The American education system is a hulking, flaming wreck, sinking fast and in danger of taking the kids down with it. That’s pretty much what you come away with from Davis Guggenheim’s new film, Waiting for “Superman” (awkward quotation marks essential). It’s one of those documentaries that presents a problem so big and scary that it freezes you into inaction rather than inspiring a taking to the streets: something Guggenheim tacitly admits early in the piece when he reveals that despite growing up believing in the public system he’s chosen instead to send his children to private schools.

Guggenheim is an experienced filmmaker and the man behind Al Gore’s ultra successful 2006 PowerPoint presentation An Inconvenient Truth. With Waiting for “Superman” he creates a compelling picture of a system gone to the dogs but doesn’t necessarily provide enough in the way of compelling solutions. There’s a great sense of a big problem, but Guggenheim has tackled so many different aspects of the debate that you sense he lost his way a little.

Not that the film wants for interesting subjects. Whether its Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children's Zone, who has obviously done some excellent work and coins the film’s title when he relays the childhood story of his parents telling him that Superman wasn’t real (he therefore couldn’t be saved), or Michelle Rhee, Washington, DC’s controversial school chancellor, Guggenheim has managed to get some potent talking heads involved in his feature documentary. On a more poignant note, Guggenheim also addresses the hopes of five children hoping to eschew the public system and win a place at charter schools, something that’s decided by an emotionally brutal lottery featuring ridiculous odds.

Still, there are tracts of this film that seem oversimplified and other parts that could have done with more investigation (or maybe a documentary unto themselves). Guggenheim focuses on the benefits of the charter school system but chooses not to highlight some of the more prosperous public schools and drill down into what makes them successful. When it comes to the public schools you’re left with the impression that it’s all about the teachers – something that becomes the filmmaker’s central thrust: the American Federation of Teachers and the job security they provide to their members via tenure.

The film returns to the teachers’ union time and time again to kick it around a little, and while there’s obviously a problem with the tenure system and the way it protects bad teachers, a little more time could have been dealt to what makes a good teacher and what makes a bad teacher. It’s something you’d think Guggenheim could get right given his 2001 documentary on teachers in the public school system titled The First Year. But it’s another one of the elements that really deserves an in depth PBS documentary of its own – in “Superman” tenure is often just used as a blunt instrument with which to beat the audience.

The Michelle Rhee aspect is another that could have done with its own film. Rhee is an honest interview subject with some impressive statistics to back-up her time as chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools system (Rhee resigned from the position in October of last year), but she was often attacked for a supposedly autocratic style and her lack of consultation with parents. Guggenheim pays only lip service to these aspects of Rhee’s time in the job, and so it’s another part of the debate you wish you learned more about.

In defence of Guggenheim, if he’d focussed on these more prosaic issues he would have been without a feature film, and that’s where the kids come in. Coming from a variety of different backgrounds they naturally humanise the debate, and watching their fate getting decided at the end of the film is more than a little heartbreaking in some cases, but overall they end up being just another slightly undercooked piece of a slick but seemingly incomplete whole.

I wouldn’t mind betting Guggenheim struggled with these problems when he handed his film over to Jay Cassidy, Greg Finton and Kim Roberts for editing. The final cut is at least ten minutes longer than a feature documentary should be. There’s so much involving material in Waiting for “Superman” but things never quite come together as well as you sense they should. Guggenheim has bitten off more than he could chew in a totally balanced fashion, meaning this good documentary never quite achieves greatness.


I say: An admirable attempt at delineating the problems within the US public school system, but one that feels overstuffed, undercooked and ultimately a little imbalanced.

See it for: Guggenheim is obviously a skilled interviewer, and from the kids up gets some engaging talking heads. Canada and Rhee are particularly charismatic subjects.