Steve Neavling over at Motor City Muckraker calls attention to a Cracked post about "full of crap" documentaries. Number three on the site's list was "Searching For Sugarman," the story of Detroit musician Sixto Rodriguez's accidental fame in Apartheid (and post-Apartheid) South Africa.
Motor City Muckraker: While the filmmakers depicted Rodriguez as an obscure musician who quit music following the disappointing release of two brilliant albums, the singer-songwriter was a sensation in Australia in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His singles shot up the charts, and he toured with Midnight Oil and Men at Work.
“To paint his as a criminally ignored genius is absurd,” the Cracked article reads. “He enjoyed a sterling career lasting over a decade.”
While Rodriguez wasn't aware of his South African stardom until after Apartheid imploded--and South African fans living in their largely isolated renegade nation knew little about their idol--Cracked has this right. Rodriguez had a reasonably successful career touring Australia in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Sugarman does willfully neglect that part of his story and, frankly, few of us in the local media have been willing to shine a light on that shortcoming. No one wants to tell kids that Santa Claus is just their parents, I guess.
However, in fairness, Sugarman wasn't wrong portraying Rodriguez as a day laborer working in Detroit and largely unknown in his home country until he was rediscovered by South African fans post-Nelson Mandela. Those things are true.
Possibly more interesting and certainly more important is another documentary Cracked dubbed as "full of crap:" The 2010 education reform tract "Waiting for Superman."
Cracked: The film focuses on the charters that perform better, of course, but at least one of those is achieving its results through fishy means. One of the administrators of a school shown in the film, the Harlem Children's Zone, expelled an entire class of children that he feared would throw off his glowing performance statistics. It turns out that when teacher pay and/or school funding is tied to student performance, a model that the film advocates, it opens the door for all kinds of shady shit, including flat-out expelling low-performing students the day before the test to boost their numbers.
In the movie, not getting into a charter school is the worst thing that can happen to a poor family, but studies have shown that school choice itself matters little to a student's success -- shockingly, it's more about how seriously the students themselves and their families take their education. And that ghetto public school might not actually be so bad: According to administrators from Woodside High School, which the film claims only sends a third of its students to college and only graduates 62 percent of them, the film excluded students who go to out-of-state colleges in their statistics, and their graduation rate is more like 92 percent. Shit, being left behind is starting to sound awesome.
Considering the weight given to Superman by education reformers and various Serious People about town, is education policy being crafted by folks who take as fact things as absurdly fictitious as a literal flying superhero from the planet Krypton?
