Superman vs. the Failure Factories

(Chuck Muth) – Parents left the debut of “Waiting for Superman” in New York this weekend either “seething or in tears” after being “rocked by the work’s portrayal of the teachers unions’ protection of subpar educators.”

“I’m almost speechless with horror and disgust,” viewer Rita Callahan told the New York Post.

In the film, Washington, DC, Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee admits, “You wake up every morning and you know that kids are getting a really crappy education right now.

The interviewer responds, “So you think that most of the kids here are getting a crappy education right now?”

Rhee retorts, “Oh, I don’t think they are; I know they are.”

“You knew that education was a problem,” Carlos Terrazas said to the Post, “but you think if you threw money at the situation, it would be solved.”

Welcome to the real world, Mr. Terrazas.

“Every morning, in big cities, suburbs and small towns across America, parents send their children off to school with the highest of hopes,” a synopsis of the documentary on the film’s website explains.

“But a shocking number of students in the United States attend schools where they have virtually no chance of learning–failure factories likelier to produce drop-outs than college graduates. And despite decades of well-intended reforms and huge sums of money spent on the problem, our public schools haven’t improved markedly since the 1970s.

“Why? There is an answer. And it’s not what you think.”

Union teachers and union officials, not surprisingly, hate the movie.

“We don’t like ‘Waiting for Superman’ because we feel it stereotypes union teachers,” said Arthur Goldstein, 55, a teacher at Francis Lewis HS in Queens and a United Federation of Teachers chapter leader.

Up yours, Mr. Goldstein.

Your union has been screwing our children out of quality educations for decades now, creating this false image that all teachers are competent and highly qualified and that all the problems in our public schools are due to uninvolved parents and not enough money.

It’s about time somebody ripped off the mask and exposed you greedy, self-interested SOB’s for what you really are.

There are excellent, dedicated and highly talented teachers in our nation’s public schools. Unfortunately, they’re stuck in a Soviet-style government monopoly in which they no longer have control over their classrooms or over what and how they teach.

We owe it as much to those teachers as we do to our children and our nation’s future to break the strangle-hold the government and the teachers union have over education in our country. Perhaps this film will be a step in that direction.

Oh, and by the way, this film was not produced by some right-wing extremist, but by David Guggenheim, director of Al Gore’s global warming film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” So there.