As of right now with 31 reviews posted, “Waiting for Superman” sits at a healthy and much-deserved 94% fresh on the Rotten Tomatoes’ scale with the only negative reviews coming from, not so surprisingly, the Village Voice and Salon.com, two hard-left outlets [my review is here]. But let’s stop for just a moment to appreciate those predominantly liberal critics who are out there supporting a film that most likely presents them with a reality that goes against their own personal beliefs.
Okay, moment over. How much time do we really want to spend crediting people for doing what they’re supposed to do?
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As far as the negative reviews go, to be honest I find the Salon.com critique so long and lacking in focus that I’m not at all sure what Andrew O’Hehir’s problem is. Melissa Anderson’s Village Voice pan, however, brings up a number of arguments I’ve heard before — mainly from teachers bitterly opposed to charter schools. It’s that old canard our friends on the left call “economic justice”:
I have a choice,” [director Davis] Guggenheim, who narrates throughout, admits, before asking an important question: What is our responsibility to other people’s children?
Maybe, for starters, demanding a stronger, securer social safety net. But macroeconomic responses to Guggenheim’s query–such as ensuring that all parents earn a living wage so that the appalling number of kids living below the poverty line in this country is reduced–go unaddressed in Waiting for Superman, which points out the vast disparity in resources for inner-city versus suburban schools only to ignore them. …
Guggenheim’s insistence on not engaging with the injustices that children of certain races and classes face outside of school makes his reiteration of the obvious–that “past all the noise and the debate, nothing will change without great teachers”–seem all the more willfully naïve.
There was no failure to launch on my part. By the time I was 19 I was working full-time and clearing a cool $150 a week, which was still next to nothing waaaay back in 1986. But I valued my independence and was eager to get started at making my own way in the world, but that meant living where I could rent for less than $200 a month – which meant living in the worst parts of the City of Milwaukee. It would be two years before I moved on up to better digs, but those are two un-romantic years of practical experience of what it’s actually like “living below the poverty line.”
From my vantage point, people like Ms. Anderson don’t give a damn about the poor. If they did they would allow the scales to fall from their eyes in order to see that reforming the public school system and putting the education of our children above the jobs’ program known as the teachers union is the real first step towards “a stronger, securer social safety net.” If you’re uneducated, you’re much more likely to be poor. How’s that for a root cause?
Geoffrey Canada
For those two lean years I was making the minimum wage, and yet somehow I still managed to put a roof over my head, food in my belly, smoke a pack of cigs a day (those were the days), and own a microwave oven and television. And this embarrassment of material wealth was true for all of my equally impoverished friends and neighbors.
Economically, we never felt poor. We had stuff. What we did feel, though, was unsafe in our own neighborhood and insecure about the future.
It’s just a fact that except for the rarest of occasions, poor people in America actually do have a lot of stuff. The problem isn’t economics, the problem is circumstance. For one thing, living in poverty is like living among Vampires. Maybe 2-3% of the population is the problem, but they’re problem enough that you better be behind barred windows and locked doors before the sun goes down.
Had anyone come around talking “economic justice,” we would’ve laughed in their face. All we wanted were those 2-3% off the streets and locked away in jail forever.
The other problem is most definitely the public school system.
If you’re poor and have kids, I promise you that the only thing you want is the education system fixed right goddamned now. Time is crucial because you know better than anyone that next year could be the year your child is forever condemned, through a system that breeds hopelessness, to a life where “living below the poverty line” is the least of your problems. Gangs, drug addiction, unwanted pregnancies, prison… Those fates are what truly haunt families living in poor neighborhoods, because they’ve seen firsthand what a bad school can do to a good child and so they live with a sick heart over the inevitable day when they will be forced to turn their child over to a school where crime, chaos, indifference and failure reign.
It is a moral abomination that a child living in the richest country in the world can be doomed –or not — depending on the one-in-ten chance a bingo ball might fall their way and give them a golden ticket into a school not turned into a Failure Factory by a wicked teachers union more concerned with political power than a child’s future.
What Guggenheim’s eye-opening documentary teaches us is that the Village Voice’s demand that we ensure “all parents earn a living wage” is putting the cart way before the horse. For decades, in support of a monstrous status quo, the Left has spread the scurrilous lie that children from disadvantaged backgrounds can’t learn. This has been their excuse for failed schools, lousy teachers, and indefensible drop-out rates for decades now. At best this line of argument is a political ploy, at worst it’s outright prejudice. What “Waiting for ‘Superman'” proves once and for all is that of course these children can learn.
All it takes are dynamic educators like Geoffrey Canada, the hero of “Superman,” freed from oppressive unions to do what’s necessary to once and for all kill the desperate lie that “poor” means “unable to learn.”
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