Starring: Documentary on five children and their families, playing themselves, and Geoffrey Canada and Michelle Rhee
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Runtime: 111 mins. Reviewed in Nov 2011
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Winner of the Audience Award for best documentary at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, this movie takes on the public education system in the USA by focusing on its failures. It does this through the eyes of five children (Anthony, Daisy, Francesco, Bianca, and Emily), who place their hopes, and those of their families, in an alternative system called a “Charter School”, that arguably better encourages intellectual growth. The Director of the documentary, Davis Guggenheim, is the same person who directed “An Inconvenient Truth”, the 2006 Oscar-winning documentary on global warming. That movie did a lot for climate change, and Guggenheim wants to do the same again for education.
The movie begins with the declaration of Geoffrey Canada, an educational reformer, that education in the US is waiting for Superman, but the wait will be in vain. Superman doesn’t exist. Geoffrey, and Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of the Washington DC public school system, are the principal adult spokespersons in the movie, arguing forcibly for quality improvement in the US educational system.
The public system is dominated, they say, by the teacher unions, which the film presents as the villain of the piece.
The innocence of the five children is disarming, as the issues swirl around them. A good education is the way out of many of the stresses that characterise the lives of these children, and most of the children are passionate about what benefits education will bring them. All the children (except for Emily) come from communities that are deficient in health care, jobs, wages, and housing.
The film stirs up strong passions about deficiencies in the US education system, but one suspects that the complexity of the system is not represented in a thoroughly objective way. The film presents the view that poor achievements are due almost entirely to poor schools and, in particular, to poor teachers. It advocates the solution of Charter Schools, like Harlem Success Academy, which have the capacity to fire bad teachers, hire the best of teaching talent, and mount their own curriculum.
Charter Schools single out minority students. They are schools for those wanting to escape an over-regulated, crowded, and regimented system; but they often extract children from their social background, thus raising the thorny issue of segregation in the film’s suggested solution. The five children are subjected to the chance of winning a lottery for access to better education in one of these schools. But, the film doesn’t show us Charter Schools that are no better than some of the schools in the public system, and the issue of whether Charter Schools solve the problems of American educational inequality is not discussed at all. There are some deep unresolved issues that are responsible for the educational crisis in the US, which include the widening gap between rich and poor, and the desperation of the poor, and the saving concept of a Charter School seems too simplistic.
Without a doubt, the film will stimulate lively discussion about the failure of the US education system. It aims its fire power at the unions, though many of its arguments are issues that the unions would support. It is edited skilfully, uses good animation to pursue its points, and it presents some very disturbing statistics on US literacy.
The movie ends sadly by showing the five children waiting desperately to see who has won the lottery for admission to a Charter School. Only a few of them are lucky. One can only hope that reasoning, humanity, and not chance, missed opportunity, or emotion will ultimately determine these children’s future.
12 Random Films…
