Waiting for Superman is the inspirational documentary coming out this fall that investigates the flawed school system in the United States and the impact it has on everyday lives.

Some salient points:

• Among 30 developed countries, the US ranks 25th in math and 21st in science. In almost every category, we’ve fallen behind- except one: kids in the USA rank #1 in confidence.

• This generation will be less literate than the one before it.

• A child that doesn’t finish high school will earn less, and is eight times more likely to go to prison.

• “Our schools are failing them.”

• “You wake up every morning and you know that kids are getting a really crappy education right now- I don’t think they are; I know they are.”

• “Either kids are getting stupider every year, or something is wrong with the education system.”

• “About 60,000 kids have gone through this high school in 40 years; 40,000 didn’t graduate. Think of the damage the school has done to this neighborhood.”

• “I just want to make my grandmother proud.”

• “Someone has taken an interest in you, someone loves you, and they recognize the importance of education.”

• “It takes a lot of outrage and a lot of good examples to say ‘yes we can do this; let’s make a difference.” Bill Gates

• “When you see a great teacher, you are seeing a work of art.”

• “I want my kids to have better than what I had.”

• Make a difference. Pledge to see the film.

Stewart Nusbaumer of the Huffington Post wrote this review of it:

“The winner of the Audience Award for Best US Documentary was Waiting for Superman, a no-hold-your-punches investigation of our failing public schools.

Guggenheim’s (director of An Inconvenient Truth) documentary focuses on aspiring students and their parents, mostly minorities, together struggling against the odds to get admitted into urban charter schools. Lacking the money for private schools, or move to the suburbs where the schools are better — although not always good — having only neighborhood high schools that are “drop out factories,” these Americans have very few options. For many their only option is finding a decent charter school. But the odds for these young students to get selected in the lottery for a charter school is often worse than for students applying to Yale University.

Until the 1970s, American schools were the best in the world. Since then there has been a huge growth in poor elementary schools and poor middle schools that feed students to drop-out high schools. But there is no secret how to change our schools, although there are those who want this to remain a secret. We have tried throwing a ton of money at the problem, created a litany of newfangled reforms, even passed new laws, but nothing has worked. Our schools remain dismal.

What Waiting for Superman drives home is to improve our education system requires improving our teachers. Requires demanding our teachers get deep in the trenches, be allowed to be flexible and innovative, persist, and to be held accountable.”

The film looks incredible and we can’t wait to see it. Several of the key players in the film, like Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem’s Children Zone and Bill Gates and his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, are striving to improve the quality of education, both domestic and abroad. We applaud their efforts to make the world a better place and recognize that we’re working towards the same goal.

What do you think- will you go see the film?

Tags: education, education for all, educationprograms, Intel CSR, Intel education, Intel Foundation

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