Best movies like The Wave

Sylvia, a novice schoolteacher, is hired to teach English in a high school, but she’s met with an apathetic faculty, a delinquent student body and an administration that drowns its staff in paperwork. The following days go from bad to worse as Sylvia struggles to reach her most troubled students.

Gripping, heartbreaking, and ultimately hopeful, Waiting for Superman is an impassioned indictment of the American school system from An Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim.

The story of a mentally anguished high school history teacher going through a complete reassessment of his life. His method for reassessing his life is to narrate it to his class and interweave in it three generations of his family's history.

Josie Geller, a baby-faced junior copywriter at the Chicago Sun-Times, must pose as a student at her former high school to research contemporary teenage culture. With the help of her brother, Rob, Josie infiltrates the inner circle of the most popular clique on campus. But she hits a major snag in her investigation -- not to mention her own failed love life -- when she falls for her dreamy English teacher, Sam Coulson.

A bunch of high school misfits in Hawaii, introduced by their new teacher, attend a science fair in which they draw up inspiration to build their own solar car and win a trip to compete in the 1990 World Solar Challenge in Australia.

Inspired by real events, this ribald comedy pits an unlikely gang of students against their principal after she bars safe-sex activities on campus. Protesting Principal Weller's muzzling of free speech, the teens stage a bold and hilarious rebellion.

After watching their best friend get murdered, a group of teens struggle to expose a local hero as the vicious killer and keep from becoming his next victims.

Five high school students from different walks of life endure a Saturday detention under a power-hungry principal. The disparate group includes rebel John, princess Claire, outcast Allison, brainy Brian and Andrew, the jock. Each has a chance to tell his or her story, making the others see them a little differently -- and when the day ends, they question whether school will ever be the same.

A high-school English teacher becomes dangerously obsessed with a star athlete who needs academic help.

Riley is struggling to make friends after transferring to a new high school where her father, Chris, is an English teacher. When she meets Kyla, they quickly becomes close friends. However, the friendship takes a strange turn when Riley learns that Kyla is obsessed with her dad. Will Kyla successfully seduce Chris and start a twisted new life with him by removing everyone in her path, or will Riley be able to save her father from Kyla’s treacherous plot before it’s too late?

A young, white school teacher is assigned to Yamacraw Island, an isolated fishing community off the coast of South Carolina, populated mostly by poor black families. He finds that the basically illiterate, neglected children there know so little of the world outside their island.

Teacher Linda Sinclair balances her staid home life with an incredible passion for her subject, but her routine is forever altered when a former star pupil and his unsupportive father reenter her life.

A young teacher inspires her class of at-risk students to learn tolerance, apply themselves, and pursue education beyond high school.

A British Guianese engineer starts a job as a high school teacher in London’s East End, where his uninterested and delinquent pupils are in desperate need of attention and care.

A chronicle of three weeks in the lives of several high school teachers, administrators and students through the eyes of substitute teacher, Henry Barthes. Henry roams from school to school, imparting modes of knowledge, but never staying long enough to form any semblance of sentient attachment.

The very first documentary about Jane Elliott's educational experiment about discrimination, which was originally produced for ABC News, in which she conducts an unforgettable lesson with her third-grade class in Riceville, Iowa.

In 1965, passionate musician Glenn Holland takes a day job as a high school music teacher, convinced it's just a small obstacle on the road to his true calling: writing a historic opus. As the decades roll by with the composition unwritten but generations of students inspired through his teaching, Holland must redefine his life's purpose.

A drama teacher's taboo relationship with an unstable student strikes a nerve in her jealous classmate, sparking a vengeful chain of events within their suburban high school that draws parallels to "The Crucible".

Stuck at a crossroads in her personal life, it falls on high school English teacher Miss Stevens to chaperone three of her students — Billy, Margot and Sam — on a weekend trip to a drama competition.

A coming-of-age story that follows 12-year-old Andy Nichol, a bright student who, like most kids his age, will do anything to avoid conflict for fear of suffering overwhelming ridicule and punishment from his junior high school peers.

A nerdy high school super whiz experiments with a chemical which will transform his guinea pig "Mr. Mumps" from a gentle pet into a ravenous monster. In a fit of rage against his tormentors at the high school, Vernon Potts goes on a killing spree, eliminating all of those who ever picked on him - the Gym Coach, the School Jock, The Creepy Janitor & his hated teacher, Ms. Grindstaff.

A charming romance develops between a boy with one eye and an overweight girl, though when she loses weight after going to college, their relationship is tested in devastating ways they never dreamed would happen.

A frizzy-haired, pink-cheeked outcast named Spork navigates her way through the annals of junior high.

Five recent graduates of an all-girl high school - Kippy, Sarah, Michelle, Peaches and Alison - attempt to lose their virginity during a two-week bicycle trip with their seemingly repressed teacher Miss Woodruff. The girls hold a contest to see who can lose their virginity in the most creative and original manner.

Documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman takes us inside Northeast High School as a fly on the wall to observe the teachers and how they interact with the students.

A high school shooting has repercussions on the town and students.

Daria is a 16-year-old girl who is a little too smart and funny to fit in with the crowd. It’s summertime and the livin' is hard. Daria finds herself forced into volunteering at the OK To Cry Corral, a summer camp for the overly sensitive and those who'd like to be.

A clique of school girls devise a secret plan that they code-name "Lick the Star".

Leda Beth Vincent lives in the small town of Shiloh and works as a cocktail waitress there. She is not too well thought of as she is nothing of a blushing virgin. But she is far from a whore and brings up her daughter Julie, a high school student, as a loving responsible mother. So, when she becomes aware that Julie's very popular history teacher, Mr Baker, spreads antisemitic ideas among his pupils, Leda Beth decides to ask Mr Baker for an explanation. But she comes up against a wall. Nobody in town - Julie less than all others - wants to support her and it looks as if she will have to bring the Board of Education to court. The trouble is that a school dropout and a tramp of her kind does not count for much compared to the holders of knowledge and of morality.

When six-year-old Ruby Bridges is chosen to be the first African-American to integrate her local elementary school, she is subjected to the true ugliness of racism for the first time.

Washington plays a school principal in a tough inner city Los Angeles high school out to rid it of drugs, gangs, low moral of teachers, and restore educational values.

Deloris Van Cartier is again asked to don the nun's habit to help a run-down Catholic school, presided over by Mother Superior. And if trying to reach out to a class full of uninterested students wasn't bad enough, the sisters discover that the school is due to be closed by the unscrupulous chief of a local authority.

Surrounded by the eccentric faculty of Truman High School, Mitch Carter wins the California Teacher of the Year award and immediately receives a tempting offer that may force him to leave his job.

At an international school in Jakarta, a philosophy teacher challenges his class of twenty graduating seniors to choose which ten of them would take shelter underground and reboot the human race in the event of a nuclear apocalypse.

A small town girl who has just moved to the big city is pressured by peers at school to lose her virginity.

A straight-edged teacher finds trouble when an honors student is willing to do anything to get an A.

A group of teenagers wish to rebel against the administrators and teachers (the system) in their suburban Chicago high school called New Port South

Based on the inspiring and powerful true story and journal entries of Rachel Joy Scott, the first student killed in the Columbine High School shooting in 1999.

High school student Jane Shipley seeks to mend her splintering relationship with childhood best friend Merritt, and fit in with her rebellious peers. When Jane's math teacher oversteps his bounds, an apathetic high school administration forces Jane and Merritt to take matters into their own hands, driving their relationship into further turmoil and inciting deadly consequences.

Rebel without a cause or a clue at an elite but uptight college discovers some of his classmates have formed an even more elite clique more or less hell-bent on ridding the school, and quite possibly American society, of what they deem to be its undesirables because of ethnicity, politics, etc. Our hero recruits a teacher and some other "less desirable" classmates to undermine the elitists, and, naturally, things get quite violent.

To prove his brother's innocence, undercover officer Nick enrolls in high school again, dealing with crushes, bullies, humiliations, popularity swings, and quirky teachers and staff to find the real murderer.

"Lesson Plan" is a documentary film about The Third Wave (aka The Wave & Die Welle) classroom experiment, as told by the original students and teacher Ron Jones.

As the debate over the state of America's public school system rages on, one thing everyone agrees on is the need for great teachers. Yet, while research proves that teachers are the most important school factor in a child's future success, America's teachers are so woefully underpaid that almost a third must divide their time between a second job in order to make a living. Chronicling the stories of four teachers in different areas of the country, American Teacher reveals the frustrating realities of today's educators, the difficulty of attracting talented new teachers, and why so many of our best teachers feel forced to leave the profession altogether. But this wake-up call to our system's failings also looks at possibilities for reform. Can we re-value teaching in the United States and turn it into a prestigious, financially attractive and competitive profession? With almost half of American teachers leaving the field in the next five years, now is the time to find out.

At fictional Harrad College students learn about sexuality and experiment with each other. Based on the 1962 book of the same name by Robert Rimmer, this movie deals with the concept of free love during the height of the sexual revolution which took place in the United States.

Walkout is the true story of a young Mexican American high school teacher, Sal Castro. He mentors a group of students in East Los Angeles, when the students decide to stage a peaceful walkout to protest the injustices of the public school system. Set against the background of the civil rights movement of 1968, it is a story of courage and the fight for justice and empowerment.

Inner city kids are given new direction when they are convinced to join the school chess team.

School... there is the popular crowd. Teachers favor some students over others. Because of this, Violet decides to start a school paper, which exposes many embarrassing secrets of popular kids who think they run the campus.

In a Mexican border town plagued by neglect, corruption, and violence, a frustrated teacher tries a radical new method to break through his students’ apathy and unlock their curiosity, their potential… and maybe even their genius. Based on a true story.

Based on a true story from 1998, five Latino and Black teenagers from the toughest underserved ghetto in Miami fight their way into the National Chess Championship under the guidance of their unconventional but inspirational teacher.

Sarah McDavid, an idealistic young teacher, takes a job in a rough high school where she is eventually attacked and raped in her classroom after school hours and decides to buck the school system in an attempt to make schools safer for students and teachers alike, against the advice of the school's principal, Dr. Keys, who tries to gloss over the hazardous conditions and the incident itself to avoid bad publicity and decreased enrollment.