Eduardo Tinoco
Professor McKee
Administration of Justice 304
14 September 2014
Waiting for Superman Every day parents across the U.S. send their children off to school with the expectation that they will be learning something new every day. But what actually happens is many children are sent to schools that have a higher chance of their child dropping out than being a college graduate. In the movie “Waiting for Superman” directed by Davis Guggenheim, he shows how big of a problem this situation has become and also why schools haven’t improved since the 70’s. Guggenheim also follows a handful of students and their families who are applying to schools that have a higher chance of a student graduating but only have a limited number of space of available. The students who apply for the school are then put in a lottery where the decision is based on luck. In the movie only 2 kids actually make it into the school they have applied for where the other 3 have to go back to their low graduating public schools. In total from the 5 children there were 2,210 applicants to these 5 different schools and only 219 available spaces. This means that together the students had a 10% chance of getting into these better schools. He goes on to talk about how bad teachers are very hard to fire and sometimes impossible to so there is no way of getting the bad teachers out of bad schools. The reason some teachers cannot be fired is because of tenure which allows a teacher to stay at a school and teach whatever she/he likes at whatever pace is not be able to be fired. This is actually a big reason why some schools cannot succeed and become better because as Guggenheim states, the “Bad Lemons” stay in that district. I believe the problem with our educational system are teacher salaries. When the best teachers are looking for a school to teach at they have a choice of going to a private