I just got back from Waiting For Superman and the film is an absolute must-see.  If you are looking for the root causes of where America has gone off the tracks, this is one of those “shock you into greater awareness” movies.  The film explores the breakdown of the American education system through the lens of five struggling families and highlights the heroic work of charter school pioneers.  

In the spirit of breaking with partisanship, education is an area where rank and file Democrats are dead wrong.  The film is not kind to the teacher’s unions (NEA and AFT), a critique that I find mostly valid.  The unions have strangled almost all attempts to introduce greater accountability and innovation and are simply a massive bottleneck to reform.  I am a firm believer in the ability of charter schools to challenge the status quo and Waiting For Superman highlights some of the best examples of when things go right.

One of the key themes of the film is grappling with the question of what comes first… bad schools or bad neighborhoods (i.e. do bad neighborhoods simply mean underfunded, underperforming schools or the reverse, do bad schools perpetuate neighborhoods full of poverty, crime, etc.).  There is not so much a clear answer to this question in the film as there is a clear sense of the interdependence of America’s future prosperity and the country’s ability to reform our education system.

We are quickly falling behind the rest of the world in preparing our citizens (children and professionals) to compete for high value jobs in the 21st century.  We can only bury our heads in the sand for so long pretending that somehow America deserves these jobs and that somehow jobs that have been lost will miraculously return.  We need to confront the hard realities of our broken systems and we need to do it without regard for political parties, political correctness, or even politeness.  The problems seem just too big and too important for pleasantries.