7. Challenging Waiting for Superman Through Detournement 1

JAMES TRIER 7. CHALLENGING WAITING FOR SUPERMAN THROUGH DETOURNEMENT 1 Waiting for Superman (2010) is a film directed by Davis Guggenheim, who won an Academy Award for the documentary An Inconvenient Truth (2006). Billing itself on its DVD cover as a “groundbreaking feature film that provides an engaging and inspiring look at public education in the United States,” Waiting for Superman received mostly glowing reviews in the mainstream media, won several film festival awards, and Guggenheim and the film’s heroes have been celebrated guests on dozens of news channels and talk shows, along with receiving high praise from President Obama, Bill Clinton, and other powerful political luminaries. However, the film has also drawn some criticism from reviewers in the popular press, from teachers, and from academics in the field of Education. In this chapter, I describe a pedagogical project that involved preservice teachers in responding to Waiting for Superman , and then reacting to a video detournement —i.e., a countertext—that challenged the main arguments of the documentary. The detournement caused several students to reconsider the accuracy and believability of the film’s main claims and arguments. THE TWO MAIN NARRATIVES OF WAITING FOR SUPERMAN Waiting for Superman comprises two intertwining narratives. One concerns five kids who have their hearts and minds set on attending charter schools, where they believe they will receive superior educations than from their neighborhood schools. Of the five kids, four are children of color whose low-income families live in urban neighborhoods: kindergartener Bianca lives with her mother in Harlem; first-grader Francisco lives with his mother in the Bronx; fifth-grader Anthony lives with his grandmother in Washington, D.C.; and fifth-grader Daisy lives with her mother and father in East Los Angeles. The only white student is eighth-grader Emily, who lives with her parents in Silicon Valley. Emily’s family is upper-middle class, and she is headed for a well-funded high school. Nevertheless, her parents believe (as does Emily) that she will receive a better education at a nearby charter school. All the children and their parents express desires and dreams about the future, and this whole narrative builds towards the finale, which features the local public lotteries that will determine the winners of the cherished charter school spots. The odds of winning, however, are slim. The clear message is that unless the children win the lottery, their lives will likely end up being ones of personal struggle and financial hardship. J. Trier (Ed.), Detournement as Pedagogical Praxis, 155–169. © 2014 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. J. TRIER The other main narrative features the film’s heroes and villains. The heroes are powerful charter school advocates who dominate the film’s screen time, extolling the virtues, successes, and superiority of charter schools over public schools. The star is Geoffrey Canada, President and CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone, which provides an array of social services and educational opportunities (free medical care, preschooling, parenting courses, counseling, and more) to thousands of children and their parents in a ninety-seven block area in New York City. Another hero is Michelle Rhee, who was the chancellor of Washington, D.C.’s public schools when Waiting for Superman was being filmed. In her three-year tenure, Rhee became a polarizing yet popular figure, appearing on a TIME Magazine cover and being celebrated for her reform efforts in a feature story (Ripley, 2010). Other heroes include Bill Gates of Microsoft fortune and fame; David Levin and Michael Feinberg, the founders of the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools; and former Milwaukee superintendent Howard Fuller, a proponent of school vouchers. The unmistakable villains are bad tenured teachers and their menacing, corrupt unions, which are singularly responsible for (what the film argues is) a broken public school system on a national scale—a system riddled with thousands of “drop out factories” that mar the educational landscape. Unions are also responsible for blocking genuine educational reform by militating against the charter school movement championed by the film’s director and heroes. The chief villain is Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers union. During her relatively small amount of screen time, Guggenheim misrepresents Weingarten as an old-school union boss rousing the lockstep troops at a huge teachers’ union rally, bullying and silencing poor Michelle Rhee at a community meeting, and expressing some noxious pro-union sentiments in brief interview snippets. Viewers who stretch the film’s specious anti-union message far enough can conclude that teachers’ unions are collectively responsible for the deep sadness and hopelessness that all the children “losers” will experience when they don’t win the educational lotteries. Cruel unions. REVIEWS AND CRITIQUES OF WAITING FOR SUPERMAN Waiting for Superman drew much adulation in the mainstream media when it came out. Scott Bowles (2010) called it a “masterful picture,” and he observed (ridiculously) that Guggenheim “mostly steers clear of politics in favor of the children’s stories.” Betsy Sharkey (2010) thought it was “a withering examination of the country’s public school system.” John Anderson (2010) saw it as an “exhilarating, heartbreaking, and righteous” documentary and “an epic assessment of the rise and fall of the U.S. school” system. Another cheerleader of the film was Thomas Friedman (2010), who (absurdly) titled his review “Steal This Movie, Too.”2 Friedman believes the film proves “what works” to cure the “miserable failures” that are the U.S.’s ailing public schools: “It is the whatever-it-takes-tenacity of the Geoffrey Canadas; it is the no- excuses-seriousness of the KIPP school (Knowledge is Power Program) founders; it 156.

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