Summary: Signs of senescence in the American Republic appear in every day’s headlines. Most tellingly, our inability to fix problems that we all see and have obvious solutions (such as copying from the more successful systems of our peer nations). Here James Bowman reviews Waiting For Superman, a powerful film about the politics of our dysfunctional schools.
Waiting for Superman (2010).
A new documentary by the director of An Inconvenient Truth .
Review by James Bowman.
Davis Guggenheim, the director of Waiting for Superman
Fortunately, this appears to be easy for him in Superman, for it is exactly how he himself views the appalling state of vast tracts of our public education system. He starts, for instance, by telling us that, when he sent his own children to private school, he felt at least a twinge of guilt for “betraying the ideals I thought I lived by.” But, well, essentially a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Ideals are all very well in their place, it seems, but it doesn’t do to take them too seriously.
What this confession amounts to is a recognition that those ideals, which are also the ideals on which the American educational system has been constructed and which most of the film’s audience can be relied upon still to harbor, are incompatible with reality, an insight from which the rest of Waiting for Superman appears to be in headlong flight.
The liberal reaction to the movie is nicely summed up by Gail Collins in her New York Times column when she writes that “by the time you leave the theater you are so sad and angry you just want to find something to burn down.” But of course, neither she nor “you” will actually burn anything down. Or do anything else to change things, apart (in her case) from asking those in charge of the coveted Charter School places to conduct their much-too-photogenic lotteries by post instead of in a public setting where they can upset her.
Certainly we may understand there is no chance that either she or, sadly, those whose misery she prefers not to witness, will ever fail to vote for the Democrats who are mostly responsible for keeping things the way they are. As Jonathan Alter (of all people) tells Mr Guggenheim’s cameras, the Democratic party is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the teachers’ unions.
Of course, as Ms Collins also laughably insists, “there’s no evidence that teachers’ unions are holding our schools back.” In this, she is probably being even more naive (or disingenuous) than Mr Guggenheim, whom she quotes as saying that his movie is “not ‘pro’ anything or ‘anti’ anything. It’s really: ‘Why can’t we have enough great schools?’” – even where the answer is as obvious as it must be for anyone without ideological blinkers on. For he, at least, cannot avoid showing some of the social evils that the teachers’ unions are responsible for, even though he doesn’t want to. For he told Trip Gabriel, also of The New York Times, that…
“he was dismayed to meet so many critics of teachers’ unions while filming, who argued forcefully that the unions protect incompetent teachers. ‘The hardest choice I made’ was to include that information, he said. ‘A part of me wanted to avoid the whole thing.'”
It shows. The film’s most chilling moment comes when Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers speaks scornfully of the much hyped Michelle Rhee as a “change agent” in the schools of Washington D.C., which are among the worst in the nation, by saying in matter-of-fact tones: “But it’s not going to change the schools.” And of course she appears to be right. With the recent primary defeat of Mayor Adrian Fenty, who was Ms Rhee’s hirer and protector, most people assume it’s she who will soon be gone, allowing the D.C. school system to sink back into its traditional torpor and complacency over the ruined lives of its pupils.
Ms Rhee implies that it is only after her run-in with the unions, who refused to submit her proposal to do away with tenure in exchange for large merit pay increases, that she realized the ed. establishment cared nothing for children: “It’s all about the adults” But who, watching this film or, indeed, with eyes in his head, can doubt it?
Mr Guggenheim can hardly ignore the central role of the unions, but he doesn’t focus on this as it needs focusing on and as The Cartel
But, unlike The Cartel, Mr Guggenheim is not angry enough or focused enough on the real causes of this national scandal. Nor does he go very far into the legal and cultural aspects of the problem – including the things that are not the teachers’ unions’ fault, such as the litigiousness of parents and the foolishness of judges in allowing teachers who want to get serious about discipline themselves to be disciplined or even prosecuted for assault on the little thugs who will soon be the big thugs preventing inner-city schools from doing any actual education
Though we see some of the private and charter schools that those in the bad ones are desperate to get into, we don’t get a look inside the bad ones to see what makes them bad. Instead, Mr Guggenheim focuses on the problem of tenure and other restrictions on school systems seeking to weed out incompetent teachers and on a few other things, such as jurisdictional disputes and bureaucracy, that are really a minor part of the problem.
Similarly, although there is a mention of the fact that America’s high school students test near the bottom of the international league tables in mathematics but are a solid first in the belief that they are good at math, there is no mention of the terribly destructive influence that education in “self-esteem” has been in contributing to this delusion, like so many others to which our young people are prey. Fixing what’s wrong with America’s schools, assuming it can be done at all, is a gargantuan project but Mr Guggenheim, because he shares so many of the illusory ideals their failures are based on, doesn’t appear to know where to start.
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About James Bowman
Bowman is a Resident Scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
He has worked as a freelance journalist, serving as American editor of the Times Literary Supplement of London from 1991 to 2002, as movie critic of The American Spectator since 1990 and as media critic of The New Criterion since 1993. He has also been a weekly movie reviewer for The New York Sun since the newspaper’s re-foundation in 2002. He has also contributed to a wide range of other major papers.
Mr. Bowman is perhaps best known for his book, Honor: A History
See his collected articles at his website, including his film reviews going back to 1994.
For More Information
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If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts by James Bowman, about education, about inequality & social mobility, about ways to reform America’s politics, and especially these…
- America, the land of limited opportunity. We must open our eyes to the truth.
- Growing inequality powers the rise of New America.
- The state of the American middle class: are we thriving or sinking?, 15 January 2014
- Warning: the income gap between races is widening in America.
- An anthropologist looks at America’s growing proletariat.
About Bowman’s great book.
It is about a lost but vital element from our culture. I recommend reading Honor: A History
“The importance of honor is present in the earliest records of civilization. Today, while it may still be an essential concept in Islamic cultures, in the West, honor has been disparaged and dismissed as obsolete.
“In this lively and authoritative book, James Bowman traces the curious and fascinating history of this ideal, from the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment and to the killing fields of World War I and the despair of Vietnam. Bowman reminds us that the fate of honor and the fate of morality and even manners are deeply interrelated.”