An examination of the current state of education in America today.

Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim reminds us that education "statistics" have names: Anthony, Francisco, Bianca, Daisy, and Emily, whose stories make up the engrossing foundation of WAITING FOR SUPERMAN. As he follows a handful of promising kids through a system that inhibits, rather than encourages, academic growth, Guggenheim undertakes an exhaustive review of public education, surveying "drop-out factories" and "academic sinkholes," methodically dissecting the system and its seemingly intractable problems.—Sundance Film Festival

Having made a film on the subject in 1999, documentary filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, with school aged children of his own now, revisits the subject of the decaying public school system in the United States, the decline which began in in the 1970s. This situation is despite President after President, no matter the political affiliation, vowing to fix the system and with per capita student funding having doubled in real terms over that time. Although more pronounced the stereotypically hard hit inner cities and deep south, this decay is not limited to these areas, with the United States falling further and further behind in standard comparisons to other developed nations in terms of basic items such as literacy. This situation is only more problematic in that many Americans do not see the problem in believing, in American bravado, that the US stands up in these comparisons. Guggenheim and his team follow half a dozen inner city young elementary school aged children and their families, they, individually and collectively, who have strong ideas of the benefit of a good education, of what they want for their futures, and of what they will do to achieve it despite limited personal resources. Some educators are profiled who are trying to fight what they see as the systemic issues which are at the core of the problem in they striving to have a good public education system for which they are responsible. Some of the public school successes are highlighted, such as charter schools, which shows that the system can be fixed if there is the comprehensive will. The success of the charter schools, however, only highlights the problem as those six individual students and their families await the results of the charter school lotteries, which assign the usually tens of available spaces among the hundreds who have applied.—Huggo