Waiting for Superman Movie: an Overview of Charter Schools

In Waiting for Superman, the film talked about the benefits of charter schools, and how they’re the future of education for America. It has apparently increased grades and the system bypasses the hassle of the teacher union, therefore allowing unhindered education due to competent teachers. However, this movie is extremely biased, and so not entirely trustworthy.

The documentary explained that in public schools, there are dropout factories, where the majority of students never graduated. The dropouts make the surrounding area a “bad” place, and this leads to a bad learning environment for future generations. This repeats, and becomes a vicious cycle, and neighboring places also become potential drop out factories. The teachers in dropout teachers aren’t doing their jobs either. For example, in 1 school in the film, the teacher refused to teach, and instead, just sat there reading his newspaper. He was fired, but a year late, the school was forced to hire him back. This is because teachers have tenure, and this means that if the teacher taught for at least 3 years, he is guaranteed that position forever, unless he does something extremely illegal. So, in dropout factories, the teachers are not doing their best, and some even don’t teach. Even in decent public schools, the grades of students on standardized tests are not up to the standard. Overall in America, only around 35 percent of students have a competent math and English grade. Surprisingly, our country’s capital, Washington D.C. has one of the worst education districts in America.

Charter schools can fire and hire anyone at will, which makes sure that incompetent teachers are gone from the system. They also have power over what to teach and how long a school day is. Furthermore, according to the film, several charter schools have been instituted in areas of dropout factories, and dramatically decreased the dropout rates. Since a lot of people are trying to apply to these charter schools, the schools has a lottery in which a few hundred people apply, and only several dozens of students are admitted in. In the film, we see 4 people trying to get into these schools via a lottery. What is very depressing is that if they don’t make the lottery, they have to go to a dropout factory in the area.

What I found interesting is how biased the movie is. This movie exclusively only focuses on extremely successful charter schools and notorious failing public schools. It never even talked about the teacher burnout rate. 25% of the teachers gave up teaching to the best of their ability/dropout of the schools because it was so demanding in order to help the students get better grades. It also focuses way too much on how charter school help students in areas of dropout factories, but in other places, does it really help that much? In our school debate, I learned that in reality, charter schools on average, is not actually helping grades go higher. In some places, charter schools are actually inferior to public schools. This film is reputable source for pro-charter school movement, but it ignored the whole other aspect: How to reform the public educational system.