Davis Guggenheim's "Waiting for 'Superman'"

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It's A Bird! It's A Plane! It's School Reformers! : NPR
by Claudio Sanchez

Excerpt:

Waiting for Superman gives generous screen time to reformers and their financial backers, most notably Bill Gates. The film is effective and powerful, says Timothy Knowles, head of the Urban Education Institute at the University of Chicago.

"It's got heroes and villains, triumphs and tragedy," Knowles says. "The promise I think is that a beautifully made, emotional film will help focus the country on what it will take to create reliably excellent schools."

But there are two big problems with the film, says Knowles. He says Guggenheim "exalts" charter schools as a singular strategy for improving education, despite their mixed record. Second, he says, Guggenheim's blistering attack on teachers' unions is unfair and counterproductive. The film accuses unions of protecting incompetent teachers. The president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, gets just enough screen time to explain and defend teachers' rights to due process, but in the end she's the perfect foil, Guggenheim's Lex Luthor.

Public school teachers care about kids, too, says Weingarten, but you wouldn't know it by watching this film.