A bashing or reality for kids . . .

Later this month a new documentary film focused on public education will be released titled Waiting for Superman.  It portrays public education as failing to meet the needs of kids by following the lives of five children who are trying to improve their education through a lottery to high performing charter schools.  It is being viewed as a powerful message that will cause outrage with the current system and features some of the more prominent names in the news such as Michele Ree, Superintendent of the Washington D.C. system and Randi Weingarten head of the AFT.  It is directed by David Guggenheim who won an Academy Award for An Inconvenient Truth.

At EDUWONK, Rotherham links to a New York magazine article that looks at the film and the issues around it.  Below, is one small segment from this article.

Among leaders of the burgeoning education-reform movement, the degree of anticipation surrounding “Superman” is difficult to overstate. “The movie is going to create a sense of outrage, and a sense of urgency,” says Arne Duncan, Barack Obama’s secretary of Education. New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein concurs. “It’s gonna grab people much deeper than An Inconvenient Truth, because watching ice caps melt doesn’t have the human quality of watching these kids being denied something you know will change their lives,” Klein says. “It grabs at you. It should grab at you. Those kids are dying.”

It is a long article (6 pages), but one worth reading.  It certainly has caught my attention.  I struggle to see our system in the picture that is described, yet based on state assessment data there are varying numbers of our students not meeting standard in all the tests.  Using words from the film, does this mean that our kids are getting a "crappy" education?  No, nor do we have the big district politics and union issues standing in our way.  We have much to learn and much room for improvement and we must find new and adaptive solutions necessary to ensure that all students meet standard.  I believe that we can be a beacon of hope for public education because we have a vision and the capacity and collective commitment necessary to achieve it.