Waiting for "Superman" (2010)

  Another day, another depressing documentary about how we're failing our future.

Do you have kids?  Have you gone through the nightmare of trying to find a good school district?  Does it seem really hopeless to look for a public school that isn't going to make your kids stupid?  There's a reason for that.

Waiting for Superman follows five or six kids from various parts of the country as they try to get into charter schools, which are public but are independent of school bureaucracy and have a 96% graduation and acceptance into college rate.  Because demand far exceeds supply, the schools have a lottery every year to see who gets in.  It's the only way to be scrupulously fair but it adds a level of cruel sport to a process that essentially determines a child's future.  The filmmakers peel back the layers to determine the root of the problem and discover a system of byzantine complexity between federal, state, and local funding, management, and union requirements that makes it almost impossible to fire bad teachers or reward good ones.  Programs intended to incentivize teachers by making their salaries merit-based up to six figures never even make it to a vote because the status quo is so firmly entrenched.

Let's face it.  The American school system is awful.  As of 2015, we are 29th in the world for reading and math among 15-year-olds.  Our universities are still pretty top-notch but less and less children are prepared for them.  As depressing as that is, it's not hopeless.  It just requires people to let go of this notion that "America is number one" and turning the focus on improving the way we do things.