper, I’d like to talk about Participant Media. You really should know who these guys are if you don’t already. Participant is an independent film distributor, responsible for such movies as An Inconvenient Truth, Countdown to Zero, Fast Food Nation and Furry Vengeance, as well as Fair Game, the upcoming Valerie Plame dramatization. In case you don’t notice a pattern here, seeing the Participant Media logo is a sure sign that the movie you’re about to see contains some kind of topical socio-political agenda. Personally, I’m of mixed feelings about this. I don’t really like the idea of a company that only distributes product if it carries some political message that the management finds favorable (*coughFoxNewscough*). Also, while I think that there is room in the cinema world for commentary on current events, I’m of the opinion that the printed word is a much better medium for it. Newspaper editorials, magazine articles and books don’t date themselves nearly as badly as movies do, they don’t feel anywhere near as preachy, their sources are easier to look up and they aren’t limited by length as films are. On the other hand, Participant Media is giving a voice to a very specific niche and I can respect that. I’m sympathetic to all the filmmakers out there who are eager to make their mark. I can understand the urge to make a movie with the intention of getting it out there and changing the world. Which brings me to Davis Guggenheim.

After working with Al Gore to push awareness of global warming onto the somnambulant American public, Guggenheim sought to do the same thing with our broken education system by way of his latest documentary, Waiting for “Superman”. If you’re wondering what the title refers to, don’t. The title is exactly what it sounds like. The movie does make clever use of some George Reeves-era Superman footage, but that’s as much as the title has to do with this film. But enough petty griping about the film, let’s solve the education crisis!

First, let’s address the obvious solution: Money! There’s no problem in the world that can’t be solved by raising funds for it, right? Not so fast. Pretty much immediately, the film exposits that we’re spending more inflation-adjusted taxpayer dollars on education than ever before, yet test scores on reading and math have remained virtually unchanged over the past fifty years. Pork-barrel politics can’t solve this problem, so what can? Where is all that money going?

Man, does Guggenheim have answers to that question.

Quite early on, Guggenheim rolls out one of his neat little cartoon skits to illustrate how the system has grown extremely complex. We’ve got a federal bureaucracy, we’ve got state bureaucracies and we’ve got regional bureaucracies, all competing with each other for money and all with varying standards of what constitutes success. There’s no doubt that this adds a lot of complication to the system and cutting all of it would doubtlessly save millions of dollars in overhead costs. However, there are a lot of problems with that solution that this film completely fails to address: Cultural differences. You can’t run New York City the way you would run Portland, for example, and expect a good outcome. Hell, you couldn’t even run Bend the same way you’d run Portland. No one could expect to come up with an education plan for all of America and expect it to work because kids and parents are different from place to place. Sure, it might help to simplify the various regional bureaucracies, but eliminating them altogether would only bring a world of pain.

Anyway, the film doesn’t address that very much. It mostly focuses on finding and eliminating things in the system that are broken. Namely, failing schools and bad teachers. The problem — which the movie spends a whole lot of time griping about — is that the system we have right now is adamantly opposed to any such changes. No matter how crappy the school is, teachers and parents and assorted community leaders will crawl out of the woodwork to complain about the jobs being lost and the kids who’ll go without an education if the school is shut down. And no matter how godawful the teachers are, firing them is made impossible by union contracts that grant them tenure after two years of teaching.

Sweet Santa Vaca, does Guggenheim roast the teacher’s unions. The way he tells it, the teacher’s unions are shrill and unreasonable in the face of overwhelming evidence that the status quo is broken. He makes it sound like the unions place a higher priority over the teachers’ “right” to have a job than the kids’ right to an education. The unions have devised a Looney Tunes 23-step process for firing a bad teacher while inexplicably forbidding higher pay to better teachers.

Now, I’m not unreasonable. I know that it takes teachers a few years to really hit their stride and learn their craft and they need to be protected in that time. Moreover, there’s no doubt that public school teachers are overworked and underpaid for the vital work they do. They deserve the best and they should get it, even if that means union protection is necessary. Having said that, any system that turns a blind eye to incompetence and doesn’t reward excellence is broken by any measure. What’s more, we’ve all had at least one horrible teacher. We’ve all had coursework we didn’t learn anything from, a class that was wasting our time or a teacher who seemed to actively discourage learning. Think back to those times and you’ll know that nothing derails an education like a bad teacher.

The film is actually quite short on answers aside from pointing out what doesn’t work and what’s preventing change. The closest that the film ever gets to a potential solution is its glowing praise of the Knowledge is Power Program. Guggenheim goes into lengthy detail about its achievements, most notably in regard to how KIPP students’ success is not correlated with their families’ respective wealth or poverty. This school has conquered the income gap, something that would be considered a miracle in the public school system, yet the film is scarce on details as to how this came about. Mostly, it seems that KIPP succeeds because it does away with such outdated school concepts as Summer Break or education tracking.

I honestly feel kinda bad about saying this — especially since it’s not mentioned in the movie — but Summer Break really is an antiquated concept. Kids don’t need three months off to go help their families harvest crops anymore. Prudently, the film avoids this point to focus on educational tracking. It seems that preparing certain some kids for high-level jobs and preparing most kids for grunt work made a lot of sense back in the 1950s, when there were precious few college-level jobs to go around. But since then, we’ve had such breakthroughs as the moon landing, the dot-com explosion and the Human Genome Project. Today, we’ve got hundreds of computer companies, bioscience labs and engineering teams that have to hire talent from halfway across the globe because not enough people in America have the scientific knowledge to be viable employees.

To my regret, there were many important issues that the film completely failed to address. For starters, it failed to mention that maybe we’ll need all that education funding to build additional schools. I don’t know if this is a nationwide thing, but overcrowding in schools is a huge issue in Portland. Just this past year, my old middle school had to be turned into a satellite campus for my old high school just so the excess students could be accommodated. The film also neglects to mention just how obsessed schools are with grades and test scores, especially after No Child Left Behind. Teachers are actively discouraged from flunking students, simply because having an “F” student makes the school look bad and less likely to receive funding. I’ve even heard of teachers falsifying test scores to get more favorable stats. It’s an outrage never mentioned in the film, aside from a passing mention of NCLB. Perhaps most unforgivably — considering what a hot-button topic this is — the place of sports, theatre and music in schools is pretty much completely ignored. I know for a fact that there are several studies about the effect of extracurriculars on students’ grades and future success, and I think it’s a shame that the film did nothing to address them.

Instead, the film spends a few minutes pointing out that kids who don’t finish school are more likely to end up in prison. We get a little info-cartoon to show how it costs more taxpayer money to send someone to prison than it does to send him to school. I have my own thoughts on what to do about that, but prison reform is another debate entirely.

Last but not least, there’s the movie’s central gimmick which I’m sure you’ve all heard of by now. Guggenheim attempts to make the crisis more personal by profiling kids who are struggling with the system; remarkably brilliant and ambitious kids who may get a second-class education or none at all because of how flawed the system is. It’s a nice touch and there’s a good amount of diversity in the kids shown, but not enough for my liking: Of the five kids shown, only one was in high school. The rest were in elementary or pre-school. As adorable as the kids were, I think it would have been a lot more help to the movie if we had seen some more kids in middle or high school who were struggling.

There’s not a doubt in my mind that Waiting for “Superman” is not a complete and authoritative look at the education crisis. Not by a long shot. Still, I can understand that to some degree since this is a very complicated matter. I still learned a lot from this documentary and I can recommend it as a nice crash course on our education system and all its various flaws. Love it or hate it, agree with it or don’t, this is a thoughtful and not-quite-preachy movie about a matter that demands immediate attention.