By Matthew Ladner
Hell has officially frozen over: someone from the Goldwater Institute is urging you to go see a film by the director of Al Gore’s global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Davis Guggenheim’s new documentary,Waiting for Superman, makes a compelling case for sweeping reform of the American K-12 education system.
Waiting for Superman focuses on admission lotteries held every year by several popular charter schools in different parts of the country. The movie’s central figures are low-income students seeking to escape badly performing inner city schools in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere. The makers of Waiting for Supermanweave the students’ heartbreaking personal dramas into an overall presentation of the flaws of American public education.
When the documentary reaches its conclusion, the cameras are fixed on the faces of the students and their parents as they wait in quiet desperation at the lotteries. More and more numbers are called, and the odds against them grow longer and longer. It feels incredibly wrong to have the future hopes and dreams of children decided in such a fashion.
It feels wrong because it is wrong.
There is no Superman about to fly in and save them – only us. The kids need the adults to pull our heads out of the sand and get about the urgent business of improving America’s embarrassingly dysfunctional school system. Run, don’t walk, to see Waiting for Superman when it opens at theaters this week.
Learn More:
School Reform News: Film Exposes Inconvenient Truths About Education Status Quo
Goldwater Institute: Demography Defeated: Florida’s K-12 Reforms and Their Lessons for the Nation
Goldwater Institute: Progressives should follow Rawls’s advice on school choice
Paramount Pictures: Waiting for Superman
Dr. Matthew Ladner is vice president of research for the Goldwater Institute. Prior to joining Goldwater, Ladner was director of state projects at the Alliance for School Choice, where he provided support and resources for state-based school choice efforts. Ladner has written numerous studies on school choice, charter schools and special education reform. Ladner is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and received both a Masters and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Houston. Ladner previously served as director of the Center for Economic Prosperity at the Goldwater Institute and as vice president of policy and communications at Children First America. 
