Waiting For...

This Friday Waiting for Superman opened in Charlotte. It was playing in a small art house movie theater in a swanky neighborhood. Teach For America got us tickets to go and see it with the rest of our peers. When I first saw the previews for the movie this past spring it brought tears to my eyes. My heart swelled with joy at the prospect of a movie that could really ignite national change in the education system. My expectation was that it would expose people to alarming realities that they were previously unaware of, and that suddenly American society would be united in a movement to end educational inequity.

To say the least I was underwhelmed. I was hoping to have the same feeling when I left the movie theater as I had when I watched Michael Moore's Sicko, the feeling of outrage at the state of our nation. In Teach For America there is a term "transformational leadership," and this is a term that I frequently share with other people because it is something that I feel is very important. I look to this term to help me describe what this movie was not, because I believe it was informational not transformational.

I listened to an NPR review of the movie this morning, and they had a lot of the same sentiments as me. One of the things they pointed out is that the only solution that the movie really came to was charter schools. While I believe that charter schools are an amazing development in the educational movement I know that charter schools are not a reality for all of our students as we saw in the movie. The ultimate message was that much of education is left up to chance for children. Although this is greatly upsetting, for some reason the way this was delivered did not leave me with the combined feeling of outrage and inspiration that I was hoping to leave with. I shared this with a colleague and she said, "well at least it starts a conversation," and all I could think to myself was well does it? I don't know that it does. After you watched it did you feel charged to join the movement to end educational inequity? I think that this movie had a ton of potential to shine light on the injustice that many of our children face in public schools, but instead it tip toed around the heaviest issues, interviewed some politicians, and brought charter schools to the forefront of everyone's mind. So all I felt when I left this was that I was waiting for something too, and that is some public image of the achievement gap that will transform Americans' thinking about the education system in our country.

Please share your thoughts on the movie! I would love to hear other perspectives.