(From The New York Post, September 17, 2010)
By YOAV GONEN
Education has hit the big time.
A new documentary by the director of “An Inconvenient Truth” is attempting to do for education what his previous film aimed to do for the environment: Save it.
But even before its first screening, “Waiting for ‘Superman’ ” has already created a rift between critics, who pan its anti-union and pro-charter-school bent, and supporters, who hail the film for telling the truth about sinking public schools.
The film focuses on five children who enter charter-school lotteries — and their parents, who include two New York City moms.
One, in Harlem, is struggling to pay for Catholic school for her daughter, and the other, in The Bronx, is fighting to keep her son on track in public school.
Both enter their kids into a long-shot charter lottery in pursuit of a better — and free — education.
Director Davis Guggenheim interweaves an explanation of how the public schools got to the sorry state they’re in.
He targets teacher tenure, the city’s infamous “rubber rooms,” and the “dance of the lemons” — where bad teachers are passed along from school to school rather than being shown the exit.
Local education reformers, including Geoffrey Canada, head of the Harlem Children’s Zone, are also featured.
United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew called it “a Hollywood movie with Hollywood solutions.” He said the film “offered few, if any, examples of great public schools, while it heralded charter schools as one of the few solutions to the education quagmire.”
He asked, “I don’t understand; charter schools will fix everything? Even though in the movie it says only one of five charter schools is really very good.”
But others credited the film for tackling topics that are normally taboo — like the power of the country’s two largest teacher unions.
“It’s a tremendous credit to Guggenheim that he was willing to go down this route — that I do not think vilified teachers,” said Joe Williams, director of Democrats for Education Reform. “He clearly understood the difference between talking about union power and the importance of having great teachers.”
“Waiting for ‘Superman’ ” gets a limited release beginning Sept. 24 in New York City and LA.
Lesley Chilcott, the film’s producer, says its focus on charter lotteries was intended as a metaphor for the crapshoot that landing in a good public school has become.
“It’s supposed to be that it’s a lottery right now if you get a good school, no matter what kind of school it is — mainstream, public, magnet or charter,” she said. “It just seemed the ultimate in sad irony that . . . these kids whose parents were involved and were trying didn’t have a choice for a school.”