It is safe to say that director Davis Guggenheim is responsible for spawning the universal specter of global warming with the chart-filled and statistics-heavy film An Inconvenient Truth.

It is also not an overstatement to say that with An Inconvenient Truth, Guggenheim practically gave a new career to post-retirement Al Gore as a crusader for the environment. By dint of the film, Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, sharing it with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which produced a report on the topic Gore campaigned for in the film: there is a connection between human activity and global warming.

The effective story-telling of An Inconvenient Truth—which won an Oscar for best documentary in 2007—managed to convince many people about the scourge of global warming.

A survey in 2007 conducted in 47 countries found that 66 percent of people who watched the film said that they “changed their minds” about global warming.

After the low-budget rock documentary It Might Get Loud—in which he delved into the creative processes of guitar gods Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin, The Edge of U2 and Jack White of the band White Stripes—Guggenheim has returned with another documentary that uncovers the inconvenient truth about the sorry state of education in the world’s most powerful state, the United States.

The documentary had its Asian premiere at the Doha Tribeca Film Festival last week. In this film Guggenheim follows the story of five children in public and private schools in urban areas across the US: Los Angeles, Harlem, the Bronx, Washington DC and Redwood City, California — but who were eventually lost in the Kafkaesque labyrinth of the US education system.

In spite of the hard work that these kids and their parents put into education, the students failed and only a handful would end up going to college.

By using the techniques that he employed in An Inconvenient Truth—statistics and animated graphs—Guggenheim makes his case on why the US education system has failed, showing that US students are trailing behind their peers in other developed nations in math and science.

Guggenheim also highlights the soaring drop-out rates in high schools throughout the country. In fact, Guggenheim goes as far to argue that it was high dropout rates that led to the creation of failed communities with high crime rates throughout the country instead of the other way around.

Unlike Michael Moore’s “gotcha” journalistic style, Guggenheim is more subtle, slowly building an argument by presenting the reality from ground zero.

One of the most heartbreaking scenes in the film was when Guggenheim took a tour of a small town in Philadelphia and learned that the majority of inmates in a state penitentiary were students of a nearby high school who dropped out. He interviewed one resident who said the cost of paying for the inmates’ well-being dwarfed the portion of the budget the city allocated for its schools. And this is only one city in America.

Who is to blame for all of this?

The greatest villains in the film are teachers’ unions, which Guggenheim describes as shameless political machines that will do just about anything to maintain their position as special interests groups. They are, after all, the largest campaign contributors to the Democratic Party, topping even the oil industry.

Throughout the film, Guggenheim never runs out of schools with legions of bad teachers who have slacked off and do almost nothing in class because they already had the job security that comes with “tenure”. Tenure, which was originally granted only to college professors, has made it almost impossible to fire underperforming teachers.

In Illinois, for example, one out of 57 doctors has lost his or her medical license, but only one in 2,500 teachers have been fired.

It does not help that in the frequent interviews Guggenheim did with the chairperson of the powerful American Federation of Teachers, Rendi Weingarten comes off like a fire-breathing politician who would steamroll anything that would cut union contracts.

Another evil responsible for the slump in American education is bureaucracy. The presence of myriad agencies with overlapping authority means that there is no single way to allocate resources for schools throughout the country.

Guggenheim of course has heroes who have fought back, people such as the chancellor of the District of Columbia public schools, Michelle Rhee, who fought both the teachers union and the redundant bureaucracy to create an effective public system. Another is New York educator Geoffrey Canada, who was responsible for creating an alternative “Charter School” system that provided both education and community outreach programs in poverty stricken Harlem.

However, the successes that were achieved by people such as Rhee and Canada do nothing to dispel the pessimism about America’s permanent status as a superpower.

Coupled the education woes with two major wars funded by massive borrowing, a protracted economic recovery and deep political divisions, it is difficult to foresee the US’ perpetual dominance on the world stage.

The most depressing fact about American education comes towards the end of this film when the five kids followed by Guggenheim in this film literally joined a lottery to get a seat in some of the best schools in their communities. These are the kids who had such high hopes for education to bring meaning to their lives and realize the American dream.

Only one of the four children—who happened to be living in one of California’s most affluent neighborhoods—received a coveted seat, the pathway to quality education. The rest were either put on waiting lists or sent back to the same substandard schools in their neighborhoods.

Scarier than a Hollywood horror movie, this documentary easily sent shivers down my spine.

If the American education system has sunk so low, what about the future of our children in this country?

Waiting for “Superman” (102 minutes, Paramount Pictures)
Starring: Geoffrey Canada, Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates, Randi Weingarten, George Reeves as Superman
Director: Davis Guggenheim
Writer: Davis Guggenheim, Billy Kimbal
Producers: Lesley Chilcott

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