Film Friday: Waiting for Superman (2010)

Directed by Davis Guggenheim (Inconvenient Truth), Waiting for Superman is a documentary about the failure of education in America. I’m a fan of documentaries, but this is not a good documentary. It's neither entertaining, nor does it provide useful information, and the only emotion it elicited was a strong desire to strangle the director. If you’re a conservative, forget this turkey.

Documentaries are best judged on two separate standards: (1) is it entertaining, and (2) does it provide valuable information. By “value,” I mean is it time well spent, not is the information consequential. Thus, for example, I’ve seen documentaries on fishing in New York City, suicides on Golden Gate Bridge, and humor in East Germany, each of which was well worth the time, despite the obscure subject matter. Waiting fails both tests.

1. Waiting Is Not An Entertaining Film

Waiting suffers from major defects that make it painful to watch. For one thing, it’s deathly dull. Guggenheim’s pacing is awful. His scenes are too long, and he wastes too much time on scenes which offer nothing, like watching a child brush his teeth. Better documentaries fill these moments with narrative, Guggenheim doesn’t. But that’s not to say Guggenheim doesn’t include narrative, to the contrary, he includes too much. Indeed, he only lets his subjects speak in soundbites, and he fills in the blanks himself. This shows a lack of trust in his subjects. What’s worse, when he narrates, he tries to sound concerned by injecting two second pauses at every. . . single. . . comma. . . or. . . period. This is beyond annoying.

Moreover, he waits almost twenty minutes before introducing the first substantive interview, and he spreads his interview soundbites throughout the film. Because of this, you wait forever to get anything interesting out the film, and it never comes together except in the broadest of strokes. Combined with Guggenheim’s heavy-handed false sentimentalism, Waiting leaves you feeling manipulated. It feels dishonest.

2. Waiting Does Not Provide Valuable Information

A good documentary also must provide valuable information. Waiting fails this test miserably. Waiting presents only small amounts of information, yet it reaches broad conclusions based on these snippets. There are 2,000 failing schools. But what percentage is that? We don’t know, yet Waiting presents this as sufficient to condemn the whole system. Why are these schools failing? We don’t know, yet Waiting blames bad teachers. What percentage of teachers are incompetent? Why are they bad? How do other countries or private schools fix this? We don’t know. And so on. In each instance, Guggenheim tosses out an isolated number, paints a broad brush criticism, shows a school where his criticism does not apply, and then concludes with “see, it can be done.” Yet he never addresses the fundamental questions of “why?” and “how?”

Guggenheim also skips the really significant questions. For example, he tells us only one in some unidentified number of public schools does an excellent job (he never defines what this means). By comparison, 20% of charter schools fall into his mystery excellent category. Thus, he concludes, charter schools are the answer. But he never tells us why charter schools are better, nor does he explain why the 20% do better than the 80%. That’s the real question, i.e. what’s working? He also points out that even our top students do poorly against the rest of the world, but he never asks why, and he criticizes current teaching methods, but never identifies them or gives us alternatives.

Also, his liberalism blinds him. Most of the problems he finds are the direct result of liberal policies, but he never connects the dots, and thus, he suggests more of the same. For example, he observes that American kids vastly overstate their abilities, but he never connects this with the relentless liberal push for teaching “self esteem,” and then he whines that teachers don’t make kids feel good about themselves. He also tells us the connection between money and education quality has been disproven, but then he presents a group of reformers who want to spend more money on teachers. Even worse, he annoyingly acts like he’s the first person to discover common sense. Did you know when teachers demand more from kids, the kids step up to the challenge? Or that money does not equate to success? Of course you didn’t, NO ONE KNEW THIS until now. . . forget that conservatives were saying these things for decades.

Further, because he refuses to connect liberal policies and the failure of education, he seeks out villains to explain what went wrong, but his villains are strawmen. The first villain is the passive voice villain, i.e. THEY. THEY set up a system that prevents good teachers from reaching kids. THEY set up a system that makes it impossible to fire bad teachers. THEY set up a system that lowers kids’ motivation and expectations. Who are THEY? THEY are the people who set up the system in the 1950s. This is a cop-out. The problem is the people who prevent reform. Blaming the long dead creators of the system or the system itself is a red herring, and shows a lack of seriousness.

The second villain is teachers unions. This is what got Waiting a lot of attention because it’s stunning to see a liberal attack a union. But his criticisms are shallow, and again he’s only discovering common sense. Unions stand in the way of reform. Gee, really? They make it impossible to fire bad teachers. You don’t say? And. . . well, that’s it. At no point does he outline the real problems with unions, nor does he discuss the things they’ve done to stand in the way of reform. He doesn’t even use their most damning quotes against them: “When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I'll start representing the interests of school children.” (Albert Shanker, President, United Federation of Teachers). Instead, the unions are presented as inadvertently hurting schools because their desire to protect teachers is something a few bad teachers exploit. But ask yourself, can a handful of bad teachers really harm 100% of the students. It’s pretty obvious there is a bigger problem here than his couple of bad apples theory.

Also, in defense of the unions and the public schools (**shudder**), he actually misleads the audience regarding the reason charter schools may do better than public schools. Public school defenders contend that charter schools get to pick their students, and thus have an advantage. Guggenheim attacks this claim repeatedly by pointing out how the selection process for some charter schools is random. But he fails to mention that it’s only random among the parents who cared enough to seek out the best schools for their kids. He then doubles down on this by selecting only black and Hispanic children (with one exception) whose parents are conscientious and deeply value education, and then presenting these as a random sample of poor families. When he shows these kids succeeding, he then savages the strawmen villain, “THOSE who said these children could not be taught.”

But this is a farce. If you want to see a truly representative example of the real problems faced by schools in poor minority neighborhoods, I highly recommend the documentary Hard Times at Douglass High: A No Child Left Behind Report Card. Hard Times takes a look at an historic black high school in Baltimore, and what it finds is absolutely horrific: 50% of the class not returning for the sophomore year, only 12 of 500 kids making it to their senior year, nearly 100% illiteracy, parents who don’t care and try to hide from the principal, parent-teacher conferences with no parents, etc. This is a much better documentary that shows what the real problems are, not the sanitized version in Waiting. If Waiting wants to provide any value in this discussion, it needs to get its hands dirty.

Finally, there’s an unspoken liberal boogeyman present throughout the film. Although Guggenheim never says the word “racism,” he constantly implies that racists are the problem. Take a look at his main point that kids are failing because “THOSE who said these kids couldn’t learn” have decided to abandon them. He explicitly identifies these kids as minority kids in inner city neighborhoods -- he completely ignores poor white kids; in fact, the only white kid he mentions lives in Redwood City, California in a multimillion dollar home. The implication is obvious; racists have undermined minority education. This is reinforced in several ways, e.g. all of the bad teachers Guggenheim shows are white, and in each case they are ignoring or abusing minority kids, and each of the reformers he follows is a minority. This is no accident.

Liberals have created a real mess in education, an area they have controlled exclusively for 50 years. It is much more comforting for liberals to think the reason education is such a disaster is a handful of bad teachers who misuse union rules and white racists than it is to admit their policies destroyed generations of black kids.

Conclusion

This is why Waiting fails. It’s a dull and annoying film that is ultimately designed to comfort liberals and excuse their failures; it’s not a film designed to expose or enlighten. In fact, if you pay attention early on, you get a clue to its true purpose when Guggenheim confesses his discomfort at abandoning his principles and sending his own kids to private school. This film is his attempt to justify that decision to himself, without admitting that his liberalism is wrong.