Reform,Ideology and the Politics of Waiting for ‘Superman’

Abstract

In the United States, charter schools have been proclaimed as the potential solution for a host of problems for inner-city education, particularly as a cure-all for marginal achievement scores on high-stakes standardized testing. Several US states and cities (most prominently Texas, New York, Atlanta and Washington, DC) have embraced this neo-liberal vision of educational reform as a ‘miracle’ panacea and injected business-derived principles into schools to much fanfare and few authentic positive results. This article focuses on the rhetoric of market-driven solutions for school reform as exemplified in Davis Guggenheim's 2010 documentary Waiting for ‘Superman’. Contextualizing the film within a milieu of recent reform and ‘miracle’ solutions, the article attempts to highlight the inherent narrative character of the educational reform movement in the United States and its perpetual willingness to ignore previous structural failures in search of new solutions which typically mirror previous innovations in their fictive type.

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