My niece, the light of my life, is ready to start school. She talks about it all the time. She can’t wait.
So I held off on watching this movie for a long time, because the subject is close to home, I obviously think about it much more than you probably expect, I’ve already seen things that worry me tremendously, and I knew that seeing it all play out at movie length would make me frustrated, mad, and despondent. And I was right. But I’m going to focus on the mad section of that emotional spectrum, and fan those flames, because that’s where I get active.
Waiting For Superman shows you the failure of the public school system in America. It’s a bi-partisan failure. Sorry, Democrats! Sorry, Republicans! You guys don’t get to waste more time pointing fingers at each other. You all done fucked up. Can we not sit around debating whys and wherefores? Every year that this mess stays a mess, more and more kids are let down by a broken infrastructure that profiles “winners” and “losers” and pushes the majority of them through without the guidance they need. The good teachers are underpaid and unrewarded, while the awful teachers ride out unearned tenures with no danger of losing their jobs. It’s sickening. There are good schools, but for fairness’s sake, lotteries are held to distribute the limited available spots to impossible numbers of kids. This process plays out in Waiting For Superman‘s penultimate scenes, to heartbreaking effect.
The good thing about this movie is that it doesn’t leave the viewer in despair. There are solutions right there for the implementing. There are people who care. There are good teachers and good parents and great kids. But they need an assist, ASAP. There needs to be support, attention, advocacy, accountability. That comes from communities, not just politicians and administrators.
So I have to worry about my niece’s prospects, but I don’t worry about my niece. She’s an incredible kid already, smart and sly and inquisitive and optimistic. She won’t be abandoned, because I just plain won’t let that happen. (Her parents and grandparents have plenty to do with that too.) But she deserves all the chances she can get, and so do the millions more kids who will be her classmates.
So watch this movie. Agree with what it says or don’t, but think about it. And then let’s do something.
Demon's Resume 