Pun Salad

My bright idea: make a documentary about people waiting for scarce documentary DVDs to arrive from Netflix; call it Waiting for "Waiting for 'Superman'".

And then make a documentary about people waiting for that DVD to show up. And call that one Waiting for 'Waiting for "Waiting for 'Superman'"'.

And then…

But anyway: it finally showed up for us. Waiting for "Superman" is a look at the dire state of American government schools at the elementary and secondary level. For anyone who's paid a bit of attention to the education debate over the past few years, the themes will be depressingly familiar: the systems are largely dysfunctional. They are not run for the benefit of students; instead, they're designed to funnel ever-increasing amounts of taxpayer money into the pockets of administrators, teachers, and bureaucrats. Teacher unions are fundamental obstacles to any sort of reform that just might favor effective teachers over poor ones; their political clout means that any politician or administrator that poses a threat to the status quo does so at risk to his or her career.

Just ask Michelle Rhee and Adrian Fenty. (Ms. Rhee is one of the primary heroes featured in Waiting for "Superman", made before she was canned.)

Parents and kids caught up in the system without enough money to buy their way into a private or parochial education are well aware of the problems. The documentary follows a number of victims; especially hard to watch is their long-shot entries into lotteries to get kids into a small number of charter schools.