Review: Waiting for Superman
/I know you're not going to believe me when I say this because y'all know I'm a reluctant Oprah disciple about certain things. But Oprah DID NOT make me do it. Loverpants, however, did. He hyped me up about the new documentary "Waiting for Superman" and then it was all I could do not to watch Oprah sounding her trumpet GO SEE THIS MOOVEHHHHH and try to find a way to see it before we had to queue it up via Netflix. Since Nana Red obliged us with her nanariffic presence this holiday weekend, hubalove and I scampered out to the mooobies on Saturday night and sat, like, next to each other? While watching this movie? And didn't even have to fold diaper laundry or Febreze a mattress after someone woke up in a puddle of tinkle? Epic fun. All I can say is that the article on Slate was totally right. The movie - produced by the same dude as Al Gore's guy for Inconvenient Truth - is heartbreaking, but it's really only the beginning of the conversation about Fixing America's Schools. It scratches the surface, it brings tears to your tear ducts, but it really does not (and cannot?) address all the forces at work in determining whether or not a child in a public school system receives a worthy education.
I appreciated that the documentary lasered in on the parents of the students and the decisions they had to make to ensure their children succeeded. The macro decisions (To which school will we send our children?) and the micro decisions (Should I request a parent-teacher conference about this?) are all laid out and you can see the anguish in these parents' eyes, knowing that the simple factor of geography can determine so much for their children's futures. The mosaic of scenes where families are waiting for the school lottery easily rivals any great suspense-filled film based on fiction, only this is reality for thousands if not millions of students.
What I do dispute about this film is the whole "Schools fail children" tag line. We always hear administrators and pundits use this. Our schools are failing children. While I appreciate the term "failing factory" for its clever alliteration, I do not think it is fair or sensible to blame an actual institution for children's failure to learn and/or progress. I do not blame the Catholic Church for molesting choirboys. I do not blame the Boston Police Department for not protecting me from crime at all times. Institutions are not capable of doing such things. They simply foster environments in which people - individual men and women- can use their abilities for good or for bad. There are a thousand reasons children may or may not learn, but rarely, I would argue, is it one singular force. A bad teacher, a poor home life, an undiagnosed learning disability, shoddy resources, sickness, depression, lack of motivation. The list goes on. Schools can only do so much, and when the winning combination is at play (support from home, good health, rich resources, excellence in teaching), it's clear to me (as an educator), there is no reason a child cannot succeed.
I also think it's cheap to throw America in the ring with other developed nations with homogeneous populations and much different federal tax bases. Of course Korea and Denmark are going to win out over the diverse population of the U.S. where the primary language spoken is not the first language of many of its citizens. I was also interested that no mention was made of the wars we've been waging overseas for the better part of the last decade.
Now I've attended all of one full year of kindergarten in a public school and the rest of my formal schooling was in private schools, most of which were parochial. I have always loved being a student, my parents always supported me, and other than some rather serious bouts with depression, I can't say that much has impeded my education. I say that I'm grateful for this gift, but I certainly need to be reminded that all those books? Those letters next to my name? They were all gift. I worked hard, but those teachers, my parents--they were all working harder.
Encourage you to see this film. Penny for your thoughts when you do.
