“We have tissues in the front and tissues in the back,” Kenya Bradshaw, director of the local chapter of Stand for Children, told local educators, business people, and education advocates in the Methodist Presentation Theater at the U of M yesterday.
“People think they’re not going to cry. You are going to cry.”
Memphis was chosen as one of 16 sites for a special screening of Waiting for Superman, a film from Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) about the “crisis of public education.”
- Geoffrey Canada, the inspiring leader of the Harlem Children’s Zone, a school that seeks to increase college graduation rates in Harlem.
Since 1971, the nation has doubled the amount of money spent on each student (and yes, that’s adjusted for inflation) but scores have stayed dismally static.
The film focuses on the systematic problems hardwired into the current system, such as tenure guidelines that don’t allow districts to get rid of unsuccessful teachers, but it also follows five children (and their parents) who are trying to find better educational options than the traditional public school system.
