How does a nation combat a cultural epidemic that begins at childhood? That’s the question Davis Guggenheim tries to tackle in his most recent documentary, ‘Waiting for ‘Superman,” which has been playing in select theatres and will be released nationwide Friday.

The film, which chronicles the lives of five students living in urban cities, is a sad and very real portrayal of the failure of education reform in the United States. In the trailer,

Guggenheim interviews a young student who says she doesn’t know what college she wants to go to, but knows she ‘wants to be a teacher.’ Another simply says he ‘wants to go school, I want my kid to have better than what I have.’ These kids, barely in their teens, are already recognizing the importance of education and how impossible it is for them to receive one.

I have yet to see the documentary (and have been fervently waiting for it to come out), but just from watching the trailer, I found myself dumbfounded and inconsolable at the crisis we have in our hands. Some of the students who are featured in the film can only go to ‘high-performance’ charter schools based on a public lottery. Meaning each student is given a number, and an administrator from the school district picks out X amount of balls that have random numbers written on them. Those whose numbers are picked can go to the school, and those whose numbers aren’t — well, they’re out of luck.

In 2010, when debates about health care and same-sex marriages have been inundated

throughout the news, education reform has been left in the backseat: unaddressed and forgotten. When the No Child Left Behind Act was passed in May 2001 with the intention of reforming children’s education, people were finally able to let out a sigh of relief that our future generations would at least be literate and educated.

But it’s been nine years, and little progress has been made to help students in low-income neighborhoods. Even worse, the obstacles that stand in the way of kids receiving good education are plenty: retaining good teachers, improving statewide scores and, most importantly, encouraging students to stay in school.

According to The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, 68 percent of eighth graders can’t read at grade level, and along with the 1.2 million students who drop out of high school each year, 44 percent of those who drop out under the age of 24 are jobless.

To think that, right now, in the 21st century, 6,000 students are dropping out of school every day — that’s one student every 26 seconds — the disparity between those who are able and not able to receive basic education is stark and terrifying.

‘The story line on education, at this ill-tempered moment in American life, expresses what might be called the Noah’s Ark view of life: a vast territory looks so impossibly corrupted that it must be washed away, so that we can begin its activities anew, on finer,

higher, firmer principles,’ wrote Nicholas Lemann of The New Yorker. ‘We have a moral obligation to be precise about what the problems in American education are — like subpar schools for poor and minority children — and to resist heroic ideas about what would solve them, if those ideas don’t demonstrably do that.’

The only silver lining this film begins to pose is how we, able-bodied college students, can contribute to start amending this crisis. Not all of us want to be teachers, and that’s OK. But whatever field we decide to be in, it’s imperative that we begin to take a more proactive approach by advocating for better public education for future generations. Those before us have influenced our own gaps of adolescence and adulthood, now it’s time to pass the reign.

Angela Hu is a junior magazine journalism and English and textual studies major. Her column appears weekly, and she can be reached at ajh01@syr.edu.

 

Published on October 6, 2010 at 12:00 pm