SPOTLIGHT
The Sunday Age
Sunday March 27, 2011
RATING: 2.5/5WAITING FOR "SUPERMAN"(PG, 111 minutes). On limited release Although Davis Guggenheim's documentary deals with the public education system in the US, many of the issues it raises will be familiar to anyone anywhere concerned with how well a school system is working. The film's fatal flaw, however, is that while it's very good at identifying what's gone wrong in the US, it's all at sea when it looks for ways to fix the problems.Guggenheim, director of the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and the excellent music documentary It Might Get Loud (2008), first tackled the subject from a very different angle a decade ago in the made-for-TV documentary The First Year (2001), which dealt with the experiences of five first-time teachers in inner-city Los Angeles. In the new film (which quotes from the earlier one), he explains that he's revisiting the topic because of his guilt at sending his children (with actress-wife Elisabeth Shue) to private school while other, less well-off parents are stuck with whatever is served up elsewhere.Charismatic Harlem educator Geoffrey Canada handed Guggenheim the title for the film by recalling his childhood worship of the Man of Steel. Through innocent eyes, he explains, he'd found a hero who'd "always show up and save the good people". But then his mother explained that he didn't exist, that the world didn't work like that. Now he understands that there's no point waiting around because Superman ain't comin'.Likewise, there are clearly no magical solutions for what's gone wrong with education in America, and elsewhere. "Fancy facilities" make schools appear inviting, but conceal plunging standards. Shocking levels of maths and reading proficiency have placed the US near the bottom of the rankings in developed countries, although surveys also indicate a popular belief that "we're number one". School governance has become a tangled mess of conflicting policies, with state and federal bureaucracies regularly at odds with each other.Parents' hands-on involvement in school administration has only introduced another layer of ideological conflict to already entrenched problems. Tenure contracts demanded by unions have allowed incompetent teachers to go about their business with impunity. Principals resort to what has become known as "the lemon dance" as they pass their "trash" on to other schools. Successive governments have promised to repair the system, President George W. Bush's famous "No child left behind" campaign (supported by Edward Kennedy) typically proving to be all good intentions and no results. Local officials have tried to impose their own solutions, Washington, DC, school chancellor Michelle Rhee taking on the unions in an attempt to clean up the mess. Individual entrepreneurs, such as Canada, go their own way. No longer looking for Superman, he's set up a charter school for students whose talents might otherwise go untapped.As case studies, Guggenheim chooses five students from around the country and details the kinds of problems they face as they try to make their way through the education system. In one of his worst missteps, he also trumps up the suspense as these children, along with their parents or carers, await the results of the horrible human lottery that allows for entry into the much sought-after charter network. The sequence is unashamedly exploitive and doesn't belong in a film supposedly concerned with how students are being disadvantaged.As long as it's probing the downside, Guggenheim's film makes for compelling viewing, even if it leaves one suspicious about some of the data it cites. For example, are the proficiency tests it draws on any more reliable than the ones in use in Australia? But when Waiting for "Superman" starts proposing ways out of the quagmire, it's just infuriating, constantly mistaking symptoms (such as intransigent unions) for the causes of the problems.And its final submission that what we all need is more good teachers is cringeworthy in its obviousness.
© 2011 The Sunday Age