ODYSSEYWARE

Yahoo News is reporting that David Guggenheim, the director of the Oscar Award winning An Inconvenient Truth, will be releasing a new film which focuses on the U.S. public education system called Waiting for Superman. The film is intended to show the problems facing public schools in our country and will debut at the Sundance Film Festival this week in Utah.

The film also estimates that by 2020 the education system will produce only 50 million students capable of filling more than 120 million jobs seeking highly qualified individuals.

“As much as politicians, reformers and the press know what the real problems are, they’re not going to talk about them, because they’re politically deadly,” Guggenheim states.

In addition to the movie, Bill Gates, whose net worth was estimated at $40 billion by Forbes magazine in 2009, will be in attendance as well.  He has a starring role in the documentary and will be appearing at the movie’s showing to discuss education and ways Americans can demand greater accountability out of our public schools, as well as strategies for overall reform of how we teach students.  His foundation, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, gives away millions of dollars to improve schools in America and has been a driving force for change in instruction in its few short years of existence.

It’s too bad this event won’t be publicly aired and we have to wait for the movie to be mass released because, as Guggenheim notes, this is a great opportunity for raising the profile of education in our nation’s debate.

“But the only way we’re going to address this crisis is if these uncomfortable truths are spoken out loud.”