Record dropout rates, demoralized teachers, parents forced to enter a drawing to get their kids enrolled: Davis Guggenheim’s portrait of US public schools is a sobering one.
"Schools are not working," said Guggenheim, director of the Oscar-winning climate change documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."
The East Coast premiere of "Waiting for Superman," a documentary about the rise and fall of the US school system, comes out in US theaters this September.
"Ten years ago, I did a movie, my first documentary about teachers," Guggenheim recalled in an interview with AFP. "Things haven’t got any better."
In presenting his film Wednesday at the Silverdocs Festival just outside Washington, Guggenheim said he "wanted to make a movie for the kids that was tough on the adults."
The film, which won the Sundance Film Festival’s audience award this year, follows several middle school students in disadvantaged neighborhoods of Los Angeles, New York and Washington that have some of the worst public schools in the country.
Even teachers there refer to the humble institutions as "drop out factories."
In Los Angeles, half of the students do not finish high school.
In southern states, only 14 percent of eighth grade students meet mathematics requirements, while a quarter of them meet that standard in California. The US capital fares even worse.
Just 12 percent of eighth grade students in Washington — less than one in eight pupils — know how to read correctly, according to Guggenheim’s film.
The struggling US education system produces 1.2 million dropouts every year, a far cry from past decades when the United States was considered the gold standard for education.
Those dismal figures come just as a Georgetown University study forecast that by 2018, 63 percent of all jobs will require at least some post-secondary education from applicants.
Guggenheim’s documentary scrutinizes a complex and stratified bureaucracy where federal laws, state laws, county prerogatives and independent school districts get all tangled up.
The director sheds light on the aberrations of a system where public schools, which cannot fire teachers who are often protected by a lifetime tenure, use bad teachers year after year.
This "dance of the lemons" or "passing the trash" allows schools to reassign bad teachers to new schools or districts rather than simply firing them.
"Superman" also follows the difficult history behind the creation of the charter school system in the 1990s, schools that receive public funds but are not subjected to the same rules and regulations governing other public schools.
While they provide an alternative that many consider better than public schools, charter schools frequently require parents to go through a humiliating process of lottery-based admissions.
In crowded gymnasiums, hundreds of young candidates and their parents fight each year over a few dozen spots as numbered balls decide their fate before mothers in tears.
The promises and flowery speeches of US presidents are highlighted in the film against the background of persistent school failures.
"Taking tests is not fun? Too bad," quipped ex-president George W. Bush in announcing his "No Child Left Behind" initiative that failed to produce its expected results to reinvigorate the public school system.
The poignant testimony of students destined for failure in "Superman" adds more fuel to the fiery education debate in the United States, just as President Barack Obama’s administration has announced it plans its own school reforms.
One of the rare education essays to make the New York Times best-sellers’ list this spring was Diane Ravitch’s "The Death and Life of the Great American School System," a virulent critique of the school system she once supported.
According to a 2006 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States now ranks 21st in science for 15-year-olds and 25th in mathematics.
"We want to make sure that kids’ future is not dictated by a lottery ball spinning around," said Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the public school system in Washington, who has enforced reforms in her district with an iron hand.
