Documentary Movie Reviews

(For optimum viewing, adjust the zoom level of your browser to 125%.)


Waiting for Superman (2010)

Rate: 3
Viewed: 4/23

WaitSuper
4/23: I don't think Waiting for Superman had a thesis.

It touches on a lot of things about the education system and therefore offers a shaky solution or two. Most of the talk has been either misleading or not quite correct while failing to bring up the white elephant in the room. The viewpoints are also limited in scope.

Sure, the education system sucks today. It has sucked for a long time. A lot of things were working out well for decades until ed schools and liberals entered the picture in a significant way. Since then, things have gone completely south. One of the biggest changes is access to education for all people including minorities and people with disabilities. That's the good news, but it has made educating them very challenging.

IQ doesn't lie. It's the best predictor of academic success as well as everything else in life. Liberals hate IQ because it's so final; they want to believe there has to be more than that, so they waste billions of dollars on unproven fads and fixes such as Head Start programs, student-centered learning, differentiated instruction, etc. Well, there's no way of going around IQ.

IQ is largely the reason why some people become doctors, scientists, professors, and so on and work in high cognition jobs. To get into the game, high IQ is the prerequisite, and the rest of the equation is hard work. The only way to prove this theory is to test randomly selected students for IQ when they're young, hide the results, see how it goes, and then compare the results when all has been said and done by the time they're past 30 years old. Remember...school buildings don't make great students; it's the IQ, stupid.

Race also plays a factor not because it's racist but it's been historically proven. Asians make the best students with whites coming in second. One standard deviation below whites on the bell curve are blacks with Latinos faring a bit better. Time and time again, through various standardized tests, have shown this to be true.

One strong reason why this is so is: culture plays a role. Asians and Jews are smart because their culture centers around academic success; it's important to them, and therefore, they read books and study mathematics consistently. However, it's not true of blacks and Latinos; in general, they don't care. Okay, Finland...liberals always love to point it out. If they can, why can't we? It's simple. Finland is a country of almost 100% white people.

The problems of education in the United States boil down to three things: IQ, behavior, and administrative support. Forget the unions; they have no impact...really. When students misbehave, the learning atmosphere is disrupted; as a result, the teacher has to pause instruction and spend time dealing with it. Throwing them out of class and then school altogether isn't an option because the liberals will fight for their right to be educated. Hence, teachers are stuck with the bad apples, no matter what. So, the misbehaving students understand this very well and therefore do what they want. Then, the parents get into the act as well. Administrators leave all of them to the teachers and look the other way. That's why most of them got out of the teaching business as quickly as possible; in fact, many have never taught in a classroom before and won't know what being in the trenches means. Discipline went out of the window a long time ago, too.

Charter schools sounds like a fancy solution. But they're no better than public schools. Teachers hired there are often paid substantially less and forced to work long hours, even on Saturdays. As a result, they either become dissatisfied or burned out and leave within a year or two. Hence, these schools have a high turnover rate. Today, and this applies to schools of all kind, most are desperate for teachers and can't find anyone; so, they resort to substitutes and uncertified teachers to babysit classes. Hence, there's no real learning going on. Applicants for graduate schools to become teachers are down big time as well because it's not an attractive profession anymore due to many reasons including low pay and abusive working conditions.

The feminist movement during the 70's was a big factor, too, because it opened doors for females that were never there before. Hence, the teaching profession lost the best and brightest to better paying jobs with none of the abusive working conditions that exists in schools. All that's left are mediocre teachers and worse. No wonder why there's an annual rise in sex crimes among them. Also, be careful when a private or charter school boasts of stellar academic achievements; it's most likely either the majority of the student body was selectively collected, was almost all white, or had no interfering disabilities. Otherwise, the worst performing students were told to stay home or were excluded from the tests. Academic cheating isn't out of the question, either, as it happened during Michelle Rhee's tenure which ended with her "resignation."

All in all, if the problems of the education system are talked about without addressing IQ, there goes the credibility.