Waiting for Superman.

Have you seen this DVD??  and if you haven't you really should, especially if you are a teacher.  

According to Rotten Tomatoes,  "Every morning, in big cities, suburbs and small towns across America, parents send their children off to school with the highest of hopes.  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.  From "An Inconvenient Truth" director Davis Guggenheim comes "Waiting for Superman", a provocative and cogent examination of the crisis of public education in the United States told through multiple interlocking stories - from a handful of students and their families whose futures hang in the balance, to the educators and reformers trying to find real and lasting solutions within a dysfunctional system.  Tackling such politically radioactive topics as the power of of teachers' unions and the entrenchment of school bureaucracies, Guggenheim reveals the invisible forces that have held true education reform back for a decade."

They end the DVD by stating that "today there is a crisis in America.  It goes beyond health care, the economy, and national security.  The crisis is in our schools.  Out of 28 developed countries, Americans rank 20th.  The key to solving all of these problems - such as climate change, the economy, etc - rests on solving on thing first - education.  These kids are the future of our country.  In America right now a kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds, resulting in 1.2 million dropouts per year.  These dropouts are 8 times more likely to go to prison, 50% less likely to vote, more likely to need social welfare systems, and earn .40 to the dollar less than a college graduate."  Crazy statistics huh?  I think so!

This is a trailer for the film - Waiting for Superman.

Click HERE to learn more about the Waiting for Superman campaign.  Also, while watching this film I was reminded of another film I watched not too long ago called The Lottery.  That film followed four families applying to a school lottery in order to attend certain charter schools.  Umm...I know this may seem naive, but I truly didn't even know things such as school lotteries actually existed!  So to say that the film was rather enlightening is a bit of an understatement.

Click HERE to learn more about The Lottery Film and their campaign.