The long-awaited film “Waiting for Superman” opens in New York City and Los Angeles Friday and it’s already generating a lot of healthy debate. Now the early learning community needs to get involved.

Academy-award winning director Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth) has created a film about the broken U.S. public school system as seen through the lives of five families hoping to get into top schools and depressing data about the system’s failings. Even before its release, the film has been hard to avoid, even earning an entire Oprah show dedicated to it and efforts to reform education.

The buzz is creating a tremendous opportunity to talk about education reform, and maybe though not definitely to make real progress. (Check out today’s highlights of “Waiting for Superman” comments at The Hechinger Report.)

Now, the early learning crowd needs to seize this opportunity to make their point that if you don’t include preschool, pre-kindergarten and child care, many K-12 reforms will struggle, and potentially fail.

In fact, key messages in the movie are relevant to both K-12 and early learning, says Laura Kohn, executive director of Seattle’s New School Foundation and a supporter of the PreK-3rd movement.

“Every child should have equal access to the high quality schooling they need to realize their potential and fulfill their dreams and be a productive member of the community. Just as a bouncing lottery ball should not determine who gets access to quality K-12, luck should not determine which children get good early learning, or, worse, whether they get any formal early learning at all,” Kohn wrote in an email. “Teaching quality varies a great deal in early learning, just as it does in K-12. Early learning also needs to figure out how to nurture and retain teacher talent.”

I would be shocked if the PreK-3rd movement doesn’t have a strategy to get involved in the debate, though the discussion is well underway and I have not yet seen many arguments about the need to include early learning.

One lesson has already emerged from the lead-up to the movie’s release. Through a relentless media campaign, including email, Facebook, and Twitter efforts, the movie has a lot of people talking. Can you envision a major motion picture making the same case for early learning? Of course, it helps to have an Academy Award-winning director in charge.

 It’s not clear when, or if, the movie will come to Seattle, which ranks ninth among cities with the highest number of pledges to see the film. I have asked the film group if that means the movie is coming here.