Waiting for Solutions

Ruth Starkman

"He's a rockstar," says documentary director Davis Guggenheim of Geoffrey Canada, president and CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone in Harlem, New York, an organization that endeavors to increase high school and college graduation rates among students in Harlem. Mr. Canada appears as one of the few catalysts of educational reform in Guggenheim's provocative new documentary Waiting for Superman about America's notoriously crisis-ridden public school system.

According to Guggenheim, America's public schools are in desperate need of rockstar teachers and administrators visionaries like Geoffrey Canada. No one watching the charismatic Mr. Canada or hearing about his accomplishments would disagree, as the documentary records Canada's successes and follows the lives of several talented American children, whose education and future lives hang in balance.

Guggenheim invites viewers' outrage as he presents the shocking statistics that most Americans already know: our once great public schools are failing our young people and no one seems prepared to take bold steps toward change. Waiting for Superman is also a character-driven tear-jerker, elaborating the desperation of several American children, Anthony, Francisco, Bianca, Daisy, and Emily, from a variety of backgrounds, both middle class and disadvantaged, African American, Latino, white in California, New York and Washington. These children occupy the center of the story, but nothing about their fate gives cause for cheer. Instead, the documentary devotes most of its energy to what it sees as the cause for their troubles, the political impasse of American education.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at September 24, 2010 7:09 PM
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