Waiting For Superman Analysis

“Waiting for Superman” Public schools, or state schools, are meant to be an easily accessible form of education no matter what walk of life they come from. In the beginning, this was a concept that was very well-received as well as well-executed, leading to America being one of the top educated nations in the world. However, as time has worn on the system has fallen into disrepair and it shows in our nearly bottom rankings. In the documentary “Waiting for Superman,” possible causes for this were explored as families from these areas were interviewed and their journeys recorded. By applying, the structural-functional theory and the social-conflict theory, we can explore these ideas and reasoning from a sociological perspective. The structural-functional …show more content…
Due to these teachers that are tenured educating their students so poorly, the families begin to look outside their means. Stories such as the one we heard from Nikia trying to put her daughter Bianca through private school without truly having the means to afford it. Nikia didn’t like sending her daughter to the local public school so she worked as hard as she could to send her daughter Bianca to a nearby private school. This worked for a while but in the end it became harder and harder for her to be able to pay to send her daughter to school there and they told her that Bianca would not be able to graduate with her class because Nikia couldn’t pay the tuition. If the public schools had better teachers or that so many poor teachers didn’t fall under tenure then families like Nikia and Bianca wouldn’t be forced to attempt to live outside their …show more content…
The movie follows a majority of families of color as opposed to white families. This is because white families, and specifically white males, are born into privileged lives and have little need to work for what they want or need. Contrastingly, the families of color that were followed in the film had to work extremely hard to get their children even a small opportunity to have a better life. The stories of Francisco and Daisy exemplify this. Francisco is the son of a single mother who has two other sons besides him. She works as hard as she can in order to for them to have their best chance at the best education they can have. She was even willing to have to wake her son up at five in the morning everyday in order to make it through the forty-five minute commute and have him at school on time everyday. Daisy had many high aspirations for such a young girl and her family encouraged her to follow those dreams and make them reality. Even though, she enjoyed going to school and loved to learn, her family believed that she wasn’t getting enough out of her current public school. Both Francisco’s mother and Daisy and her family sat through lotteries to try and get a spot in the private schools of their choice. Unfortunately, as with almost all of the other families that were followed in the documentary, their number was not

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