The campaign against teachers and their unions

by Laura Clawson. Daily Kos/Labor

The campaign against teachers is special, and worth paying attention to. It's not like workers in general get much respect in our culture, at least not beyond vague lip service that only ever applies to the individual, powerless worker not asking for anything. And janitors, hotel housekeepers, cashiers, and a host of others could fill books with the daily substance of working in low-status professions, I'm sure. But right now, teachers are the subject of a campaign heavily funded and driven from the top down to take a profession that has long been respected by the public at large and make the people in the profession villains and pariahs, en route to undercutting the prestige, the decision-making ability, the working conditions, and, of course, the wages and benefits of the profession as a whole. What we're watching right now is a specific front in the war on workers, and one with immense reach through our culture—and coming soon to a movie theater near you if it's not already there, in the form of the poorly reviewed parent trigger drama Won't Back Down.

(That it's a war not just on teachers but on the workers of the future and on the government just sweetens the pot for many of the people waging the war.)

Teachers face a catch-22. Those in poor districts are expected to be superhuman, to by themselves counteract the effects of poverty—even though we know that while teachers are the most important factor in educational achievement inside the school, factors outside the school, like poverty, are far more important. But while teachers of poor students are supposed to be superhuman, teachers of well-to-do students are frequently treated by doctor and lawyer parents as idiot failures, teaching because they can't be doctors or lawyers. Policy and funding decisions are used against teachers in poor districts; the condescension of parents serves the same purpose in wealthier ones. But in both cases the professionalism of teachers is undermined.

I've written a lot about how corporate education policy targets teachers (and the concept of education as a public good that should be available to all kids). But this upper-middle-class condescension toward teachers is a potent weapon in that campaign against teachers and education. One of the foundations of the corporate drive to "reform" education to corporate preferences is the idea that billionaires know better, that hedge fund managers and Walmart heirs and Bill Gates, by virtue of having made a lot of money, must know more than education professionals about how education should function. And that translates downward—if Bill Gates is supposed to know how schools should work in general, an engineer or executive at least gets to boss his kid's teacher around.

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

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Mayor Kevin Johnson and the next anti teacher union film

On Monday afternoon - Labor Day _ , a Hollywood film called "Won't Back Down" -- will be shown   in Charlotte, Los Angeles Mayor Villariagosa  is scheduled to speak on a panel at the theater, joined by Michelle Rhee of StudentsFirst, Ben Austin of Parent Revolution, and Sacramento, Calif., Mayor Kevin Johnson. Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker will also speak at the event.

"Won't Back Down" stars Maggie Gyllenhaal as a single mother determined to get her daughter out of their failing public elementary school and Davis as a teacher at the school who joins with her to gather parent and teacher signatures behind a It's a movie about the push for school choice, a movement that has been gaining momentum around the country for the past several years. It is also a film about teachers' unions, who are one of the Democratic Party's biggest and most loyal sources of political contributions.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation's second largest teachers' union, blasted the film in an open letter this past week, calling it "divisive" and saying it "resorts to falsehoods and anti-union stereotypes."

"The film contains several egregiously misleading scenes with the sole purpose of undermining people's confidence in public education, public school teachers and teachers unions," Weingarten wrote.