If Oscar winning director, David Guggenheim’s last movie An Inconvenient Truth rattled your environmental cage, then this one will really hit home to any parent, grandparent, aunt, or uncle with a school-aged child in your family. Like everything else in America, what the HELL has happened to our education system?!?! As a small child I can remember the angst – the daily ritual – juice, cereal, shoes on, lunchbox, backpack, school bus and then walking down a corridor to my classroom. And I loved my teachers and I loved my school. But what if you don’t? What if (unlike some of us who have the choice of private school) you’re the victim of a bad public school system where a lottery decides if say, 20 of 500 children are chosen to attend the better school? Since 1971, educational expenses per child have risen 40% yet reading scores have flat-lined. What happened to George Bush’s plan “No child left behind!?” Did you know that in Mississippi the math scores aren’t much better than they are in Los Angeles, California? And far worse, in our nation’s capital of Washington, D.C., only 12% of students are up to par on their reading levels? The documentary follows two tracks…one is the statistics of frightening drop-out rates due to lousy teachers (who are granted tenure because apparently the unions protect them.) All they have to do is breathe in class to keep their jobs. And, paralleling that story line, we follow five families with devoted blue-collar parents, who believe that education is the answer to everything… these parents help their child do homework, read, tutor and even forfeit paychecks in hopes of getting them into a better system and out of the ghetto. But with an entrance into these better schools based on a spinning lottery, the reality is zero chance of entry. They’re child will fail even if that child was a better student then his classmate. Bill Gates sums it up best… because if we don’t fix the problem now, then in twenty years we’ll be unable to compete with a challenging technological and economical world (because American children already fall behind other countries in education.) If this were a movie, I’d give it three tiaras for a few issues that don’t gel in the structure, but because it’s a reality, it’s only problem, like Guggenheim’s last film, is that it doesn’t offer any solution. So let’s hope, at the very least, to raise some awareness. Four Tiaras
