David Guggenheim’s documentary Waiting for Superman makes several widespread claims about education, or more specifically, the problems currently inherent in public education. The film cites multiple issues with education such as teachers who are incompetent, yet protected by teacher unions, test scores that are abysmally low when compared to other countries around the world, and failing public schools with demoralizing drop out rates. The solution? According to Guggenheim, charter schools are the save-all answer to fixing the education system in the United States, the embodiment of superman swooping in to save education from its supposedly desolate state. Despite its sweeping assertions about the failings of public education, the documentary…show more content… Towards the conclusion of the film, the emphasis returned to the five students who were hoping to gain admittance to several different charter schools around the country via a lottery system. The lottery systems ranged from random computerized numbers to a bingo style drawing in which balls were drawn with numbers on them of which each student was given a number. The roughly twenty minute segment is drawn out and meant to build suspense as the available spots are slowly taken up and the students and their parents hold on to the hope that their number or name will be the next to be called. In the end, only one of the students that the film followed was selected. The remaining students are left to wonder what the future will hold as the parents speculate whether their children will graduate or be able to achieve their goals. After exposure to readings that questioned the success of charter schools, this pervasive conviction that these parents have that charters are the best solution is somewhat muddled. Perhaps, these students would have excelled within the charters they wished to enter, but there is also doubt that the charter would be the best environment for these students. Either way, Waiting for Superman presented a vision of charter schools that was one-sided in that charter schools are the sole solution, one that will save education; I think that the documentary would have been more successful if it had presented both sides of charter schools, the negative and positive views that are needed in order to get the complete, unreserved notion of what charter schools are and mean for our education
