Are We Waiting for Superman to Rescue Education?
Long before Davis Guggenheim made An Inconvenient Truth, he directed his lens towards education in films like Teach and The First Year. And while nearly a decade has passed since then, Guggenheim is back at it, grappling with how to make sense of a country that still maintains its unique sense of American supremacy, despite a kid dropping out of high school every 26 seconds and that worldwide ranks 20th in the number of kids that finally do graduate.
Failing schools—and the reformers who are attempting to fix them—are the subject of Guggenheim's forthcoming documentary, Waiting for Superman. And while it won't open until September in Los Angeles and New York, with a wider release to follow, an all-graphics video, "The Future Is In Our Classrooms" (see above), helps makes sense of not only the problem, but what you can do about it.
Today marks the launch of the action portion of the Waiting for Superman site, where you can help out an individual school by doing things like becoming a mentor or funding a classroom project. Feeling like the system is irretrievably broken and that your talents are better suited towards systemic change? You can do that, too.
