By: Daniel Mitchoff

While watching Waiting for “Superman” one thing becomes blatantly clear: David Guggenheim spent a lot more money on the movie than the research that went into the movie. Yeah, the basic premise of a failing school system with the United States is repeatedly emphasized within modern politics despite a continually developing global market pitting the next generation up against other countries’ youth that are vastly more educated and prepared. The United States’ educational system begs the question as to if America will still be competitive if the kids we are raising now are expected to be stupider than the previous generation.

This has been a problem for decades, with countless time and money spent on trying to solve the problem with virtually no end or solution in sight. But somehow, Guggenheim thinks he’s found the problem and presents it in Waiting for “Superman”. The problem with America’s educational system is the educational system, in essence. Absolutely none of what was presented in Waiting for “Superman” was new or correct. The idea of replacing current public schools with charter schools is based has no basis in statistics. In fact, most of the numbers suggest charter schools are no better nor worse than other public schools. And Waiting for “Superman” realizes this and goes on to its next point: teachers unions.

There are five states currently that prohibit teachers unions, all of which continually rank as the lowest states in education. The collective bargaining rights that teachers unions provide are the life blood to insuring that teachers can teach without having to worry about their jobs—a key ingredient in any job, not just teachers, to provide safety from capricious, discriminatory, and/or unwarranted employer methods. Perhaps the most unethical practice that teachers unions do participate in is giving teachers nigh-instant access to tenure, in which most professors go years and years of hurdling, researching, and brown-nosing ever before receiving. Tenure is the back-bone to Waiting for “Superman”s argument that teachers unions don’t work, but in reality this slight set-back cannot explain away decades of negligent within America’s education.

Guggenheim further deconstructs his argument down to the individual teachers’ level, blaming “sour apples” in the patches of teachers that accumulate until the whole system is rotten from the core. This would require that nearly a majority of teachers would have to have dissatisfactory performance records, which simply is not true. There will always be low-performing teachers, just like there will always be low-performing doctors, lawyers, politicians, and any and all other professions you can think of.

So Waiting for “Superman” returns back to the bigger picture: the bureaucracy and extensive amounts of regulation of the system makes it harder for teachers to actually teach. This leads Guggenheim back to the charter school question, but it is something more inherent within this assertion that Waiting for “Superman” starts to touch on something right, for once. Unlike any other nation, America has too much bureaucracy and red-tape in how student-teacher relationships should be conducted, red-tape that had previously not existed, and which has led to the further and further disassociation between teachers and the students they are trying to teach.

While Waiting for “Superman” is emotionally charged with impassioned rhetoric and skewed, misrepresentative evidence, it still contains a nugget of truth to its thesis. America’s education is at a crisis and something needs to be done; not by politicians, not by corporations, but by ordinary citizens who value their children’s future by taking proactive steps in helping untangle the massive amount of regulatory prohibition in the educational system that does not allow for teacher to become too detached from their jobs.