Michelle Rhee is a storm in an education system that needs an El Niño. Brought in as the DC Public Schools Chancellor in 1997, Rhee has been a controversial figure from the beginning. She fires teachers at will. She closes schools that don’t perform well. She challenges the powerful teachers’ unions who, some believe, are one of the primary causes of the mess the education system has become. And she also stands as Davis Guggenheim’s, director of An Inconvenient Truth, new Al Gore in his upcoming documentary Waiting for Superman.
But this time, Guggenheim has done more than set up a camera to shoot a PowerPoint presentation. Waiting for Superman follows Rhee and handfuls of educators, parents, and students as they do their best to work through what public schools have become. The dropout rate is higher than ever. Test scores are dropping every year, and nothing seems to be working out as planned. To feel the emotional weight of this problem, Guggenheim introduces us to five students. Each has the unfortunate luck of living in neighborhoods with low-performing schools. We watch as they brave the heart-wrenching process of a lottery to enter one of the better schools in their area.
In between floating head interviews and narratives following these children, Guggenheim displays his more straightforward arguments via wonderful animations and frightening statistics. But knowing the problem doesn’t necessarily fix it, and we come to realize fairly quickly that it’s going to take more than one reformist chancellor to fix these ailing schools. Even Guggenheim himself, who admits in the film that he sent his kid to an expensive private school, seems unsure of the solution.
So we’re left with a pleading portrait, a collection of everything going on within the education system (bureaucratic nonsense, unions protecting bad teachers, cuts in funding) presented to us as if to say, simply, “help?” For our kids, for our teachers, for our future. Whether the documentary will push the conversation forward is hard to say, but Guggenheim has done what artists are supposed to do in trying to understand this problem. But like many of the more complicated problems in the world, Guggenheim's film can only illuminate it. It's up to us to fix it.
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