Our group watched the movie Waiting for Superman directed by Davis Guggenheim. Waiting for Superman focused mainly on charter schools, and the lotteries that are required to enter them. Since charter schools are held in such high esteem, most often more people are applying for spots than spots available at the the time. So, they hold lotteries. Each child applying is given a number, then the school will go through a random selection process in order to select the students they will take in the following year, everyone else is wait-listed. After watching the movie Aditya sent us an article that he said might change our new found views on charter schools, which were at the time, mostly positive. The article “The Myth of Charter Schools” by Diane Ravitch was featured in the The New York Review of Books. It talks about the not so good part of charter schools, and their obsession with perfection. We also learned later on that there were many other problems with charter schools. I think that the movie made us look more at the personal struggles that a kid trying to attain a place in a charter school might have. That and the statistics really separated our group’s thoughts on charter schools. Half of our group, at that time, liked the idea of having a “private-ized” public school. It had the funds and the government affiliation of a public school, but it had things like smaller classes and more free reign with their curriculum and standards. Later on our group, because of the article and various conversations with people who worked in the field, we discovered that their was a huge divide in real life too about the issue of charter schools. After hearing certain accounts that labelled charter schools as “secretive” and “too harsh” the half of our group that was originally for charter schools switched their views. Now, this movie leaves us with an undecided opinion on these types of schools. We see the positive and the negative, though the movie itself only showed us the positive.
