WAITING FOR “SUPERMAN”

Yes — and this is one of those documentaries that earns its four stars by simply telling the truth well. Davis Guggenheim examines America's public education system with real rigor: the bureaucratic tangle of federal, state, and local funding, the protection tenure gives underperforming teachers, and the outsized power of teacher unions in blocking reform. He balances that critique with real hope, following educators building charter schools that are actually working.

The film airs several political viewpoints along the way — some further left, some further right — but its sympathies land on more conservative, patriotic solutions that hold unions accountable. It doesn't examine private or home education, but that was never its assignment.

There's little here to worry a family beyond a stray crude word and some hard statistics. This is a documentary that will inform you, move you, and maybe make you angry in the right ways. Watch it, especially if you have any say in how children in your community get educated.

America's public schools are failing, and the film sets out to show exactly how — and why. It follows several children and their families as they pursue better options through charter-school lotteries, while educators and reformers fight the entrenched systems standing in their way. What happens to these families, and whether the odds break their way, is the story worth watching for yourself.

Four stars means this is about as well-executed as a documentary gets, and the source material backs that up. Guggenheim directs with a clear point of view and conveys it cleanly, using animated sequences to land alarming statistics on dropout rates, crime among dropouts, and declining test scores without losing the audience. The film's real strength, though, is emotional: it follows real children and parents through the anxiety of school lotteries, and those sequences are, at times, genuinely heartbreaking. It's a documentary that argues with your head and grabs your heart at the same time — disciplined filmmaking in service of an urgent case.

This is a light, mixed humanist film — meaning it doesn't argue from a biblical framework, but it doesn't work against one either. It gives real airtime to progressive, socialist, feminist, and anti-capitalist viewpoints on education, but its ultimate sympathies rest with more patriotic and conservative solutions, holding the National Education Association and teacher unions accountable for much of the crisis in public schools.

What's worth celebrating here is the film's evident love for children and its insistence that every child deserves a real shot at learning — a conviction Scripture shares completely. Its moral center isn't explicitly Christian, but it isn't hostile either; it's found in educators sacrificing for other people's kids and children who dream simply of becoming nurses and doctors who help others.

The film's blind spot is its scope, not its spirit: it never examines private or home education, so families weighing those paths won't find them addressed here. That's a limitation, not a flaw in judgment — the film set out to examine public schools, and it does that job thoroughly.

Underneath the statistics is an old, true longing: that children be trained well and given a future. Scripture says it plainer than any policy debate can: "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it" (Proverbs 22:6).

This is a documentary worth your time and your attention — clear-eyed about what's broken in American public education, and genuinely hopeful about the people working to fix it. It's not a Sunday-school film, but it's a fair and moving one, and older teens and adults will come away better informed and rightly moved. Worth the trip — older teens and adults.