One of the more important contributions to the culture that movies like Waiting for `Superman' (my beef is the quote marks) make is bringing us back to debating?the?fundamentals.? Whether or not the film cracks the education code or compels people to take up arms, it is sure interesting reading what people read into it.
Nick Lemann in the New Yorker, as we know, bemoans the ?narrative of crisis? that the film represents.
At the other pole is Stephen Holden, in the New York Times, who for some reason thinks that Randi Weingarten (?somewhat demonized? in the movie says Holden, as opposed to Variety's view that the film paints her as ?a foaming satanic beast?) would be ?the first to admit that public education is in crisis.?? Oh really?
Joanne Jacobs has a good roundup of ?Superman' views. She really likes Rick Hess's take: My Conversion Experience.? Rick went somewhat apoplectic.? ?He even considered ?spiking? the column as ?too mean and gratuitous a shot at a well intentioned exercise.? ?But the ?Oprah spectacle,? Guggenheim's crack the code crack, and the ?continuing barrage from would-be reformers hawking Waiting for ?Superman' and promoting a goopy groupthink symbiosis with the Paramount marketing operation? ? well, it put Rick over the edge.? (And it seemed to so outrage some of his readers this week that he posted a list of the ?six tenets? that guide his own writing on the subject. Go see for yourself.)
It's not surprising that Oprah would hit a few?buttons: ?groundbreaking documentary,? ?millions of children are being failed by our schools,? ?children are getting stupider every year,? ?for the first time in our American history this generation is less educated than the one before it,? ??alarming,? ??the very future of our country is at stake.?
Checker was pretty calm about it. ?Aside from all that glitz and glamor, Waiting for ?Superman' is quite a movie to boot.??I can see how the ad blurb people will twist that one:? ?Quite a movie!? ?Chester E. Finn, Jr.,? Education Guru.
Then there's Dana Goldstein in the Nation, with a lengthy essay on education built around the movie:
Here's what you see in Waiting for Superman, the new documentary that celebrates the charter school movement while blaming teachers unions for much of what ails American education: working- and middle-class parents desperate to get their charming, healthy, well-behaved children into successful public charter schools.
Here's what you don't see: the four out of five charters that are no better, on average, than traditional neighborhood public schools (and are sometimes much worse); charter school teachers, like those at the Green Dot schools in Los Angeles, who are unionized and like it that way; and noncharter neighborhood public schools, like PS 83 in East Harlem and the George Hall Elementary School in Mobile, Alabama, that are nationally recognized for successfully educating poor children.
Et cetera?
My favorite bold and broad Superman generalization (would this be caused by??goopy groupthink symbiosis??), however, goes to Holden in the Times:
Waiting for ?Superman' doesn't explore the deeper changes in American society that have led to this crisis: the widening gap between rich and poor, the loosening of the social contract, the coarsening of the culture and the despair of the underclass.
Is it any wonder that education policymakers find themselves fighting in the weeds?
?Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow
