Waiting For Superman Summary

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Reflection At a young age, students aspire to become doctors, lawyers, nurses, and other careers where they will become successful. However, public schools are failing to teach students the required material necessary to obtain these careers. In the documentary, Waiting for Superman, Guggenheim sheds light into the defects of American’s education system (Birtel, Chilcott, & Guggenheim, 2010). After watching this documentary, I learned that student’s dreams are jeopardized because we have not found architects who can fix our education system.
Downfalls of Public Education Although the U.S. passed the No Child Left Behind Act and doubled the amount of money spent per child for education, the U.S. is ranked 23rd out of 30 developed countries (Birtel et al., 2010). Society’s reasoning behind the low rank is because they assume that students are incapable of learning in disadvantaged neighborhoods. However, Geoffrey Canada proved this assumption incorrect when he opened a charter school in an underprivileged neighborhood in New York (Birtel et al., …show more content…

One factor is underperforming teachers. An ineffective teacher will cover only 50% of the learning material compared to 150% with an effective teacher (Birtel et al., 2010). If a teacher is not teaching a student successfully, why are they not being fired? Teacher tenure is a reason. Teachers who have tenure are guaranteed employment, thus making it hard to dismiss ineffective teachers (Birtel et al., 2010). To put this into perspective, “1 in 57 doctors lose their medical license and 1 in 97 attorneys lose their law license, but only 1 in 2,500 teachers lose their teaching credential” (Birtel et al., 2010). When a teacher does not effectively teach the learning material, their actions can negatively impact a student. Therefore, it may explain why the United States has a low

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