Two and a half years ago, Davis Guggenheim was struggling to figure out how to dramatize the education crisis in America as vividly as he did global warming in his Academy Award-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."
He told producers that the subject was "a storytelling quagmire, full of controversy, with layers of denial and anxiety." He didn't think he could explore it in a lucid and engaging movie.
He was ready to give up until he read Thomas L. Friedman's New York Times op-ed piece on May 25, 2008, about a heart-piercing event Friedman observed at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland in Baltimore.
"It was actually a lottery," Friedman wrote, "but no ordinary lottery. The winners didn't win cash, but a ticket to a better life. The losers left with their hopes and their lottery tickets crumpled."
This lottery selected 80 boys and girls as the first group of students in the SEED school of Maryland in Baltimore, which operates as a public boarding school. It brings boys and girls out of disadvantaged neighborhoods and onto a campus where they live and study every school week — and make stunning educational growth leaps.
What hooked Guggenheim as a filmmaker wasn't only the lottery's upsetting spectacle — as Friedman wrote, "at once so uplifting and so cruel" — but also its power as a metaphor. "There's something wrong," Friedman summarized, "when so much of an American child's future is riding on the bounce of a ping-pong ball."
Over the phone from Los Angeles two weeks ago, Guggenheim said that reading Friedman's column was the eureka moment for what became "Waiting for 'Superman,'" his overwhelming new documentary about America's public school system.
Guggenheim couldn't fit Maryland's SEED school into this film. But it was crucial to his thinking "as a myth-shattering phenomenon that's proving that you can go into a tough neighborhood and educate every kid." And, he said, "People in Baltimore can understand the other big revelation of the movie, which is that the problem is not just in poor neighborhoods. The erosion of our schools has penetrated our middle class and upper middle class."
He ended up following children from Washington, Harlem, the Bronx, East Los Angeles and Redwood City, Calif., in Silicon Valley as they prepared to enter lotteries for schools that draw on public and private resources to build innovative, staggeringly effective programs. All happen to be "charter schools," but Guggenheim acknowledged that the majority of charter schools aren't as successful.
"Charters are an experiment — can you make great public schools with public money outside the school district and outside union rules? Some charters don't do better than other schools — and you should shut them down. But a growing number of high-performing charters send more than 90 percent of their kids to college. They are incubators for success. They bring fresh ideas into the mix. And that's what this movie is about."
The lottery provided Guggenheim with a ruling image — and not just because he built dramatically to gut-wrenching scenes of destiny delivered on pingpong balls. According to Guggenheim, America's public education system works as a lottery for everyone, the affluent included. Even in a wealthy area like Redwood City, "kids are winning or losing the lottery based on what track their schools put them on in sixth or seventh grade," the track that puts them into top academic contention or the one "where they get worse teachers and lower expectations."
"Waiting for 'Superman'" argues that Americans must find new ways to reward superb instructors and to weed out incompetent ones, even if that means eliminating or revising the concept or practice of tenure. Guggenheim, who is dyslexic, said he owes an incalculable debt to teachers who "looked past my terrible test scores and poor grades and saw that I had something to offer."
Guggenheim confesses at the start of the film that he passes three public schools as he drives his three kids to private school. He feels a classic and in some ways laudable form of liberal guilt, but he also feels bad for his children, who are growing up in "a bubble."
He grew up in a bubble, too. He remembers at age 5 asking his mother why he was taking a 40-minute bus ride every morning from Washington into Virginia, when there was a school right down the street.
"Because the schools in Washington, D.C., are broken," she told him.
"I went to the Potomac School in Virginia, then Sidwell Friends, then NYU and Brown," said Guggenheim. "And now I'm doing the same thing — I'm taking care of my own kids, as the schools for other people are crumbling. That's a big shock, that I am part of the problem."
But he isn't — not really.
Guggenheim's first documentary, "The First Year" (2001), saluted public school teachers. "They were doing remarkable things and reaching kids every day, even though there was this feeling that the system outside the classroom, though slow and relentless, would ultimately win."
With "' Superman'" he decided, "If I didn't make a film that addressed this system — all the things that work for adults but are ruinous for kids — 'they' would never fix our schools."
One huge Baltimore influence on Guggenheim was the depiction of education on "The Wire." "It made you feel the how high the stakes were for the kids as well as the weight of the system grinding away and pressing down on people." That dual emphasis inspired him to create two parallel movies while editing "Waiting for 'Superman'" — one about the kids, and the other about the system. He started putting them together three weeks before he submitted the film to Sundance, where it won this year's audience award.
Last Tuesday, Guggenheim spoke to a high-powered group of educators, public servants and opinion-makers in Baltimore. Doug Becker, president of the board of the Sylvan/Laureate Foundation, who had organized a Baltimore screening of "The First Year" roughly a decade ago, did the same for "Waiting for 'Superman.'" Afterward, he led a discussion of the film with Guggenheim and the CEO of the Baltimore public school system, Andrés Alonso.
At the end of the evening, Becker showed a political commercial that Davis' father, Charles Guggenheim, one of the premier documentary-makers of his day, made in 1968. In this brief, poetic and still potent TV spot, a small boy pulls a string of toy vehicles — a school bus, a car and a boat — up some very steep steps. As he struggles with his playthings, the narrator says that in a complex new America, where cars are doubling, pollution threatens air and waterways, and the number of schools should double, children need people who care for them.
The steps are the steps to the Capitol. The man who cares is Robert F. Kennedy. And the 5-year-old boy is Davis Guggenheim.
No wonder Guggenheim said that his night in Baltimore made him feel as if he'd come "full circle."
michael.sragow@baltsun.com