Legend of the Fall: Snapshots of What’s Wrong in the Education Debate
Bill Maher presents viewers of his HBO series, Real Time, with a mix of satire and serious considerations of topics and ideas often ignored in our wider public discourse. During his 15 October 2010 episode—with panelists John Legend, Markos Moulitsas, Dana Loesch, and Dan Neil—Maher shifted the discussion to education after identifying the documentary Waiting for Superman a great film.
After praising the documentary, which has received unmatched media support including a week-long focus on education by NBC and an episode of Oprah dedicated to the film, Maher offered facts he had learned from the film. While Maher at first appeared to have accepted the film uncritically, he did turn on the basic argument of the documentary—that the teaching profession is bloated with bad teachers who need to be weeded out in order to save our schools and those children trapped in bad schools—and raised the possibility that educational