Waiting for Superman

            Today in class we finished watching the movie Waiting for Superman.  It was partially about charter schools in Washington D.C. and about the education system in the United States.  There were so many interesting points in this film.  Here is a bunch of the statistics that the film provided that I thought was interesting.  Since 1971, reading and math scores have flat lined.  40% of students that don’t graduate on time from a school are known as dropout factories and there are about 2,000 factories in the United States.  It costs 132,000 dollars to send a person to prison for four years and 107,900 to send a student to a private school.  Our country could have sent them to a private school for less cost.  Also, in almost everything, the U.S. is far behind other developing countries.  Tenure isn’t allowing schools to get ride of the bad teachers in schools.  This is known as passing the lemons because schools can’t get rid of their bad teachers so they just pass them around from school to school.  

We then were asked in class what affected us the most in the video.  I said that it was hard to see such young students so sad when they weren’t called for the lottery in charter schools.  These students are so excited to learn but your educational system isn’t allowing many of them too learn.  There are many factors that contribute to this but one of them is because our schools haven’t been changing while the world is.  Taken as a whole, this movie was really great and I’m really thankful that we got to watch it in class.