Is 2010 the year of the education documentary?

USA Today
June 30, 2010

In 2006, An Inconvenient Truth shined a light on global warming, bringing images of collapsing ice sheets and drowning polar bears to multiplexes nationwide. Could 2010 be the year moviegoers get the angry urban parent with a hand-drawn placard, demanding more high-quality charter schools and an end to teacher tenure? This summer, no fewer than four new documentaries, most of them independently produced, tackle essentially the same question: Why do so many urban public schools do such a bad job — and what can be done to help kids trapped in them?

Among the new films:

•Teached, directed by activist and one-time Teach For America corps member Kelly Amis: It tackles teacher tenure, bureaucracy and "anti-child work rules that permeate every school in America," among other issues.
•The Cartel, directed by former TV news anchor and reporter Bob Bowdon: It takes on the "unconscionable failure" of New Jersey's public schools.
•The Lottery, an intimate look at four families' attempts to get their children into an oversubscribed Harlem charter school.
•The biggest and flashiest of the four? Waiting for Superman, directed by Davis Guggenheim, who won an Oscar for ... An Inconvenient Truth.

Guggenheim's film, to be released this fall, casts the widest net, following five families, from the Bronx to Los Angeles, as they search for better schools for their kids. At once moving and disturbing, Waiting For Superman illustrates the dysfunction of a system that seems to have lost sight of its most basic function: to educate everyone.Yes, but school reform as compelling drama? Perhaps. The narratives of both Superman and The Lottery build inevitably to nail-biting scenes of families pinning their hopes on a breathless random drawing to determine who'll get a shot at their dream school.

For Madeleine Sackler, who directed The Lottery, the decision to explore school reform hit in 2008, after she happened upon a news report of New York City schoolchildren and their parents enduring a computerized drawing to determine who'd get slots at Harlem Success Academy, a high-performing charter school. The next year her camera crews were following a handful of prospective kindergartners, fingers crossed and eyes closed in prayer, as they waited for their names to be called. Sackler, 27, says it's "a simple story about parents who want something and can't have it." She tells the story through the eyes of four kids and their parents — most of whom bemoan the public education they got in typical New York City public schools. One does it from prison. Vividly shot on a shoestring and edited in Sackler's New York City living room, the film opened in New York and Los Angeles on June 11 and opens in select cities nationwide this summer.

Sackler says most people who see the film are "surprised at how bad things are — and that there are so many parents who want things to get better," though she asks filmgoers to take her subjects' word for it, as the school scenes are all but limited to Harlem Success Academy. Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, says it may seem appealing to focus on just a few high-performing schools, but that it's a "cop-out" to think that this is a solution. He says unions have long pushed for improving the system "for every single kid" in the USA. "It ought to be that, no matter where you live, there's a great public school," he says. "It shouldn't be a lottery — it should be right down the street." Still, the question arises: Why are we seeing all these documentaries now? Perhaps it's the impact of President Obama, a Democrat and onetime community organizer, pushing for expanded charter schools and teacher pay reforms? Or crusading Washington, D.C., Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee— a key figure in virtually all every one of the four new films — on the cover of Time magazine, clutching a broom as she "cleans up" D.C.'s historically underperforming schools?

Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington, D.C., education think tank, says school reform "has gone mainstream — it's certainly politically mainstream now." The grass-roots push for better schools "fits into a larger American narrative about how small groups of people can change the world." Guggenheim, who narrates Superman, slams public school bureaucracies and unions, extolling charter schools. But he notes in passing, "Only one in five charters is producing results" — even though they're free from both bureaucracy and union rules. Says NEA's Van Roekel, "I can show you far more schools where the union is turning it around than they can show you where it's not."

Superman might also be due for a few updates, as two of Guggenheim's biggest bugaboos have been largely neutered: For instance, using jittery, hand-shot cellphone footage, Guggenheim goes inside New York City schools' infamous "rubber rooms," where teachers languish for months or years in paid limbo as they wait for due-process hearings over alleged misbehavior or poor performance. But he doesn't mention that the city and its teachers union agreed to abolish the rubber rooms in April. Also, the epic fight between Rhee and the Washington Teachers Union, left in limbo at the end of Superman, has cooled down considerably. In April, the teachers approved a new contract proposed by Rhee. And while the two sides still have differences about teacher evaluations, they've agreed to work through them. Petrilli says he doubts that all the attention will bring education reform to the level of global warming, since for most moviegoers, underperforming public schools will remain "a poor people's issue." "The vast majority of parents ... are pretty satisfied with their schools," he says. But Sackler says just putting the families' stories in front of moviegoers will help the cause. "Most people don't know what a charter school is," she says. "So at the very least, people will be more informed about the headlines."