The Truth Behind Won't Back Down

By Julie Cavanagh, Special Education Teacher in Red Hook, Brooklyn

Huffington Post
September 26, 2012

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-cavanagh/wont-back-down_b_1906434.html 


This week a film partially funded by Walden Media,
which is owned by entrepreneur and conservative Philip
Anschutz, will be released in theaters. The film, Won't
Back Down, is a work of fiction but claims to be based
on real life events and tells the story of a teacher
and a parent in a 'failing' school who join forces to
'save their school.' Walden Media also funded Waiting
for Superman, which was billed as a documentary on
education and chronicled the stories of several
families navigating the educational landscape
intermixed with commentary from journalists,
economists, philanthropists, and business folks who
surmised the troubles of public education today. These
two films differ in style, but their substance is
aligned and their conclusion is the same: teacher
unions are the obstacle to student achievement.

When Waiting for Superman was released, a group of
parents and teachers, of which I was a part, responded
to that film with our own documentary, The Inconvenient
Truth Behind Waiting for Superman. We highlighted the
myths we believed were propagated in that film, shining
a light on the corporate education reform movement, and
called on parents, educators, young people and
community members to demand real reform. Since then,
the national conversation regarding education reform
has gained more prominence. When we were making our
film, the idea that there were forces attempting to
privatize our public education system and that they
aimed to use teacher unions as a scapegoat while citing
poverty as an excuse rather than an important factor we
as a society must address, was controversial. Today it
is fair to say this conversation is accepted on
national television.

Even though the national consciousness has been raised
regarding issues related to education and folks are
more engaged and informed than ever before, the efforts
to misinform, malign, and muddy the truth remain. Won't
Back Down takes its viewers on an emotional roller
coaster ride and clearly pushes the perspective that
teachers and their unions prevent progress. While I
have my own views about an alternate vision for teacher
unions, I am a proud union member, and know that
teacher unions, regardless of their flaws, are
committed to progress and student achievement; I also
know they are all that stands in the way of the sale of
our public education system to the highest bidder and
that is precisely why they are being attacked.

In our film, we featured several parents and teachers
who actually took a stand against the corporate reform
movement. Whether it was parents and teachers who
joined together to stop a charter school from being
forced into their building against the will of the
community, or to fight budget cuts that were ravaging
their school, to beg the powers that be to stop the
closing of a beloved neighborhood school that was long
under-resourced and undermined, or begging for policy
makers to prevent ballooning class sizes or stop
wasting precious funds on high stakes testing when they
could be diverted to culturally relevant and rich
curriculum; they all shared real, true, authentic
stories about how they, together, would not back down.
There are thousands of real won't-back-down stories out
there (I have shared my school community's here:
http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2012/09/we-fought-invasion-of-ps-15-real-life.html
and you can too), not based on actual events, but are actual
events. Most of them involve fighting the very forces
folks like Philip Anschutz fund.

There is at least one thing however that Won't Back
Down gets right; it does take parents and teachers and
young people working together to make our schools
great. Unions are not obstacles in this and in fact are
positioned to lead the collaboration. One must only
look to Chicago to see a real won't-back-down story
where the cast of characters include not lazy unionized
teachers, but educators who together with parents,
young people and community members are fighting for the
schools they deserve.

I hope the folks who choose to see Won't Back Down
return to their communities energized with the spirit
of collaboration, not demonization, and together fight
for real reforms for our schools.

Follow Julie Cavanagh on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/juliecavanagh15

___________________________________________

Not Waiting for Superman

      Rethinking Schools has launched a new project, “NOT Waiting for Superman.” We could use your help and invite your participation.

As you may know, on September 24, the film Waiting for Superman will open in theaters in New York City and Los Angeles. Soon after, it will open in thousands of theaters across the country. The film, made by Davis Guggenheim who directed An Inconvenient Truth, is backed by a well-financed, sophisticated media campaign.

According to those who have seen the film, Waiting for Superman is “very sophisticated,” “emotionally engaging,”  “politically convincing to the uninformed,” and “contains powerful stories.” Politically it has been described as “anti-teacher union,” “anti-public education,” “pro-charter,” “promoting market solutions,” “anti-teacher,” and “promoting the Duncan/Rhee/Klein agenda.”

Rethinking Schools editor Stan Karp wrote this after viewing the film:

The message of the film is that public schools are failing because of bad teachers and their unions. The film's "solution," to the minimal extent it suggests one, is to replace them with "great" charter schools and teachers who have less power over their schools and classrooms.

This message is not just wrong. In the current political climate, it's toxic.

The film was made by the Academy-Award winning director of "An Inconvenient Truth," a documentary that helped awaken millions to the dangers of global warming. But this film misses the mark by light years. Instead of helping people understand the many problems schools face and what it will take to address them, it presents misleading information and simplistic "solutions" that will make it harder for those of us working to improve public education to succeed. We know first hand how urgently change is needed. But by siding with a corporate reform agenda of teacher bashing, union busting, test-based "accountability" and highly selective, privatized charters, the film pours gasoline on the public education bonfire started by No Child Left Behind and Race To the Top.

Waiting for school improvement

Dana Goldstein | September 23, 2010

Here's what you see in Waiting for Superman, the new documentary that celebrates the charter school movement while blaming teachers unions for much of what ails American education: working- and middle-class parents desperate to get their charming, healthy, well-behaved children into successful public charter schools.

Here's what you don't see: the four out of five charters that are no better, on average, than traditional neighborhood public schools (and are sometimes much worse); charter school teachers, like those at the Green Dot schools in Los Angeles, who are unionized and like it that way; and noncharter neighborhood public schools, like PS 83 in East Harlem and the George Hall Elementary School in Mobile, Alabama, that are nationally recognized for successfully educating poor children.

You don't see teen moms, households without an adult English speaker or headed by a drug addict, or any of the millions of children who never have a chance to enter a charter school lottery (or get help with their homework or a nice breakfast) because adults simply aren't engaged in their education. These children, of course, are often the ones who are most difficult to educate, and the ones neighborhood public schools can't turn away.

Waiting for Superman

I haven't seen the film yet.  Here is a critical review.

An Inconvenient Superman: Davis Guggenheim's New Film Hijacks School Reform

Davis Guggenheim's 2010 film Waiting for Superman is a slick marketing piece full of half-truths and distortions. The film suggests the problems in education are the fault of teachers and teacher unions alone, and it asserts that the solution to those problems is a greater focus on top-down instruction driven by test scores. It rejects the inconvenient truth that our schools are being starved of funds and other necessary resources, and instead opts for an era of privatization and market-driven school change. Its focus effectively suppresses a more complex and nuanced discussion of what it might actually take to leave no child behind, such as a living wage, a full-employment economy, the de-militarization of our schools, and an education based on the democratic ideal that the fullest development of each is the condition for the full development of all. The film is positioned to become a leading voice in framing the debate on school reform, much like Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth did for the discussion of global warming, and that's heartbreaking.

I'm not categorically opposed to charter schools; they can and often do allow a group of creative and innovative teachers, parents, and communities to build schools that work for their kids and are free of the deadening bureaucracy of most districts. These schools can be catalysts for even larger changes. But there are really two main opposing positions in the "charter movement" -- it's not really a movement, by the way, but rather a diverse range of different projects. On one side are those who hope to use the charter option to operate effective small schools that are autonomous from districts. On the other side are the corporate powerhouses and the ideological opponents of all things public who see this as a chance to break the teacher's unions and to privatize education. Superman is a shill for the latter. Caring, thoughtful teachers are working hard in both types of schools. But their efforts are being framed and defined, even undermined, by powerful forces that have seized the mantle of "reform."

The film dismisses with a side comment the inconvenient truth that our schools are criminally underfunded. Money's not the answer, it glibly declares. Nor does it suggest that students would have better outcomes if their communities had jobs, health care, decent housing, and a living wage. Particularly dishonest is the fact that Guggenheim never mentions the tens of millions of dollars of private money that has poured into the Harlem Children's Zone, the model and superman we are relentlessly instructed to aspire to. Those funds create full family services and a state of the art school. In a sleight of hand, the film magically shifts focus, turning to "bad teaching" as the problem in the poor schools while ignoring these millions of dollars that make people clamor to get into the Promise Academy. As a friend of mine said, "Well, at least now we know what it costs."