Posted by JM Ashby
I watched Waiting for Superman several nights ago, and I would like to recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it yet. I didn’t have the opportunity to see it when it was first released to theatres because no theatre within 50 miles of me chose to show it, so I am sharing this mini-review now.
Anyway, Michael Moore has shit on Waiting for Superman recently because he felt that it unfairly laid all of the blame on teachers. It’s true that it does hit teachers pretty hard, but its not all about teachers. Teachers are a part of the system, meaning you can’t just ignore their part in the equation, but the entire system or systems are what's broken. Some of the numbers are pretty staggering too.
Just to share a few examples... A school in Southern California where only 20,000 out of 60,000 students over 40 years have graduated. In Pennsylvania, 60% of prison inmates are high school dropouts and the cost of imprisoning them is many times higher than the cost of proper education. The top 5% of US students rank 23rd in the world in education.You can’t help but notice while you’re watching that white kids almost do not make an appearance or factor into the discussion. The film focuses on several black families, several hispanic families, and one white family. The reason for this is pretty simple; minorities tend to live in lower income neighborhoods and get saddled with lower quality education opportunities. With that said, even children who live in wealthy neighborhoods and attend wealthy schools are falling behind the rest of the world. Many kids, no matter their economic background, enter middle school unprepared, enter high school unprepared, and enter college unprepared if at all. Obviously your economic background may increase or decrease your chance to get a good deal or a bad deal in our “luck-based” system.For anyone who pays attention to the subject of education, which I do, the film is not exactly loaded with tons of new information. Still, it’s always healthy to see new perspectives and possibly learn a thing or two along the way. For example, I wasn’t aware of the system of tracking that schools use. A system where they assign you to good or bad teachers based on your economic background and grades. After thinking about it, this made a lot of sense because when I was in school I seemed to always end up in classes with the same kids and I had mostly mediocre teachers. The kids from wealthy families all had classes together and had the best teachers, hence they received the best grades. I don’t come from a poor family, I come from a middle class family, so I was fortunate enough to at least have the mediocre teachers and not the worst teachers. The poorest kids in school were assigned the worst teachers and got the worst grades.If you look at things in that light, its no wonder the whole system is crumbling. The failure aspect is almost self-fulfilling. The current system is designed to create an upper class and a lower class of students. Some people say that bad neighborhoods lead to bad schools, while others say bad schools lead to bad neighborhoods. Personally I think it would be safe to say that all factors play a role.Waiting for Superman is not all doom-and-gloom. In fact, it is somewhat positive in that it shows there are real solutions out there waiting to be employed. The larger problem is that those solutions have to be brought to scale, and we have a political establishment in this country that isn’t interested in doing that. They need to become interested though, because if we don’t start making changes right now, the future of our nation’s youth is bleak. President Obama hit this point several times during his State of the Union Address, but it remains to be seen if that part warning, part call-to-action fell on deaf ears or not.If recent events have taught us anything, it’s that a generation of youths who have no opportunity and no mobility are not guaranteed to sit idly by while the masters of the universe write-off their future.