This starts out like Waiting for Superman, the Davis Guggenheim documentary about parents hoping to win the lottery-style drawing that will let their children get into a charter school. But Jamie (Maggie Gyllenhaal), single mom to a poorly taught third-grader, loses one such lottery, and Nona (Viola Davis), who doesn’t trust the Pittsburgh school where she teaches to educate her own son, doesn’t even get to enter. So when Jamie hears about a law that might allow her to turn the school into a charter, she enlists Nona as her natural ally. To succeed, they’ll have to get half the parents and half the teachers on board. That’s a touch of dramatic license; the small number of states that have such laws don’t include Pennsylvania, and most only require parent signatures. But requiring both gives the movie twin dramatic arcs and a window into the teachers’ perspective, and the state is actually considering such a law.
While sympathetic to teachers, this is not a movie that fans of teachers’ unions are likely to embrace. True, a couple of characters, in a couple of scenes, do praise their historical protective function — one even name-drops United Federation of Teachers founder Albert Shankar — but, it would seem, only so to make the larger point that they’ve outlived their usefulness. Yet the problem is not union bashing, although the film gilds the lily a bit — the one in this movie won’t even let teachers voluntarily stay late to help students—but rather that it’s more overfamiliar underdog story than a thoughtful critique of the educational system.
That is, it’s a lot like the crusading teacher movies (Dangerous Minds, Freedom Writers), possibly with a touch of Norma Rae, ironically, about a crusading labor organizer, except that here we have a crusading mom, plus some stirring speechifying, swelling music, cheering, and late inning heartstring-tugging parent-child melodrama, which Davis totally sells, but still…. What we don’t have much of is what it actually takes to improve a school and teach difficult kids. We don’t have much insight into the things — violence, lousy parents, chaotic family arrangements—that make the job of teachers and administrators alike in tough neighborhoods difficult. This is not to say those things can’t be overcome, only that this movie makes it as simple as really really wanting to do it. To be sure, there is a plan, but we don’t get to see it. If there are no union contracts, how will it be decided what teachers will be paid? On what basis will their performance, or that of their students, be rated? How will the children actually be taught differently? And so on.
Of course, systemic obstacles to change are real, too, and the film gets about a B in terms of showing those. It does suggest that when employees, teachers in this case, are not allowed to innovate or deviate, and when they see mediocrity rewarded, it can beat them down, decreasing performance. It shows how nervous people can be at the notion of change. By making people aware of parent-trigger laws, the movie may even inspire such change. But, notwithstanding the vague basis in fact, there is too much programmatic gloss on the story, something that could not be said of director Daniel Barnz’s previous film, the far more subtle teacher-student story Phoebe in Wonderland. This is geared to make people cheer at the end, but replacing the superteacher as savior with the superparent as savior is not necessarily a hopeful message. It suggests that rescuing students in our worst schools is a herculean task, one that will need to be done one school at a time. It suggests that, in their hearts, parents really are waiting for Superman.
IMDb link
viewed 9/13/12 7:30 pm at UA Riverview [PFS screening] and reviewed 9/13/12 and 9/27/12 and 9/29/12
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