"Superman": Charlotte is waiting

Will Charlotte audiences pack a theater to watch a documentary about urban education?

If someone had asked me that a few weeks ago, I'd have responded with an "Are you serious?" smirk. But the buzz about "Waiting for 'Superman' " has been building since its national debut, including a feature on Oprah. When I went with a group of education reporters to see it in New York City, the huge theater was selling out on weekday evenings.

The film by Davis Guggenheim, director of "An Inconvenient Truth," opens in Charlotte on Friday. It's likely to swell the surge of education-reform energy building here and nationwide.

The title will make sense to local folks who attended Geoffrey Canada's Charlotte talk in March. Canada, one of the country's most charismatic education leaders, created the Harlem Children's Zone, which provides "cradle to career" services designed to break the link between poverty and academic failure. He tells of growing up in the ghetto and fantasizing that Superman would save him, then crying when his mother told him Superman wasn't real.

His message, and that of the film, is that we all have to be the heroes.

Education wonks will find plenty to debate. Does it oversimplify complicated issues? Sure. Does it present  charter schools as The Big Solution? Sort of. I don't think I'm spoiling anything to say that charter-school lotteries serve as the dramatic hook. My sense is that's less about creating a "great charters/lousy traditional schools" dichotomy than about painting a vivid picture of the slim odds some children face in seeking an excellent education. Here, many families seek Charlotte-Mecklenburg magnets as a ticket out of weak schools (though the computerized lottery and notification letters wouldn't make good theater).

What "Superman" undeniably does is put human faces on the children and parents fighting odds that are stacked against them by poverty and failing schools. We may walk out of the theater arguing about causes and solutions to the problems. But it will be hard to walk out with a shrug.