The Thousands

Davis Guggenheim’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth kickstarted public debate about climate change. Waiting For Superman aims to do the same for the catastrophically broken United States education system. Guggenheim makes you care about this complex problem by focusing on five students – Daisy in LA; Anthony in Washington; Francisco in the Bronx; Emily in Silicon Valley and Bianca in Harlem.

Hollywood might idealise American school life, but really it’s a crapshoot – emphasis on crap. Thanks to over-regulation and teachers’ union stubbornness, kids get a crap elementary education, feed into crap middle schools then crap high schools, and end up requiring remedial literacy and numeracy classes in college – if they make it that far. Our five protagonists’ only hope lies in winning a lottery to attend a publicly funded but privately run charter school.

Like Inside Job, Superman has to crunch plenty of numbers, but communicates them fluently and engagingly using cute animations by Awesome and Modest. The film is bittersweet – not all five kids win the lottery – but it’s heartening to meet adults who agitate for change. These include activist educator Geoffrey Canada and the delightfully straight-talking former DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee.