“Waiting for Superman” – Make the Pledge

It has been 9 years since the No Child Left Behind Act passed Congress. Whatever you may think of the law, it represented a genuine (if, IMO, misguided) desire to improve the flailing public education system in this country. Whatever your feelings toward the Bush administration, funding for education did increase over the past decade.

Unfortunately, the government’s well-meaning attempts still haven’t given schools a fraction of what they need to deliver a quality education to every single American child. The public education system needs money, money, money. They need money to pay teachers. Money to buy textbooks and computers. Money to provide fine arts departments and debate teams and sports teams and all the other extracurricular activities that allow kids to explore and realize their full potential.

Teaming up with Al Gore several years ago, director Davis Guggenheim created An Inconvenient Truth, a film that finally forced global climate change and humankind’s impact on the environment into a national debate. Hopefully, Guggenheim’s new film, Waiting for Superman, can do the same thing for American education. But people will have to see the movie if we want that to happen.

So, please, as a personal favor, I’m asking you, dear readers, to head over to the film’s website and make the pledge to GO SEE THIS MOVIE. For every person that makes the pledge to see Waiting for Superman, Donorschoose.org will donate $5 to public schoolteachers who post their classroom project needs on their website (on Donorschoose.org, that is; a fantastic site, if you’ve never investigated it, by the way). As they reach certain milestones, other organizations will start matching the donation total, to boot. Look, these people aren’t even really going to be able to tell if you go see the movie (though you should), so all I’m asking is for a couple of clicks of the mouse, and some teacher out there gets $5. Where’s the downside here?