Education sees rescue, but not from Superman.

While Washington is consumed with whether our president is secretly a Muslim, or born abroad, possibly in outer space, I'd like to talk about some good news. But to see it, you have to look at America from the bottom up, not from the top (Washington) down.

What you'll see from down there is that there is a movement stirring in this country around education. From the explosion of new charter schools to the new teachers' union contract in D.C., which will richly reward public school teachers who get their students to improve faster and weed out those who don't, Americans are finally taking their education crisis seriously. If you don't want to stand on your head, then just go to a theater near you after Sept. 24 and watch the new documentary "Waiting for Superman."

Directed by Davis Guggenheim, who also directed Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," "Waiting for Superman" takes its name from an opening interview with Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children's Zone. HCZ has used a comprehensive strategy, including a prenatal Baby College and social service programs at its charter schools to forge a new highway to the future.

Canada's point is that the only way to fix our schools is not with a Superman or a super-theory. No, it's with supermen and superwomen pushing super-hard to assemble better-trained teachers working with the best methods under the best principals supported by involved parents.

"One of the saddest days of my life was when my mother told me Superman did not exist," Canada says in the film. "I read comic books and I just loved 'em . . . 'cause even in the depths of the ghetto you just thought, 'He's coming . . . he always shows up and he saves all the good people.'"

Then when he was in fourth or fifth grade, he asked, "Ma, do you think Superman is actually [real]?" She told him the truth. "I was crying because there was no one . . . coming with enough power to save us."

"Waiting for Superman" follows five kids and their parents who aspire to obtain a decent public education but have to enter a bingo-like lottery to get into a good charter school, because their home schools are failures.

Guggenheim kicks off the film explaining that he was all for sending kids to local public schools until "it was time to choose a school for my own children, and then reality set in. My feelings about public education didn't matter as much as my fear of sending them to a failing school. . . . I'm lucky. I have a choice. Other families pin their hopes to a bouncing ball, a hand pulling a card from a box or a computer that generates numbers in random sequence. Because when there's a great public school there aren't enough spaces, and so we do what's fair. We place our children . . . in the hands of luck."

This movie is about the people trying to change that. The film's core thesis is that for too long our public school system was built to serve adults, not kids. For too long we underpaid our teachers and compensated them instead by giving them union perks. Over decades, though, those perks accumulated to prevent reform in too many districts. The best ones are now reforming, and the worst are facing challenges from charters.

The movie challenges all the adults who run our schools - teachers, union leaders, principals, parents, school boards, charter-founders, politicians - with one question: Are you putting kids and their education first?

Because we know what works, and it's not a miracle cure. It is the whatever-it-takes-tenacity of the Geoffrey Canadas; it is the lead-follow-or-get-out-of-the-way ferocity of the Washington and New York City school chancellors, Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein.

And it is the quiet heroism of millions of public and charter school teachers and parents who do put kids first - so no Americans ever again have to play life bingo with their kids, or pray to be rescued by Superman.