Independent Viewing 1

Waiting For "Superman"

Bibliography:

Waiting for Superman. Dir. Davis Guggenheim. Perf. Paramount Home Entertainment, 2011. DVD. 

Summary:

The documentary analyzes the failing American public school system, and the effect it has on the futures of the kids within it. All through the film, Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth”), the director and co-writer, has been followed the educational ambitions of five children in urban areas across the country: Los Angeles, Harlem, the Bronx, Washington, D.C., and Redwood City, California. The film offers insight into the reasons behind the childrens' and schools' poor performances, but also possible solutions. For example, many student's poor test results are directly related to the quality of the teacher. However, as many or most teachers have tenure and cannot be fired, the school is not able to improve, and neither are the students. Guggenheim then goes deeper, explaining that we cannot eliminate tenure due to the political strength of the Teachers Union. He then gives the perspectives of many people that are currently trying to change the system. He similarly analyses "drop-out factories", the affiliation between bad neighborhoods and high school drop-outs, the effect of longer days on student improvement, and the current struggle for better public schooling in charter schools. The film ends with a series of lotteries in which our five main children try to get into a charter school, and on two make it.  

Rhetorical Devices:
Archival Footage - As it is documentary, the film switches between the five storylines of the struggling children to explanations of the overarching problems. During the latter, there are a lot of clips of high school drop-outs, legislators trying to make reforms in Congress, speeches and promises given by presidents, etc. Their purposes vary, but they are mostly used to support a claim.
Logos/support - These mostly came in the when the narrator was trying to explain vocabulary, a conflict, or research study to the audience. They were are no people, only a series of statistics and diagrams on the screen. However, they were always presented as cute, childish animations. This was perhaps done to emphasize the innocence of those represented, or to contrast the sheer impact that the cute little animations had on the future of hundreds of thousands of children.
Pathos: This appeal was made extremely effectivly by focusing in on the overarching topics offered by the film, narrowing the story to five very driven children and their parents. Though struggling financially, all of these families know the value of education, as do their children, and are working extremely hard to offer their children the best, but all they can do is enter them in a lottery. Particularly when the most passionate students don't get chosen, the audience begins to feel the parents' and childrens' desparation at the situation, and it pushes the audience to fight for change.
Expert Testimony: The claims made by the film for fixing the system are extremely politically involved, and would entail changes in a system that has remained static for centuries. To convince the audience of his ideas for limiting distribution of tenure and lengthening school days, he needed very very solid support, and he often used expert testimony to do so.
Satire -  Although not emphasized greatly, satire is discretely present throughout the film. After getting the audience on his side, Guggenheim alienates the refutation with statements like "The great nation that put a man on tehmoon was finally going to fix education."
Parallels - This was another device used to make the refutation seem weak. He stated a claim that many experts have testifed to be true, that children from these bad districts simply can't learn. He then compares it with a previously commonly held belief, that airplanes could not break the sound barrier. By proving that that all of the people that once believed the second claim wholeheartedly were very wrong, he makes all of the experts that stated the other claim seem wrong.