Waiting For “Superman”, A Personal Review

Sarah Auerswald / Moms, Movies / 7 Comments

Waiting For “Superman” is the latest documentary to come from Davis Guggenheim, director of An Inconvenient Truth, and it’s a powerful film illustrating the problems – and some solutions – in our public education system. I highly recommend seeing it, so long as you bring your fortitude and a box of kleenex.

This issue couldn’t be more personal for me, since my kids attend public school in Los Angeles –  in fact they attend one of the schools that Director Guggenheim drives right past at the opening of the film, one of the schools he says he felt he couldn’t send his own kids to.

And I have been in the trenches. I was PTA President for 3 years, trying to raise money to help level the playing field with the ritzy private school across the street – the one the Guggenheims apparently chose instead. It was a tough fight, and not one I’d say I won by any stretch of the imagination.

I was never able to inspire as much fund-raising as it would take to make up for the problems that are systemic in public education and especially in LAUSD.

The film gets right to the heart of the problem, and it’s a two-parter: First of all, the system is outdated and doesn’t address the world we live in today, and second, the teacher’s union isn’t helping fix education.

OK, let it sink in and actually read the words, please: I said the union isn’t helping fix the problem. Not the teachers themselves.

At least, not all the teachers.

And please understand that I am a union member, as is my husband, and so was my grandfather. My loyalties lie with the little guy trying to keep THE MAN from pushing too hard and putting people’s lives at risk in the name of profit. But in this case the “little guy”, the teacher, is pitted against the even “littler guy”, the students. The kind of systemic change that would benefit the students most is being fought by the teachers’ unions, and I don’t see any creative solutions coming from their side besides cutting administrative bureaucracy.

I’m sorry, but shooting the fish in the barrel isn’t going to save education. Creative, systemic, BIG DEAL changes are what we need.

Most teachers in LAUSD are dedicated, hard-working people, trying their best to educate children in poverty who don’t speak English as a first language, to give them a chance at climbing up off that lower rung of society. But the system as a whole needs to change – in my opinion it needs to be thrown away and a whole new one created – and the union is much too vested in this old one to let it go.

I have to spread the blame a little wider here and say that I think our society has chosen to value the retirement plans of the Baby Boomers at the expense of this generation’s education. We can’t sustain the giant pensions that 65-year-olds will begin to draw on — and will then draw on for possibly 20 years or more — whether they once worked for the school district or the DWP — and also properly educate today’s school children for life in a global economy.

Please don’t take money out of my child’s classroom and then complain out the other side of your mouth about the ills of outsourcing jobs to India and China. Make the connection, people: if our kids aren’t better educated, they will lose high tech jobs to overseas workers who are better qualified.

And then they won’t have jobs to keep paying in to the Social Security (and pension fund) pot — from which you are living out your ripe old age in comfort.

So it affects you one way or another. Whether you like it or not.

Those kids you sentenced to a fate of low-skilled jobs? They’ll be pushing you around in a wheelchair at the Motion Picture Home one of these days – don’t think you can just move to a better neighborhood and you’ll never have to see them again. It’ll be your nephew who just never could get ahead, who’s still living at home with his parents at 45. It’ll affect you, whether you like it or not.

I feel very strongly about this issue because it directly affects the schools my children attend, but my kids are among the lucky ones: I will make sure they get the extras that a cash-strapped public school can’t afford to provide for them. Any parent who cares enough, sees enough value in education, and is able to, would do the same.

I worry about the kids whose families can’t, for whatever reason, do those extras for them. Those kids rely on the public education system, and for that reason alone, we have to keep funding it to the highest possible amount, keep selling the wrapping paper and having the bake sales, and attending the school board meetings — and blogging about it. It’s just too important.

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Other LA Mom Bloggers who are talking about the movie include: SoCalMom, Elise’s Ramblings, LosAngelista, Pillowbook, YvonneInLA, and QueenOfSpain.

{I attended a screening of the film hosted by K12.com.}