Essay On Waiting For Superman

“Above all, I believe every child, no matter their ZIP code or their parents’ jobs, deserves access to a quality education.” -Betsy Devos. Waiting for Superman is a film directed by Davis Guggenhiem, and was released in 2010. Waiting for Superman is about the struggle of getting a quality education for children from low-income families. These children featured in the documentary have shown very enthusiastic attitudes towards school, but unfortunately are prevented from doing so because of where they live and financial issues. The three most important understandings I gained from watching this documentary include how the education system affects many families negatively, how teachers benefit more from the education system than the students, and how a child’s education and the outcome of their life depends on one lottery, no matter how driven or intelligent the …show more content…
Teachers are very hard to fire because they have something called tenure, which means that teachers are very hard to fire once they’ve been teaching a certain amount of years. The document talks about tenure and how long it takes to fire a teacher. According to the documentary, it takes 23 steps to fire a teacher. This shows how the government basically guarantees teachers their jobs. This is unfair for students because if the teacher doesn’t do their job correctly, the students can’t do anything about it. At the best case scenario, the teacher can be moved to a different school. However, this will also negatively affect the children at the next school, and the next after that. The system of switching bad teachers from school to school is known as the dance of the lemons, which is discussed in the documentary as well. In conclusion, teachers are basically guaranteed their jobs and will most likely just move from school to school in a system called the dance of the