Is America willing to settle for a great education - for the few? That’s the subject at the center of the documentary by director Davis Guggenheim, Waiting for Superman.

The documentary is selective and fragmentary, which shouldn't be shocking. A cottage industry has developed around pundits who have little substantive knowledge over public education, yet opine away nonetheless. For example, one of the foremost shortcomings of the documentary: that Guggenheim selected to add in footage of a flawed teacher in a Milwaukee classroom along with the rubber room in New York, but opted to not add in footage of flourishing public schools in which uncounted and unheralded instructors do extraordinary things each day to teach our children. This lack of balance may suit Guggenheim's narrow and selective narrative; however it doesn’t tell the full and textured story of what is actually occurring in American schools.

The documentary calls consideration on the kids who're being failed by our educational system and deprived of the kind of education that will open doors for them all through their lives. Despite Guggenheim's irrefutably good intentions, the picture falls short by casting 2 extremes in starring roles - the "bad" instructor as bad guy and charter schools as heroes all set to save the day. The dilemma is that these drawings are more fictional than realistic.

Are there bad teachers? Of course there are, just like there are bad accountants, and lawyers, and movie reviewers. I wish there weren't any bad teachers. But American Federation of Teachers is in the forefront of developing and implementing means to improve teacher quality, and to deal effectively and efficiently with breakdowns once they occur.

In reality, union-led educator assistance and review programs (where new and struggling instructors are trained and reviewed by more experienced peers) have shown to be far stricter on poorly performing instructors than those conducted by administrators.

No educator - myself included - wants educators in the classroom who don't belong there. Those knowledgeable about education understand the need for educator quality, but they do not buy into the simplistic notion that an epidemic of "bad instructors" is bringing down an otherwise thriving enterprise of education.

And tenure should never be misconstrued being a "job for life." Educators and instructors unions are right to preserve a good, objective standard by which educators ought to be judged. But due process must not disintegrate into glacial process, and teachers who - at the end of a fair, efficient process - are deemed unfit in the profession ought to be dismissed. Administrators also must fulfill their responsibilities: to support, properly evaluate and, when necessary, make tough decisions concerning the educators entrusted to teach our kids.

I can clutter a cutting room floor with all the snippets the picture gets wrong. For example, New York City's rubber room has been closed, after years of union-led efforts to slam the door on this practice.

For argument's sake, let's say a miracle happened overnight and our current, fully insufficient system of evaluating teacher effectiveness suddenly became adequate or, better yet, accurate. Say administrators identified teachers who simply didn't succeed, and removed them from their classrooms. What then?

Who wants to cope with the more complicated (but less sexy) and absolutely essential (but unexciting) realities, as in the fact that educators need equipment, resources and backing to do their jobs well? It is invigorating to say "fire the deficient educators," but it doesn't do much to develop schools. The plain, unsexy truth is that the best way to improve instructor quality is to do a better job of developing and supporting the educators to whom we entrust our kids’ educations. But some seem to buy into the world according- to-Superman philosophy of education reform - that the "best performing schools" are the boutique schools that enjoy extra resources and are more selective in choosing their student populations. I mean no disrespect to the many well-intentioned people who set out to provide a good education to students that have been denied that right. But most of them fall short, as well as people who defy the odds touch only a minuscule percentage of children.

The chance for a great public education should come not by chance, not even by choice, but by right.

We all agree that right is being denied to too many kids. But, in the end, no solution is as measurable, as available or as answerable as a remarkable neighborhood school. I've seen such success stories in real life. In schools everywhere from New York City to Albuquerque, N.M., from St. Paul, Minn., to Philadelphia, and from Los Angeles County to Baltimore, children are defying the odds. The solutions are not the stuff of action flicks - supports for disadvantaged kids, extra help for those who start or fall behind, high expectations for all children and challenging coursework - but they achieve the desired results.

Picture a sequel to Waiting for Superman, released a few years from now. Would we rather stick with the Hollywood ideal of providing an escape hatch - sometimes superior, most often inferior - to a handful of kids? Or provide a model in which we had summoned the will to accomplish the hard, but effective and far-reaching, work to create meaningful improvements to whole school districts, providing all kids with the best possible choice - an extremely effective neighborhood school? 90 percent of American kids - almost 50 million kids - focus on our public schools. Modification in a single classroom, a single school, or even a single school district isn’t enough.

We cannot wait. And we cannot hinge our hopes on Superman, or on any mythical solution or silver bullet. We cannot rely on anything other than replicable, scalable, successful tactics to supply all kids the education they deserve.