Waiting For Superman

This is the shortest of three assignments I had due last Friday.  It's a reflection on the documentary Waiting For Superman which we watched for class.  I wanted to revise it and work a few things differently then post it...but, BaDOOM!  Not gonna happen this week, so here is this...I was just happy to have the opportunity to quote The Flaming Lips in a paper for school.

If you haven't seen the movie...

SPOILER ALERT!

 
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Reflection On Waiting For Superman

            The foremost response I have to this film is that it is incredibly one-sided, heavy-handed, and emotionally manipulative, and though it has some points to make, it would have been a far better film and its audience would have been far better served if the filmmaker had been more concerned with presenting an honest, robust, and reflective picture of the situation and less concerned with eliciting the particular narrow emotional response that it achieves.  I’m going to reflect on one scene from the film that I think most powerfully shows the filmmaker’s unexamined assumptions and the filmmaker’s propensity for propaganda.

At the end of the film we are subjected to the long scene (it seemed to last at least a half an hour but it was probably more like five minutes) wherein the kids are waiting to hear their names in the charter school lottery.  As the number of placements available drops to zero, and most of the kids we’ve been following are not called, our hearts break along with theirs; a viewer cannot help but respond to tears standing in the eyes of children and parents as their hopes are crushed.  Throughout the film we were told that the public schools these kids will be forced to attend are broken.  The high schools they will attend are failure factories.  The cycle of poverty and crime goes on and on and the only way out is education.  But bad teachers, intractable teachers’ unions, and byzantine bureaucracy stand in the way of these kids receiving the education they need to escape a dismal life of failure.  Plucky reformers like Michelle Rhee try to work within the system but they are slammed down hard by the awesome might of the unions.  Other plucky reformers find a way out, a way to slip slightly to the side of the system and create charter schools free from the crippling hands of the unions and the dead weight of bad teachers.  These charter schools are the only hope for these kids, the film tells us, but space is limited so they have one slim chance, one small hope to escape their fate—the lottery.  As that hope slips away, the children and their families are devastated and we, the audience, are devastated too.  We are devastated for these children because the film sets us up to believe that now their lives are over and there is no hope for them.  The children have received the sentence of death—death via public school attendance.  By choosing this “dead children walking” frame for this scene and for the movie as a whole, the filmmaker sets up very heavy-handed, emotionally manipulative, false dichotomy and ignores a more nuanced reality.

First of all, (ignoring the fact that these kids are all in a massively successful documentary film and if they don’t all have college trust funds from this then there is something very wrong with the filmmaker), what do all of these kids have in common aside from a desire to attend a charter school?  Each one of them is blessed with at least one very strong advocate, parent or guardian, fighting for them, caring for them, and supporting them.  Having advocates like that is a far more powerful aide to future success than the particular school a child attends.  The film does those advocates a disservice by painting a “charter school or doom” dichotomy for these kids.

Second, this heavy-handed scene plays on a false “receive a great education or be doomed to a life of poverty” dichotomy.  Now it is the case that education is a road out of poverty for some people, but there are no guarantees, our society has wider problems than that.  The road out of poverty via education is a path for the few, not the many.  What I mean is:  what would happen if educators were successful beyond their wildest dreams?  What if no child was left behind, every single member of a generation received a great education, graduated from high school, and, let’s take it a step further, graduated from college?  Would poverty simply disappear because we were able to wave millions of college degrees at it?  No, of course not.  Our system is structured to have winners and losers and we could easily end up with millions of highly educated burger flippers and hotel cleaners.  Or, I suppose the hope is, or the assumption behind this film and legislation like No Child Let Behind is, that education will create a nation of American technocrats that will allow the United States to “beat” China, India, Mexico, and everybody else in the world and insure prosperity for our citizens.  Since it has slowly become too “icky” (i.e. socially and politically unacceptable) for us to have an underclass in the U.S. (although that particular battle is far from over—there are many, many people who are just fine with having an underclass), people hope that poverty will be eliminated through education and there will be enough room in the middle and upper classes in America because an educated nation could be a nation of four hundred million rich people if only we have the gumption to exploit the rest of the world.

This film rests on the assumption that everything is fine with our society at large and it is only our broken public school system—broken by those pesky teachers’ unions—that is problematic.  If only those kids could have gotten into charter schools, their lives would be saved.  If only we could fix our school system, then all the poor kids would get their shot at a picket fence and a two-car garage.  I agree that our school system is broken.  There are too many bad schools, bad teachers, and bad educational experiences for children.  But maybe our schools are broken because our society is broken, and the schools simply reflect that.  I have long thought that the great hope imbedded in education is a hope of societal transformation.  The hope is that producing generation after generation of highly educated citizens will give us a populace with the tools needed to create and maintain a just society.  But that too is too much of a false dichotomy.  If it is to happen at all, a just society won’t come through fixing the schools then letting the schools fix society.  It won’t be a simple step-by-step, cause and effect, process.  To quote the band The Flaming Lips:  “Tell everybody, Waitin’ for Superman; That they should try to hold on best they can; He hasn’t dropped them, forgot them, or anything; It’s just too heavy for Superman to lift” (from The Soft Bulletin, 1999).  Not only is the problem of poverty too heavy for any reformer to lift, or any charter school to lift; poverty is too heavy for our entire educational system to lift.  Education can be a part of it and an important part, but a just society will need many strong institutions to help with the lifting. 


2 August 2013 Edited to remove my name which popped in there due to the copying and pasting from my assignment.  I'm trying to be a little more careful about interwebs anonymity these days.