D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s tenacious style of public school reform likely will reach its largest audience to date this fall with the release of “Waiting for Superman,” a new film by Academy Award-winning documentarian Davis Guggenheim.
With “Waiting for Superman,” screened at the SilverDocs festival in Silver Spring this week and scheduled to be released Sept. 24, Guggenheim’s goal is to do for public schools what his 2006 “An Inconvenient Truth” aimed to do for the environment — bring the severity of the problems to the attention of Americans not forced to deal with them.
The movie was produced in association with Philip Anschutz’s Walden Media. Anschutz also owns The Washington Examiner.
“How do I get people to care about other people’s children — not just their own children, but others?” D.C.-raised Guggenheim asked, appearing alongside Rhee and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten after the Silver Spring screening. That concern, he said, served as the movie’s guiding question.
The film focuses in part on Rhee and a handful of charismatic educators around the country, including Geoffrey Canada, president and chief executive officer of the lauded Harlem Children’s Zone, and Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, founders of Knowledge is Power Program charter schools. KIPP D.C. operates seven of the city’s top public charter schools.
But it also follows five families in California, New York and D.C. in their heartwrenching quests to find a decent public school. Each family winds up in lotteries for high-performing charter schools with admissions odds as steep as 20 to 1. Predictably, not all of the students win a spot at the coveted schools.
Rhee praised the film, saying it powerfully illuminated injustices she is committed to ending. “People always ask me why I do this. This film answers that question,” she said. Weingarten, speaking after the film, expressed concerns over what she perceived as the film’s anti-union bias, and its potential to distract politicians from investing dollars in teacher resources and support. “There’s an agenda that I believe works — good teachers supported by good leaders, good curriculum, and eliminating barriers to success,” she said. “If we do those things, then this movie is a call to action.””
