EchoMaRinE Well, that is a difficult movie/documentary to review. I cant say this is a masterpiece but it is not as bad as some people claim. Lets start with the positive things. There is a concrete idea about the US education system problem (I am not saying the idea is right or wrong. There is an idea). The presentation of the idea is fine but for something to be called "documentary", I would expect more evidence about the proposed claims. Some potential solutions are also presented and they sound like there is a way to fix the problem. Looking at the negative things, the list is longer I am afraid. First of all, I was confused about the status of the private education (as someone not living in US). At the beginning, I felt like the whole movie will be about how great the private schools are and how bad the public education is. It didn't go in that direction but the target was certainly the public schools. The attack on the unions just doesn't feel right. If your system does not let you show the stick, you can encourage people with carrots. Instead of trying to force teachers out of the unions by offering more money, it is possible to offer more money for better performance. Therefore, the proposition "we were going to fix everything but the unions didn't let us do" sounds childish and blaming unions for the performance of teachers is quite one-sided (as most reviewers point out). I agree with the "better teacher for better education" idea but the proper way to have better teachers is not bribing them to leave unions. Instead, one can offer performance based promotions and better education for teachers (yes, education of the educator). Anyways, the last ten to twenty minutes were really pointless as well. To sum up, the movie is pointing a problem but the way they try to propose potential solutions is somehow problematic.

Michael Mosqueda Waiting For Superman is a documentary by Davis Guggenheim. This documentary focuses on schools throughout America and the students within them. Parents in the film grow tired of the lack of success within these schools. Students continue to fail and drop out of high school. Officials blame the failing schools on the surrounding failing neighborhoods. It was soon revealed that it was indeed the schools that were failing the children and causing so much chaos within the neighborhoods they were in. Schools should be the number one priority in America because students make tomorrow, yet schools were continuing to fail these innocent kids. This documentary focuses on the lack of help schools have on children trying to learn. Children are ready to learn, yet schools have not yet figured out a system to help them succeed. Public schools are not doing enough to educate the children and prepare them for college. Without college, as proposed in the movie, these children will have a slight chance at a successful future. As Geoffrey Canada stated, schools in low-income areas suffer the consequences of failing public schools because these children turn to gangs and crime. Without education, these children will most likely end up in prison. As stated in the movie, it costs more money to take care of in a inmate rather send multiple students to a private school. Children in minority neighborhoods need more help in education because they suffer the most when it comes to statistics. African Americans and Latino Americans are the people who fill prisons in America. Without a push in education, these children will continue to fill statistics. Public schools fail students because the teachers aren't fit for such job qualifications. Because the teachers in public schools are protected by the ten-year plan, it makes it so much more difficult to fire the teachers lacking to educate students to solve the problem. The chances of firing a teacher in public schools are such a low percent. Students need teachers to do their job to learn; yet teachers feel they can do as they please as long as such rights protect them. Michelle Rhee tried to help the education system by tempering with the 10-year policy, but these teachers were not for such a change. She soon realized these adults were for themselves and not the children. Public school teachers can range from great teachers to horrible teachers. The difference in a teacher can have a student a grade level above normal or a grade level behind. Children hold their faiths in teachers because they hold their futures within their teaching lessons. When a teacher fails a student, that student will most likely lose interest in schools and drop out. Public schools are neighborhood schools anyone can be accepted into if they live in the district. Depending on the area, these schools can show excellent results or unbearable results. It is unfair and injustice for a parent to send their child to a horrible school because it is the only school in the neighborhood. There are other options for parents like military schools or private schools. The only conflict is the cost to send children to these schools when majority of the parents are struggling living in urban cities. All public schools should be performing at amazing rates for every child to have a chance to succeed in life. A school should not have a better academic program because it is located in a better neighborhood. Suburban schools may have better buildings and nice athletic fields, but they are performed no better than urban schools. These schools lack great results. They don't have high drop out rates like urban cities, but they do not provide better scholars. These students graduate to have regular jobs like managers or lawyers. America needs more students in science and mathematics fields. To solve the problem of public schools, charter schools were introduced into America. These schools were publicly funded but had their own rules. These schools had such a different system from public schools. Charter schools had different teachers because they actually wanted to be there to help children learn. These schools have so much more help and patience for students. They have longer school days so students can learn more and have time to talk to teachers. These qualities help students learn so much more that make charter schools provide at a higher level than public schools. The only disadvantage of charter schools is the space they have for students; space is limited for only a few spots a year. Parents struggle for the luck they need to get their children in these charter schools As parents attend these raffles for their children, they watch as balls with numbers on them spin or a pile of cards with names on them waiting for their child's name. Charter schools may be a new way for children to have a chance at receiving a good education, but they shouldn't have to rely on a raffle done with their names on them. Public schools need to realize they aren't helping America out by failing thousands of children every year. Drastic changes need to be made by people in power to get new teachers who want to help children and not teachers who look forward to a check every week. Its injustice for children to rely on money or luck to get an education that can put them in college. College shouldn't be so hard to achieve for children because college is what every child needs. School should be a priority in everyone's eyes in America because education is a huge deficit. Other countries continue to provide better results in mathematics and science. Foreign people come to America to do jobs Americans cant. This shows the lack of education America has. Change is needed to help this crisis. Work Cited 1. Waiting For 'Superman'. Davis Guggenheim. 2010. Film.

Uriah43 This documentary starts off by suggesting that our education system is broken. It then spends over 90% of its time focusing on inner-city schools. Needless to say, this is not a true sample of our education system as there are other schools in the country besides just those in the inner city. That fact should raise a red flag that there might be more to this documentary than meets the eye. It then goes on to criticize the teachers' unions for making it difficult to fire bad teachers. In essence, it makes these unions the scapegoat for everything that is wrong with our education system. What it doesn't document are the numerous times these unions prevent abusive and politically motivated principals, superintendents and other administrators from riding roughshod over good teachers who honestly care about their students. Not a word to their credit. Begging the question: Why not? Neither does this documentary mention the complete failure of "No Child Left Behind" which in fact has increased our high school drop out rates rather than decreased them. No mention at all. Again, why not? What it does do, however, is present a young woman named Michelle Rhee as a dedicated reformer who comes into Washington D.C. with the expressed intent to fire those who aren't up to the task. She accomplishes this in no time. The problem with that is that her "broad brush" approach also meant that some of those she fired may not have been so bad after all. But her supporters avoid this by suggesting that, since test scores rose during her term of service, her tactics were therefore necessarily correct. What they neglect to say is that apparently there was a massive cheating scandal during her time and that these same test scores are now being called into question. So apparently these test scores don't necessarily validate her ruthless and high-profile approach. Further, there were other issues the Washington Post reported (on 2 Nov 2010) that never made it into this documentary either. Again, why not? Apparently they weren't pertinent to the overall agenda. Then there is the issue of charter schools. During one part of this documentary it admits that only 1 out of 5 charter schools produce "outstanding" results. Not surprisingly, it doesn't exactly define what "outstanding" means. Yet it then spends the rest of the film leading the charge for charter schools. It even shows mothers and children crying when they don't win the lottery to gain admittance to them. To me this was both dishonest and disgusting. First, it's disgusting to use children as pawns to advance an agenda. Second, it is dishonest to suggest that charter schools are the answer to the problem when it is readily admitted that only 20% are meeting expectations. It is also dishonest not to include problems many of these charter schools are having. Instead, everything focuses on certain test scores a small percentage of these charter schools achieve. What isn't stated is that charter schools are allowed to drop any student who doesn't meet their academic standards! So if they're not meeting the desired goal then they are thrown out with no damage being done to the charter school in question. In other words, they aren't being held to the same standard as public schools choosing instead to focus on a small percentage (20%) that apparently meet or exceed expectations. But this documentary conveniently leaves all of this out. Neither does the documentary mention the impact that sports has on our public school system. Here in Texas there are some schools that consider winning a football championship to be their number one priority. So they hire football coaches to teach subjects like history, economics and mathematics regardless of whether they are good teachers in that subject or not. Money that could be used to pay for books or teachers is secondary to a new stadium or the installation of artificial turf. Yet, according to this documentary, it is the teachers' union which is at fault for everything that is wrong with our educational system. How convenient. Another convenient issue was the comparison of our national scores versus those of Asia or Europe. Talk about an "apples to oranges" comparison. On the one hand you have the United States which is an ethnically diverse country that has a significant minority of students who have difficulty with English and/or struggle with poverty and high-crime environments. We are compared against homogeneous societies like Japan or South Korea who don't have these issues. Yet our system is considered "bad" even though only a very small percentage of students in Japan or South Korea are afforded the opportunity to go to college while there is no such problem in the United States. But this isn't mentioned in the documentary. In short, the fact is that this documentary only addresses specific concerns which people with a certain political agenda want addressed and deliberately neglects many facts to the contrary. Those who participated in this film should be ashamed.

Tss5078 Waiting For "Superman" is an inside look at the problems with education in America. The film is extremely eye-opening, showing just how bad a state most of our education systems are in. They clearly illustrate that no matter the area, teachers are failing America's youth at an alarming rate. I found the film to be very biased though, as it only points out what's wrong with the system, and fails to mention any of the positives that still exist in education. It also fails to offer solutions for the problems. Guggenheim throws lots of facts and figures at us and repeats the same themes. It gets to a point where he's just beating us over the head with the same concepts. Many people saw this as an inspirational call to action, but me, I saw it as a guy complaining. Honestly, if you can't offer up a solution than why present the problem? I'm pretty sure that almost everyone in America knows how bad education has gotten, even if they don't have the exact figures in front of them