Waiting for Superman or Waiting for Godot?

If I were going to critique the new Davis Guggenheim movie, "Waiting for Superman," I would have to get out and see it. In this post, I am merely going to raise a couple of questions about it.

The first question arises from reading Richard Kahlenberg's commentary in The American Prospect and Dana Goldstein's review in The Nation. Kahlenberg mentions that Guggenheim's documentary claims that one in five nonunion charter schools produces amazing results.

Presumably, Guggenheim bases that claim on the study that Kahlenberg also cites:

According to a large Stanford University study funded by pro-charter school foundations, only 17 percent outperform regular public schools to any degree; 37 percent underperform; and 46 percent have no impact.

Question Number One: How, exactly, does Guggenheim claim to be a documentarian and yet he presents such a misleading statistic with a straight face?

Okay, if he wants to round up the 17 percent to call it one in five, no problem. And if he wants to say that any measure of better performance at all is "amazing," I won't object. That is a matter of opinion.

But if the data shows that a nonunion charter school is more than twice as likely to underperform unionized public schools than it is to outperform them, shouldn't you mention that statistic in your documentary? If Guggenheim and the nonunion charter school crowd were selling us on this idea, and they hid the odds of worse results from us, wouldn't that be false advertising? Isn't this the same thing that Goldman Sachs did when it pitched "crappy" investments to its clients?

All those are rhetorical questions. I have not asked my second question yet.

The second question arises from thinking about the policy implications of the title of Guggenheim's documentary. I have no doubt that Geoffrey Canada is an inspirational figure and that the students in Harlem are better off thanks to his dedicated efforts to improve education. Call him Superman if you want.

But it is naive to think that inspirational individuals are a sound foundation for public policies. The challenge for American education is not to give school superintendents vast powers and then to wait for a Superman to step in and use those powers wisely. That approach would be far more likely to work out as waiting for Godot.

The real challenge is to design systems and adopt reforms so that all school districts and all students can achieve excellence- even when the school superintendent is unable to leap over teachers unions in a single bound or is actually slower than a speeding bullet.

(We could start by ensuring that bullets stay as far away from schools as possible, but the Roberts Supreme Court disagrees with me on that point.)

Question Number Two: If Davis Guggenheim were really interested in finding out why some unionized public schools are failing, why doesn't his documentary examine the majority of unionized public schools that are succeeding - some by an amazing margin - and then compare those groups of schools?

It is possible that my two questions reflect some misunderstanding on my part. I was pretty sure that a documentary was intended to present facts with any editorializing in the background. When key facts go missing and the editorial judgment is front and center, I thought it was called a 102-minute political campaign commercial.

I'm just glad that Davis Guggenheim did a much better job of handling statistics in his earlier work, "An Inconvenient Truth."