John Legend spreads the gospel of education documentary

IT WOULD BE difficult to come up with a better spokesman for the documentary "Waiting for 'Superman' " than music star (and Penn alum) John Legend.

Handsome, smooth, articulate and with a social conscience, Legend, whose new album with the Roots, "Wake Up!," dropped last week, was at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month to discuss the film and the importance of education.

The 31-year-old, six-time Grammy winner grew up in Springfield, Ohio, where his parents were "very intensely focused on my being educated," he said in a suite at Toronto's Fairmont Royal York Hotel. "They actually home-schooled me for a bit and I was reading at a very young age."

Enrolling in public school when his parents got divorced, Legend found himself ahead of his classmates.

"Being ahead you get treated differently because you get tracked with the other smart kids, you get the best teachers," he said. "The public schools that were like mine invest their best resources in their top students. I was in all the advanced classes and all of my advanced class teachers were really good, really compelling, really passionate about what they were doing. I think they were excited that they got to teach the best kids - but they were probably teaching the best kids because they were the best teachers.

"So all of us did pretty well that were on that track - we went to college and graduated. But the vast majority of our school probably didn't finish college. Now our school is officially listed as a 'dropout factory' [a term widely discussed in the film]. The cutoff for that is 40 percent or more don't graduate on time from high school.

"So I went to a dropout factory but I was in an isolated environment in that dropout factory."

And that isolated environment, which began with concerned parents, got Legend to an Ivy League university. Legend's story, however, is the rare exception.

That's why "Waiting for 'Superman' " is so important to him, he said. "I want as many people as possible to see it. I want voters and politicians to see it because I think it's very powerful, very emotional and very topical. [Education reform] is an issue that is critically important for the country and the film's treatment of the issue is really moving and it will inspire discussion and, hopefully, it will inspire action."

Legend's involvement with "Superman" is a bit of a fluke, almost as a big a fluke as one of the film's young subjects gaining entry into a better school.

"The reason I even knew about the film," he said, "was because I was making the album 'Wake Up' and we were looking back at civil rights and the political and social songs from the '60s and '70s. It's been my idea for a while that our school situation is the best solution to bring about equal opportunity and equality and civil rights in this country but right now it's the problem. It helps perpetuate inequality. I think of our education crisis and education reform as the civil rights issue of our time."

Legend thought it would be a good idea to add a visual component to the album and highlight the issues it was raising, "to not only make music but talk about an issue that's important to us and is a legacy of the struggles that went before us."

"So we reached out to [director] Davis Guggenheim ["An Inconvenient Truth"], saying why don't we do a film where we look at America's school system and maybe do it through the lens of this album we're making, and go to the home towns of all the songwriters that we're covering and look at the schools in their cities."

Legend was also planning to meet with director Spike Lee, but serendipity struck.

"We meet with Davis and find out he's already making 'Waiting for "Superman." ' So we decided we don't need to reinvent the wheel and make another education documentary - how about we work with Guggenheim on what he's doing.

"He showed us some footage from the film - it wasn't done yet - and I was just so moved by seeing the vignettes that had been put together. It was so emotional, so stimulating, interesting and thought-provoking that I told him anything he wants from me musically I would love to help. I wrote 'Shine' for the film and that's the title song and we also ended up contributing our version of 'Wake Up, Everybody.' "

Legend hopes the film will spur citizens and legislators to fix the system.

"In the history of America it really hasn't been left up to chance - if your parents had money, what neighborhood you lived in - whether you could go to a good school or not," he said.

"Unfortunately, in a country that says everybody has an equal chance to succeed, that clearly hasn't been the case. If you go to an inferior school, your chances of succeeding are significantly lower. If you're taught by ineffective teachers, your chances of succeeding are significantly lower. Prior to charter schools having lotteries, it was more predictable, I guess [almost no poor kids had the opportunity to go to a good school], so these lotteries actually give some kids a chance at the American dream. The onus, however, is on us to make it so every kid has a chance at the American dream and you don't need a lottery to go to a good school."