Directed by: Davis Guggenheim
Rating: PG

Davis Guggenheim should get one of those bright red buttons from Staples that proclaims "That was easy!" when you push it. After decades of failed educational reform in America, Mr. Guggenheim has found the answer to the scholarly mess that is our public school system. His solution involves a heck of a lot of charter schools. Oh, and don't forget the dissolution of the teachers' unions.

Waiting for "Superman" follows five kids from five different neighborhoods—mostly poor and urban—as they struggle in their current schools and attempt to find alternatives. They aren't failing school, though; their schools are failing them. The problem, Guggenheim argues, lies almost completely on the shoulders of the teachers. Some are inattentive, some are bad, some are abusive, some are neglectful—but what they all have in common is that getting rid of them proves to be a superhuman challenge. They are protected by a bureaucracy of gargantuan proportions, they are shielded by tenure, and they are stubborn about keeping things that way.

Guggenheim, who directed the similarly revealing An Inconvenient Truth, walks us through the public school system with the help of educational reformers like Geoffrey Canada, whose inner city charter schools promise to send kids to college, and Michelle Rhee, the controversial superintendent of the Washington, D.C., public schools, whose battle against the teachers' unions was fruitless. The statistics and anecdotes get more appalling as the movie progresses. We hear about the absurd easiness of achieving tenure. Then we hear about the 23-step process to fire a teacher who's in a union. And then we hear about places like New York's "rubber room," where teachers awaiting probation hearings twiddle their thumbs day after day, all the while receiving their full salaries. It's an expensive mess, and one that will only get worse in the future, as these kids grow up and realize they can't compete with their international counterparts, who received proper educations.

Guggenheim might do a few too many dramatic close-ups of classroom-related items for my taste, and the "We can make a difference" platitudes running through the end credits (the same gimmick he used in An Inconvenient Truth) are cheesy, but these are only minor issues with a film that is, on the whole, shot and edited extremely well. My only qualms are with Guggenheim's approach to this testy subject (no pun intended). It's easy enough to be swept up into the anti-union mania and the charter school craze; it's especially easy if you take a position having only seen this movie. The interviews with Rhee and Canada are extensive and fascinating, but where are the voices from the other side? Nowhere to be found, except in stock footage clips of teachers' union conventions where swaths of obviously misinformed educators cheer for their leader as if they were viewing a sporting event.

The real story here is in these five kids, these poor souls who just want to learn. The cruelty of the public school system has forced them into lose-lose binds, with charter school lotteries as the only escape route. The odds are stacked against them, sometimes hopelessly so—one girl enters a lottery at a school that has 10 spots open and 135 applicants—but we hope for them anyway. When they get lucky, it's a glorious moment. And when they're not so lucky, we can only hope that their drive to succeed will be enough. Guggenheim tells us it doesn't have to be this way, though. What if all the schools in the nation were like these special charter schools, to which hundreds of kids apply?

There is a segment of the movie that Guggenheim begins by saying, "Now that we know how to solve the problem…" I remember this moment because, in the audience, I was wondering to myself, "Wait a minute, when did we do that?" His argument is biased and presumptuous and it asks for too much too quickly, although in a perfect world I suppose it could work. But it isn't a perfect world.

Waiting for "Superman" is well made and convincing and it bears an important message, but because it's a barrage of criticisms against public schools, the people who need to hear the message most—bad teachers and their unions—probably won't want to listen.

Danny Eisenberg is a 2010 graduate of the Bromfield School and is currently a student at the University of Pennsylvania.