Documentary Examines Issues Within The Education System

When Davis Guggenheim was looking at public schools to send his son to, he was horrified at what he found and instead opted, against his own beliefs, to pay for private school so his child could get a good education. This stung Davis, who was a strong supporter of the public school system, and even made his first documentary about public school teachers. Along with his An Inconvenient Truth and It Might Get Loud producer Lesley Chilcott, the two decided to further investigate the problems with the American education system. The result is Waiting for ‘Superman’, a heart-wrenching and shocking wake-up call about the problems children face from kindergarten to high school.

CityNews.ca spoke with Guggenheim and Chilcott about the film. Read our Q&A below.

Brian McKechnie: Did both of you go to public school?

Lesley Chilcott: I went to public school in three different states and I got lucky. I got on that top track and that’s the track where the teachers pay attention and groom you and all of that.

Davis Guggenheim: I remember asking my mom when I was five why I take the school bus from Washington, D.C. 45 minutes into Virginia to go to school and she said, ‘Because the schools in Washington, D.C. are broken.’ It’s 40 years later and they are still broken.

BM: Do you think the idea of public education has changed since you were kids?

Davis Guggenheim: It’s amazing that some of these schools have no arts or after-school and sports stuff at all. For a guy who was at the bottom of his class, I depended on those things. My father taught me that in America, if you worked hard and went to school, you could have a chance, even if you were born in a different country and didn’t speak the language and your parents were poor. It’s American myth, but a myth is also something that can be true. But that’s not true anymore.

BM: Did you find the neighbourhood that people live in affected the quality of the public schools?

Davis Guggenheim: We live in Venice, California, where a small apartment costs half a million dollars and a small house costs more than a million dollars and still the neighbourhood schools are not working. So that idea in America that the bad schools are over “there” is gone now. Even buying your way into a neighbourhood with a good school is not working anymore.

Lesley Chilcott: The middle-class schools are also not doing well internationally. And while they may not be D- and F students in terms of testing, they are not doing well at all. Emily [one of the children featured in the film] lives in an amazing neighbourhood, but the high school she was supposed to go to was performing quite poorly [despite] it having a beautiful campus, an arts room, science, etc. And when you’re a kid like Emily who may need a little extra help, there is a real danger that you are not going to get it.

BM: You didn’t cover every angle of education, such as home-schooling. Was there anything else you wanted to cover but couldn’t?

Lesley Chilcott: We easily could have had a five-hour movie, and we did at one point when we had the movie in two separate parts. We had all the stats and animations, and political information in one part and then the kids story in another part. It wasn’t until just before Sundance when we turned it into one movie. Unfortunately, we didn’t talk about special ed. which is a huge issue and could have been its own [film].

BM: Are teachers the problem or is it the system?

Davis Guggenheim: This is [the reason] we made the movie. The first movie I made 10 years ago was about public school teachers. You realize these guys are the solution, but outside of their classrooms there was this system that was so broken that it tended to wear down all the good people and tended to eat up all the new money. Our thought was to make a movie that attacked that system. You’re never going to fix our schools unless you fix that corrupted and broken system.

BM: Do you think privatizing schools is the answer?

Davis Guggenheim: I don’t think everyone wants to privatize schools. Most of my friends would rather send their kids to a great public school. I feel that my kids are missing out. They have great teachers but they are not going to school with their neighbours and that’s an experience they are not getting. I don’t think there is a movement to privatize schools; I think people are just desperate to find a great school, and one of the last options is to pay money for something you should be getting for free.

Waiting for ‘Superman’ is in theatres on October 1. Find out how the Canadian education system compares to the American system at waitingforsuperman.com.

brian.mckechnie@citynews.rogers.com

Top image: A scene from Waiting for ‘Superman’. Courtesy Paramount Pictures.

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