Still waitingBy John DeSando, "It's Movie Time," "Cinema Classics," and "On the Marquee"
The forces that forever collide when educational reform is the subject are the primary need for great teachers and the urge to protect all teachers through tenure, good or bad, from repression.
Waiting for Superman does as well as can be expected in taking the side of good teachers and demonizing unions like AFT for blocking reform such as that proposed by former chancellor Ree of the DC schools. Her proposal to raise salaries significantly wouldn't fly with the attendant right of administrators to weed out weak teachers despite tenure.
The salvation according to this one-sided tract is the charter school, which avoids the restrictions that contracts and tenure bring. The film's drama comes with the overly-long sequences showing parent and pupil responses as they wait for the results of the painful lottery. While such theater persuasively shows the pain and disappointment for the losers, the doc fails to mention that there are many failed charters not worth the tears.
Director Davis Guggenheim used images of receding glaciers to pepper Al Gore's polemic about global warming called An Inconvenient Truth just as he does the lottery scenes in WFS. Such tactics that leave out strong opposing arguments compromise every time, but documentary makers just can't seem to understand that even powerful counter arguments can help any just cause.
WFS's real strength is showing parents and children fighting to get a good education, still one of the riches of modern civilization that needs no superman, just a committed populace that knows good teachers are the salvation of any school system.
John DeSando co-hosts It's Movie Time, Cinema Classics, and On the Marquee for WCBE 90.5. The shows can be heard streaming at http://publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/ppr/index.shtml and on demand at http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/arts.artsmain Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.RR.com