Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for Superman is a furiously controversial look at the problems with American schools. I interviewed Guggenheim the morning after a screening in San Francisco at which he had dealt with questions from teachers and parents in the audience until fairly late at night.
The teachers were tipped off by the furor the documentary has already started on the Internet and on Oprah; a group called the United Educators of San Francisco surreptitiously handed out flyers, agreeing with some of Guggenheim’ contentions, but not his conclusions: “Why didn’t it show the success of most of our public schools?”
Below, Guggenheim discusses the film and the anger it is causing. The co-Oscar winner for An Inconvenient Truth is a cordial, seemingly slow-tempered man who has been making documentaries since 2001; his film The First Year followed a teacher at Los Angeles’ Venice High, a school in a neighborhood that’s a nexus for avant-garde and film-industry types and serious gang-bangers alike.
METRO: The image that opens and closes your film, of 5 students waiting for lottery results to find out if they’ve been accepted to private schools, seems especially poignant … the state lottery in California was one of the ways we were going to fund our schools. You mention driving past one of these failing schools every day, as you take your own children to private school. Where is that?
DAVIS GUGGENHEIM: I live in Venice.
METRO: Is it Venice High that you’re talking about?
GUGGENHEIM: Technically no. However, I followed a teacher at Venice High at work in my first documentary 10 years ago.
METRO: Did you go to public school yourself, and how well did that work?
GUGGENHEIM: I don’t know, I have my career, and that’s got to vouch for my education. (Laughs). What about you?
METRO: I went to a public alternative school. Hindsight makes me think I could have used more structure, more discipline.
GUGGENHEIM: Me, too.
METRO: So, you appropriate images of 1950s schools and social studies films to show what schools used to be like. You could just as well have used clips to show the anxieties of the era: snippets from Blackboard Jungle or Up the Down Staircase, or news items from the late 1950s about the public terror that the Russians were going to beat us at math and science.
GUGGENHEIM: These sections weren’t saying what the schools were like, they’re saying, “This is the way we remember them to be.” That’s why the film has the line “We all believed schools gave everyone a chance.” These schools were once thought of as a way out of the underclass.
METRO: You’re no stranger to controversy; I’m wondering what were the most extreme reactions you faced when An Inconvenient Truth came out.
GUGGENHEIM: We were bracing for the right-wing to be super, super angry, but mostly audiences got what we were saying. Our problem wasn’t that the audience was going, “I don’t trust Al Gore” when they went in—the hardest part was getting people to the theater in the first place. An Inconvenient Truth is pretty reasonable; it’s not vitriolic in its righteousness. Weirdly, we got flack from über-environmentalists who felt we hadn’t gone far enough.
The problem is parallel in Waiting for Superman. We get people in the nonprofit world, in grad schools, who say you didn’t get this right, you didn’t get that right. Of course, we didn’t make it for them, so that’s fair.
METRO: Why were there no stories about the failures of charter schools, besides the brief mention that some four out of five fail?
GUGGENHEIM: Explaining that would have taken 15–20 minutes of the movie. We’re still trying to figure it out. This isn’t about charter vs. district schools: it’s about, do the kids in the movie have a chance to go to a great school? The charters that I was following are exceptional schools, but there are plenty of mainstream schools that are wonderful and just as good. Unfortunately, those mainstream schools wouldn’t let me shoot in them.
METRO: I could see there wasn’t much cooperation here from the public schools.
GUGGENHEIM: It’s not necessarily their fault; a lot of times they get cameras coming in and they’re right to be worried. The charter question is interesting. The great thing about charters is that they’re innovative. One of the essential parts of innovation is failure. Starting a company or a technology, you’re going to make three attempts; two will succeed, and one will fail. The hard part now is shutting down the ones that are failing. The ones that are succeeding hold the ingredients to success.
The way I see it, charters are not the answer, because mainstream schools will always be there, be the majority. Charters are like incubators. We can see the things that work and bring them over to our mainstream schools. We need innovation badly, because the incremental changes we’ve been trying for 40 years have not worked.
METRO: One of the children profiled seeks to get into a “Seed School,” a boarding school of sorts. Is this the model we need, something like a British boarding school?
GUGGENHEIM: Seed schools are boarding schools. All week, the kids learn, and learning is the most important part of the kid’s life. They go home on weekends, though. Ninety percent of the kids in these schools go to college. They are drilling these kids, giving them a structure they don’t have in their life, and the results are equally impressive.
We need to do whatever it takes: whether it’s what Geoffrey Canada is doing in Harlem, or what the Kipp Schools are doing everywhere in the country. In places where family problems are extreme, we need to make the school the biggest part of the kid’s day.
In my first film, The First Year, I would watch the teacher I was following have incredible days with his students. What would happen to some of his students is that they wouldn’t have dinner; they’d come back after a terrible night at home, and the work would have to commence all over again. These educators feel that we have to sear into these students how important studying and structure is. It’s worked, it’s transforming lives.
METRO: There’s a Jean-Luc Godard quote I like, “Everybody talks about the key to a problem, nobody talks about the lock.” It’s surprising to me that you don’t mention the consistent underfunding of schools in California, after Prop. 13. You say money has been thrown at the schools. That sure hasn’t been the case in California. In fact, where there are suburban real-estate developments with Mello-Roos taxes, the public schools are often first-rate.
GUGGENHEIM: I do talk about the lock in this problem; it’s just a different lock than you see. The funding thing is a riddle, because we have spent more and more money on schools nationwide. California has its own unique problems, but the Washington, D.C., and New York districts spend twice as much and still have failing schools.
To me “the lock” is a broken system. Whenever you have numerous school districts, and unions, and a huge mechanism that works for the adults, and you pour money into that broken system … it doesn’t go to the kids, it doesn’t go to the classroom. I think more money works. The problem is that if you pour money into the broken system, it doesn’t get where it can do good. In general we’ve doubled money in the last four years, and test scores have still flat-lined.
All these very conservative people whom I don’t agree with say more money doesn’t work, but then you go into these schools, and there are no books, no pencils, the paint is peeling, the teacher doesn’t have what he needs—so there’s the riddle.
My theory is that I deal a lot with the lock. The system that’s in place, this huge centralized bureaucracy, the 14,000 school boards, the teachers’ unions and their relationship with the Democratic Party … that’s the lock, those are the things that are keeping reform from happening.
METRO: A recent Washington Post article contradicts what Waiting for Superman says about American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten. In fact, she has made the agreement to streamline the process for dismissing incompetent teachers.
GUGGENHEIM: We finished the film before the new contract happened. I’ve since talked with her and interviewed her and asked her to write a chapter on the upcoming book. I said, “Look Randi, we’re not going to agree on a lot of things, but we’re both going to agree that we want to help every kid in America.” She’s been amazing since I finished the film. She’s championed a new contract with New Haven schools about merit pay, and helped with a new law in Colorado that rethinks tenure. I applaud her, and the new contract in D.C., which is very forward looking, so I think she’s doing a great job.
[Alas, Weingarten wasn’t inclined to exchange compliments with the director, because a few days after I talked with Guggenheim, I got this mass-emailed, unsolicited review of Waiting for Superman from Weingarten. In excerpt:
“The film, by Davis Guggenheim, shows how tragically far we are from the great American ideal of providing all children with the excellent education they need and deserve. Yet, despite Guggenheim’s unquestionably good intentions, Waiting for Superman is inaccurate, inconsistent and incomplete—and misses what could have been a unique opportunity to portray the full and accurate story of our public schools. … Guggenheim has found ways to make facts and data interesting, even entertaining. But, when certain facts don’t advance his story line, he makes them disappear. … In other words, Guggenheim ignored what works: developing and supporting great teachers; implementing valid and comprehensive evaluation systems that inform teaching and learning … and insisting on shared responsibility and mutual accountability that hold everyone, not just teachers, responsible for ensuring that all our children receive a great education.”]
METRO: Can you provide a critique of D.C. chancellor of schools Michelle Rhee’s methods?
GUGGENHEIM: I think she’s a rock star, and she’s doing things people don’t want to do because they’re extremely unpopular. The fascinating thing is that the mayor is up for re-election. If he leaves, she’s gone. [Vincent Gray defeated D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty Sept. 14, but early rumors that Rhee was going to resign if Fenty was defeated proved false.]
It’s like stopping in the middle of heart surgery. Rhee is doing the difficult thing—attacking the lock—which is too many employees getting paid way too much money. She’s doing the hard work of closing 23 schools, firing principals because a lot of them were not effective. Rhee is really putting teachers first. I know what she’s going through, because I’m from D.C.
METRO: Maybe I need to research this more, because it’s hard for me to understand how closing schools and stuffing kids into merged classrooms is going to serve them better.
GUGGENHEIM: In D.C., a lot of these schools were half-full. When you’re shutting down schools, you’re combining resources, and now every school has a nurse or a PE coach, which they didn’t have before. It takes a lot of fortitude. You get people in urban districts who are not good principals. Some are great, but some are not qualified, and if we’re not willing to make tough choices the changes aren’t going to get made.
What I’ve read of D.C.’s schools shows me that some of these teachers were not trained, not effective and didn’t believe that every kid ought to learn.
And if I was in San Francisco, and I was the superintendent here, and I saw a few principals who were not working … I know I’d have to make tough choices. I know it doesn’t feel good, and shutting down schools is a terrible thing.
METRO: There’s probably a contradiction in D.C.; people who support teacher’s unions are sending their kids to private schools.
GUGGENHEIM: Those who had the money would do what my family did, which was to send their kids to school in Virginia.
METRO: Two final questions. A documentarymaker once told me that every successful documentary must have a hero and a villain. Do you agree with that?
GUGGENHEIM: No. I made one last year, It Might Get Loud, and it had no villain.
METRO: Except for people who hated loud music, I suppose.
GUGGENHEIM: In An Inconvenient Truth, we made a choice; we could spend half the movie going after Exxon Mobil. … In the case of Waiting for Superman, I made some tough choices about the unions’ role in all this, but when I interviewed Randi, it was a very comfortable conversational interview. I think the quotes put her in the best light. She made her case, even if I disagree with her somewhat.
METRO: Has Al Gore seen this movie yet?
GUGGENHEIM: I can’t wait to show it to him; I want to watch it with him.
Read Richard von Busack’s review of “It Might Get Loud”
Read Metro’s interview with Guggenheim and Al Gore about “An Inconvenient Truth”
