TOW #28 - Waiting For "Superman" by David Guggenheim Analysis

American public education system is clearly failing. David Guggenheim gives his insight to fix this modern day dilemma 

             In the documentary Waiting for "Superman", David Guggenheim takes his audience of American parents, teachers, and students on a journey to examine the different aspects of the American public education system. Throughout the documentary, Guggenheim goes through the "good" and the "bad" of the way schools are run, and looks into how these factors may impact the way receive their educations. One of the problem that he discusses is the ease in which a school teacher is able to achieve tenure and how even a poor teacher cannot be easily replaced. Guggenheim claims that having an efficient or an inefficient teacher can make a world of difference to the students, and yet both kinds of teachers have the same kinds of privileges. He mentions how teachers unions are making this problem even more difficult. Guggenheim also looks into the outdated system of "tracking" and argues that while this system worked well in the past, it does not go along very well in the modern world. He then suggests the use of good charter schools as a solution to the problems of the education system, arguing that charter schools allow some students in poverty to receive higher education, even though this is done by lottery. Throughout the film, Guggenheim establishes connections with students and provides different statistics in order to emphasize that American public education system really needs to improve.

            There are five important students who are interviewed throughout the video: Anthony, Daisy, Bianca, Francisco, and Emily. These students all have a dream and a passion to learn, but they are constantly struggling with the harsh realities of the public school systems around them. Both Anthony and Daisy seem to be destined to fall behind their grade levels and fail to graduate their neighborhood's failing high schools. Francisco may be held back a year because of his weak reading skills. Bianca's mother is struggling to pay her daughter's tuition at a neighborhood parochial school, and Emily will most likely be placed on a lower track that can deter her from reaching her academic goals if she attends Woodside High School. As time goes on, the audience members start to establish connections to these students. Almost at the end of the film when each students enters a lottery in order to get to a charter school, I was relieved for Emily and Anthony for getting into Summit Prep and getting on the waiting list for SEED respectively, but I was also heartbroken for the other families who were crying because the students did not get into their school of choice. Guggenheim establishes pathos by giving frequent interviews with these students, and this ultimately makes the audience feel sorry for the families whose dreams are crushed when they lose the lottery. This feeling then allows the audience to question the effectiveness of the American public education system because it just does not seem fair that these students who do not get elected will have to continue receiving poor education and will have a slim chance achieving their academic goals while others would have the opportunity to get out of poverty through high level education. This sense of pathos allows the audience to believe that America truly needs a public education system that all students can benefit from.

            Guggenheim also includes numerous statistics and facts about the overall education system that establishes the credibility of the film. He analyzes the American public education system in the viewpoints of politics, foreign countries, and individual schools to reveal is weakness. At one point of the film, Guggenheim mentions how the spending per students grew from $4000 to $9000 and yet the reading scores stayed the same. The scores in math are no better, because only 18% of 8th graders in Alaska are proficient in Math, 40% in New Jersey, 30% in New York, so on and so forth. Internationally speaking, U.S. is one of the lowest in education for it ranks 1st out of 30 among in self esteem, but 21st science, and 25th in math. Even the good test scores in suburban schools are nothing to be proud of because the low scores of the bottom 50% gets masked by the top percent of students. All these cold hard facts show that no matter how much money the government puts into education in U.S., the standards are not getting any higher, meaning that U.S. is wasting its precious dollars for a seemingly futile cause. They also show that despite being a strong country, U.S. cannot compete effectively with foreign countries in terms of brains. This would be detrimental to our country, considering that in modern world, societies depend on people who had high education. In order to continue thriving, Guggenheim warns that U.S. must improve its public education system so that all students may have equal opportunity to learn in high standards.