'Waiting For Superman' Premieres In LA

Waiting For Superman, a documentary about fixing the public school system in the United States, premiered in LA at the Paramount Theater last night. Director Davis Guggenheim (he also directed An Inconvenient Truth) and wife Elisabeth Shue were there, as well as Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and actress/education advocate Cheryl Hines.

The film opens in New York CIty and Los Angeles this Friday, September 24.

Photos from Getty

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Elisabeth Shue and Davis Guggenhiem

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Director Davis Guggenhiem and wife, actress Elisabeth Shue.

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Director Davis Guggenhiem and wife, actress Elisabeth Shue.

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USC's neon tommy on Waiting For Superman:

This provocative film follows a number of students and their families across America exposing the weaknesses of the current public education system and presenting solutions. The film, backed by Participant Media, won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.

Below are neon tommy's interviews with the filmmakers at the premiere.

Comments

[William D Simpson]

12:04 PM on 09/22/2010

Superman has been among us all this time. We just don't want to do what He says. This is the irony with it all.

http://wsimpson.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/reason-awakened-to-creations-god/

[olddognewtrick]

08:51 AM on 09/22/2010

Yikes! Talk about bitting the hande that feads you...

[popart]

01:39 AM on 09/22/2010

parents need to be role models when it comes to their attitudes toward achieving a good education for their children.....parents who demean education and dont respect teachers and have little regard for intellectual pursuits quickly condition their children to fail. we dont need better teachers we need better parents...or we condemn out children to be just like us.

[climbing panda]

06:53 PM on 09/21/2010

i will be buying this as a christmas present for all my public school, union member teacher friends.

[Christiana Wyly]

02:41 PM on 09/21/2010

This film is incredible. One of the best documentaries I have seen in years. But it's also a tragedy. Never before did I truly understand the way the broken system works behind the scenes. Its much worse than I suspected. No child should doomed to fail because of the school district they are born into. I hope this film inspires an all-out revolution in the school system.

[jcgrim]

02:18 PM on 09/21/2010

This movie's goals: 1. To glorify the outsourcing of public education to private, for-profit businesses as a means to "save" poor children. 2. Create a narrative to influence the public that teachers in public schools are uncaring,unprofessional, and lazy because of tenure and unions.

Empirical evidence: No support in valid scientific literature for the changes championed in this movie. No support in the empirical literature that teachers and schools are failing.
By definition this work is propaganda.

From Wikipedia: Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position.

As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda, in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience. Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus possibly lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or uses loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the attitude toward the subject in the target audience to further a political agenda. Propaganda can be used as a form of political warfare.

[climbing panda]

06:57 PM on 09/21/2010

you mean to say the empirical fact that america spends more than any other nation per student but ranks somewhere in the 30's by most worldwide metrics doesn't demonstrate the failure of the american education system?

[climbing panda]

06:59 PM on 09/21/2010

there is no evidence, yet, because tenured and unionized teachers are reticent to let their failures and short coming be exposed.