Waiting for superman

                                      waiting for superman

     Education, educators and students

A documentary made in 1999 looks at the public educational system and the risks of the quality of that education that can often start by a lottery type drawing for the placement of their future. The documentary looks at the personal lives of several children and their family situations and their experience in the failing educational system.. It points out the skyrocketing spending for education and all the Presidents claim to making education their number one focus. Spending has gone up, grades have gone down. It appears the social economics of the inner city family's student plays a major role in the child's success.

Starting with president Bush, the "No student left behind' doctrine was initiated. Testing was taken across the nation and pointed to a disturbing pattern of falling grades as students progress to the high school level. In fact there has been a astounding dropout rate and was found to be the fault of the schools rather than the student. Many of the students who dropped out wind up in jail to further damage the financial burden on the economy. Locking up a teenager costs the public three times as much sending the child to a private school. Academic sinkholes in the big cities would suddenly be turned upside down by a 37 y/o teacher named Michelle Reed, who planned to change the system of entangled "GOLIATH" or "BLOB", that has formed in the public educational system that has taken effective education away from the students. The beurocratic overlapping and entanglement of the government has harmed the success of the student. 

Furthermore focus on the teachers ability is looked at, and how 'tenure" or the law protecting teachers employment, has harmed the students quality of education. Teachers unions further protected the failing teachers job security. It appears that that very union actually harms the recognition and rewarding of the good quality teachers. "The dance of the lemons", was put into play in which the failing teachers would be passed of to another school and so on.. "The rubber room", which is a $100 million a year cost to New York city to deal with the crappy teacher.

Charter schools were formed and ran on a lottery system that initiated in the Harlem community took students from a broad social economic community that was to be ran by non union teachers. Michelle Reed the schools superintendant fires several principles in her crusade to further weed out the ineffective failing schools. At the same time the effectiveness of charter schools is being observed, but only very few children will be enrolled. Another factor called tracking has further harmed the students sucess and the economy as a whole. It has been known that math science and engineering is the driving force behind the world economy, but the U.S ranks 23rd in the world.

A new and radically successful education program called Kipp has given new hope to inner city schools. By extending the school day and making the student and teacher accountable. 

What it all boils down to seems to be the adult. The teacher, the parent, and the commitment to the child. Not all students will get into charter schools, so remains is a huge problem in the school system, and really without a solution readily available. The budget for education is up why isn't there an increase in the academic success of the student. Is it the community, the teacher, or the students lack of motivation? Every student should somehow be selected in the lottery, or should the seed schools replace the current institutions?