What I Watched -- Waiting for "Superman"

I didn't give this doc the attention I thought it deserved, but after seeing it, I think I gave it all the attention it needed.

Waiting for "Superman" purports to be "an engaging and inspiring look at public education in the United States."  That's not quite what I got out of it.  It was more like this: 30 minutes of all the ways in which the public education system in general is broken, followed by 70 minutes of up-close investigation of five charter or independent schools and the students who are desperate to get into them.

Each student's story was both sad and hopeful, so I guess the movie accomplished something there.  But it seemed to lose itself a bit along the way, in that it stopped being a movie about public education in general.  The first 30 minutes are likely dead-on vis a vis all the problems with the system, but the movie does no more in terms of addressing those problems than to identify them.

Bottom line: interesting food for thought, but don't expect any answers.