Waiting for 'Superman' (PG). Director: Davis Guggenheim. 111 minutes
Cute kids can carry a film a long way. Take Anthony, a fifth-grader from Washington DC. His lips distended by a mouthful of braces, he admits he's determined to stay in school, in order to avoid the mistakes made by his father, and to make his grandmother proud. Smart and smiling Daisy, from East LA, wants to become a nurse so she can help people in need. Bronx first grader Francisco just can't figure out why his classmates don't enjoy school as much as he does.
Waiting for 'Superman' uses the stories of five intelligent and motivated students as the emotional fulcrum for a sober consideration of the flaws in America's public education system. Most live in low socio-economic areas where school academic performance is generally low, and the drop-out rate is high. For all five, their academic future hangs in the balance.
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Davis Guggenheim is the documentarian who brought Al Gore's climate change manifesto to a global audience in An Inconvenient Truth. Waiting for 'Superman' also reveals uncomfortable truths and systemic failures that seem to favour bureaucracy and teachers' rights over students' wellbeing.
The stakes are high: Guggenheim draws a link between low levels of education and custodial prison sentences in later life. Strikingly, he demonstrates how the cost of imprisoning one inmate for just a few years would be enough to pay for a child's entire primary and secondary school education.
The film has its villains. Not just successive presidents who have paid lip service to this popular issue but failed to pass significant reforms. It also paints teachers unions as self-interested clubs whose safeguards for good teachers also protect the lazy and incompetent, at students' expense.
It finds fault with the system of 'tracking' students, under which low-achieving students are held to lower academic standards and given fewer opportunities to improve. Eighth-grader Emily lives in an affluent Northern California neighbourhood. She is generally a high-achiever, but struggles with maths. The tracking system represents a genuine threat to her academic flourishing.
There are heroes, too. The chancellor of Washington DC's public school system, whose tough love approach has seen her close 23 schools deemed 'ineffective'. The Harlem based reformer who devised methods of 'pipelining' students from birth to college. And the proprietors of high-performing 'charter schools', alternative education institutions that receive public funding contingent upon strict academic standards.
Waiting for 'Superman' celebrates the best of