Two Thumbs Down for Won't Back Down

by Phyllis Bush

Last night I took one for the team. I received an invitation from the Parent Revolution to attend free screening of the movie Won’t Back Down. Admittedly, I had read all of the reviews and all of the on line reports of its union bashing message, but I was prepared to watch the movie with an open, if somewhat skeptical, mind. The first thing I noticed was that the cinematography was grainy and faded, and since the audience is told at the beginning of the film that this is based on a real event (although we are never told who or where this might have been based upon), my guess is that the film maker wanted this film to look like a documentary, perhaps the narrative version of Waiting for Superman.

The movie opens with a scene of a harried single mother who is brushing her teeth and getting a drink of caffeine at the same time. She rushes in to get her daughter out of bed because they are apparently late to school. But first, the movie maker wants the audience to see her obvious love for her child as she snuggles with the child instead of getting her up and moving. Several things stood out about this opening scene. The mother’s clothing was borderline trampish; their apartment looked pretty messy and dirty, which offended me on a number of levels. While it is never stated, the inference is that this woman is poor, and because she is poor, her living conditions are obviously squalid.

Even more offensive than the depiction of living in poverty was the characterization and the dialogue. The characters were all stereotypes. What was the point of the love interest between the banjo playing teacher and the dedicated, dyslexic, trampy mother? How is it that the TFA teacher was the only teacher in the whole school who cared about kids?

The union leader is so offensive that the audience must draw the conclusion that this horrid school is the fault of the teachers’ unions. At one point the union leader bastardizes a quote often attributed to Albert Shanker, the founder of the AFT: "When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children." However, in their effort to demonize teachers’ unions and union bosses, they failed to note that Shanker also said:

Public schools played a big role in holding our nation together. They brought together children of different races, languages, religions, and cultures and gave them a common language and a sense of common purpose. We have not outgrown our need for this; far from it.

The aim of the movie is obviously to play on and manipulate the heartstrings of the audience. Obviously, the message is that the secret to fixing the schools is for the parents to take it over even if the big bad bureaucracy and the teachers’ unions don’t want reform. While that sounds like a really swell idea, some of the basic reasons about why this is not a good idea have nothing to do with job security or bureaucracy. How will these schools be funded? Where will they get their facility? How will they staff it? The list goes on and on.

One of the most annoying aspects of the movie is that, like our policy makers, it over simplifies the issues. The bottom line message is that no matter how simplistic an idea is, if it is called “reform,” then is must be a good idea.

Even though Waiting for Superman was also manipulative and simplistic, it was a much better movie than this. Now that I have seen the movie, I no longer have to rely on hearsay to say how I feel about it. However, I can never get back the two hours where I could have been watching some more edifying, like Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

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Parents Across America Fact-Checks Won't Back Down

Parents Across America Fact-checks Won’t Back Down, the Parent Trigger propaganda flick.

"Inspired" by real events? The new movie by Walden Media (makers of Waiting for Superman) about parent triggers, is apparently "inspired" by the parent trigger movement in 2010 launched against McKinley Elementary School in Compton, Calif. That movement, unlike the one in the movie, failed.

Simply put, parent trigger laws allow 51% of parents of a given public school the right to close a "failing school" or replace it with a privately managed charter. So you can guess who is in favor of the laws...Charter Management Organizations, Corporate Reformers and politicians who are pushing charter schools on America despite the lack of research showing that charters offer any advantage over regular public schools.

The evildoer in the movie is, as expected, the teachers union. NEA responds...

It’s no coincidence that “Won’t Back Down” is funded in large part by Walden Media, the same company that bankrolled “Waiting for Superman.” Walden Media is owned by Phillip Anschutz, a right-wing billionaire who has a long history of supporting conservative politicians and causes.

Won't Back Down, like Waiting for Superman, describes another battle in the war against public education in America. Diane Ravitch explains why parent trigger laws are the wrong way to help struggling schools.

Public schools don’t belong to the 51 percent of the parents whose children are enrolled this year. They don’t belong to the teachers or administrators. They belong to the public. They were built with public funds. The only legitimate reason to close a neighborhood public school is under-enrollment. If a school is struggling, it needs help from district leaders, not a closure notice.

Parents in Florida got it right earlier this month. By organizing, they stopped a parent trigger law. No Florida-based parent group supported it. By their actions, they recognized that collaboration — not hostile takeovers — is the most effective way to improve their public schools.

Ravitch asks, should "51 percent of people using a public service have the power to privatize it?" Perhaps corporate reformers might answer "yes" to that question. However, the right thing to do is to improve public services -- not throw them away.

Parents Across America provides a comparison of the film version, as shown in the trailer (see below), to the reality of the Compton CA action.

Film version: The trailer shows parents, led by the Gyllenhaal character, mobilizing valiantly to take over their school — and only much later contacting an outside organizer for extra support.

• Reality: The Parent Trigger attempt at McKinley Elementary School was entirely orchestrated by outsiders – the staff of Parent Revolution, the Los Angeles organization that first proposed the legislation that created the Parent Trigger. Parent Revolution looked around the state for a school to target, chose McKinley and pre-selected a charter school operator called Celerity to take it over. Parent Revolution sent paid operatives door to door in Compton with petitions. Only then did any parents at McKinley even hear about the petition drive, according to the Los Angeles Weekly, which covered the story in detail.

Film version: The trailer shows parents determined to take over the school, against all odds.

• Reality: In Compton, there was no discussion of parents taking over the school. The Parent Trigger attempt was intended from the beginning to turn the school over to the Celerity charter school operator.

Film version: The trailer shows parents uniting in support of the purportedly parent-led cause.

• Reality: In Compton, after Parent Revolution turned in the petition signatures, hundreds of McKinley parents turned out to a school board meeting to oppose the Parent Trigger. Many parents protested that they had been misled into signing the petition and that they didn’t want their school to become a charter school, according to the Los Angeles Weekly.

Film version: The trailer shows a movement destined to triumphantly turn a hellhole into a successful school.

• Reality: In Compton, the charter operator, Celerity, ended up opening a school near McKinley rather than taking it over. The vast majority of McKinley parents kept their children at McKinley. Only 20 percent of the McKinley families transferred their children to the new charter, according to the Los Angeles Times. “

There has since been a second Parent Trigger attempt, also led by Parent Revolution, at another California school, Desert Trails Elementary in Adelanto, in early 2012. That effort divided the school community into factions, and is currently mired in court battles.

None of this is to say that struggling schools are acceptable and that we shouldn’t be working to improve them. But the Parent Trigger is not an attempt to improve struggling schools; it’s an attempt to divert public money into private pockets. It’s about empowering opportunistic entrepreneurs, not parents. No star-powered propaganda vehicles can make that reality go away.

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Equity and the Fight Against Competition

Diane Ravitch has posted a profile of a tireless advocate for public education and equity.

Ravitch, who is a powerful and vocal advocate for public education in her own right, describes Jan Resseger, a lay minister for Public Edcuation and Witness for the United Church of Christ, as

a fearless and tireless advocate for public education and for equity. She has a passion for justice and a deep and loving concern for people. She understands in a visceral sense that a decent society must sustain vibrant public institutions.

Resseger's focus for this year, according to an email she sent to Ravitch and others on her list, is to fight the concept of competition in public education.

My biggest beef is with the Administration’s transformation of Title I from a formula program that delivers federal funds (admittedly so small relative to the need that these dollars don’t accomplish what I wish they did) to schools with large numbers of or concentrations of students in poverty. The goal of this program is to help those schools meet the students’ needs. Title I was created back in 1965 as the cornerstone of the War on Poverty. Its context was expanding civil rights for children who had been shut out or left out or left behind. The current Administration and Congress have frozen the Title I formula program in the last two budgets and re-directed the money into competitive programs like Race to the Top and School Improvement Grants in which the states or districts with the best grant proposal writers can help their states or districts be winners. That means, of course, that a lot of states and school districts and schools are the losers. If you have winners, you always have losers and I don’t think any state or school district or school that serves children in poverty ought to lose the chance to serve those children. You may think this particular issue is way too deep in the weeds of policy to worry about, but for me it is a big, heartfelt worry—and let me warn you, I’ll be mentioning it again and again this year as part of my personal campaign against competition.

You can read more from Jan Resseger here and here.

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GEM Puts Documentary Online

The Grassroots Education Movement has placed their documentary, The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman online. They describe the film...

One year ago, The Grassroots Education Movement premiered a new documentary, written and directed by New York City public school teachers and parents, created in response to Davis Guggenheim’s highly misleading film. Waiting for "Superman" would have audiences believe that free-market competition, standardized tests, destroying teacher unions, and the proliferation of charter schools are just what this country needs to create great public schools.

The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting For "Superman" highlights the real-life experiences of public school parents, students and educators to show how these so-called reforms are actually hurting public education. The film discusses the kinds of real reform – inside schools and in our society as a whole – that we urgently need to genuinely transform education in this country.

Since the official premiere of GEM's film at the Assembly Hall of The Riverside Church in Harlem on May 19, 2012 featuring historian Diane Ravitch as our honored guest, our free offer of the DVD and permission to copy and distribute copies of the film have produced an estimated 15,000 copies in circulation. Requests have come in from all 50 states and 6 continents. Screenings have been set up by unions, parent groups, college professors and libraries all over the nation, in India, Turkey, England, New Zealand and Australia. Demand has been so great, we are currently working on a Spanish language version of the 67 minute film.

For more information about the film, visit: waitingforsupermantruth.org.

The film is online at http://vimeo.com/41994760

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Education Issues 2012 #2

Testing, Corporate Reform, Teacher Evaluation, Job Qualifications, ALEC, Arne Duncan,
Fiction vs. Non-Fiction

(Click on the titles below to read the complete articles.)

Testing isn't teaching

To understand how tests and learning become enemies, imagine the impact on teachers whose job security suddenly depends on the inappropriate application of a statistical model that almost all assessment experts warn cannot validly measure teachers' performance.

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Coming Soon to a School Near You: Big Ed

Corporate America has given us Big Banks - banks too big to fail. Corporate America has given us Big Pharma - a pharmaceutical industry too big to fight. Coming soon to a school near you, courtesy of corporate America: Big Ed - a centralized education system too big to question its self-serving, profit-driven, intellect-destroying priorities.

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Stephen Krashen on Teacher Evaluations

Stephen Krashen, professor emeritus at the University of Southern California, responds to a USA Today article about evaluating teachers using test scores.

A number of studies have shown that rating teachers using test score gains does not give consistent results. Different tests produce different ratings, and the same teacher's ratings can vary from year to year, sometimes quite a bit.

In addition, using test score gains for evaluation encourages gaming the system, trying to produce increases in scores by teaching test-taking strategies, not by encouraging real learning. This is like putting a match under the thermometer and claiming you have raised the temperature of the room.

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The Tragedy of Education Transformation: Leadership without Expertise

Professional degrees in education and experience in the classroom don't matter. So say some politicians who have no professional degrees in education or experience in the classroom.

South Carolina's Superintendent of Education Mick Zais makes several claims in The State (March 25, 2012) that build on one central argument: "The most important information about teachers isn’t the degrees they have or their years of seniority. Their effectiveness in the classroom matters much, much more."

Like Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Zais has no experience teaching children in K-12 public education. This complete lack of teaching experience and degrees in the field of education is a suspect position from which to claim that these two characteristics do not matter. In fact, political appointees and elected officials sit in unique positions often above both accountability (the mantra du jour of the political elite regarding education) and qualifications—unlike the real world markets they often praise.

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Lobbyists, Guns and Money

ALEC isn’t single-handedly responsible for the corporatization of our political life; its influence is as much a symptom as a cause. But shining a light on ALEC and its supporters — a roster that includes many companies, from AT&T and Coca-Cola to UPS, that have so far managed to avoid being publicly associated with the hard-right agenda — is one good way to highlight what’s going on. And that kind of knowledge is what we need to start taking our country back.

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Condi Rice-Joel Klein report: Not the new ‘A Nation at Risk’

The report cites lots of statistics that paint public schools in the worst possible light, and continues the trend of comparing America’s educational system with that of high-achieving countries — but doesn’t note that these countries generally don’t do the kinds of things these reformers endorse. Its recommendations would lead to further privatization of public schools and even more emphasis on standardized testing.

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Flunking Arne Duncan

Diane Ravitch gives US Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, a report card.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan loves evaluation. He insists that everyone should willingly submit to public grading of the work they do. The Race to the Top program he created for the Obama Administration requires states to evaluate all teachers based in large part on the test scores of their students. When the Los Angeles Times released public rankings that the newspaper devised for thousands of teachers, Duncan applauded and asked, “What’s there to hide?” Given Duncan’s enthusiasm for grading educators, it seems high time to evaluate his own performance as Secretary of Education.

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Fiction vs. Non-Fiction

Does non-fiction help children learn to read better than fiction? Maybe if you define "learn to read" as "passing a standardized test."

See also Keith Oatley's Scientific American article (Nov. 2011) Fiction Hones Social Skills.

The first article below touts a study showing that non-fiction helps students learn to read better than fiction.

Nonfiction Curriculum Enhanced Reading Skills, Study Finds

Children in New York City who learned to read using an experimental curriculum that emphasized nonfiction texts outperformed those at other schools that used methods that have been encouraged since the Bloomberg administration’s early days, according to a new study...

Howard Gardner, professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, responds.

Reading Curriculums

To the Editor:

Re “Nonfiction Curriculum Enhanced Reading Skills, Study Finds” (news article, March 12): It is instructive to know that second graders who received a Core Knowledge curriculum performed better than comparison groups on measures of reading. But every choice of curriculum — and, more important, every choice of an assessment measure — entails a value judgment.

Those educators who selected a reading program that valued fictional works presumably thought that was an appropriate emphasis. It is now up to those educators to provide measures that might reveal better performances on their curriculum — for example, richer imaginations by students or a greater likelihood of reading books of any sort outside the school environment.

HOWARD GARDNER
Cambridge, Mass., March 12, 2012

...and Neuroscience responds...

Your Brain on Fiction

Reading great literature, it has long been averred, enlarges and improves us as human beings. Brain science shows this claim is truer than we imagined.

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Diane Ravitch in Fort Wayne, Indiana

Diane Ravitch spoke to over 1000 people at IPFW last night (March 13). The Journal Gazette...

Ravitch and phony reform by Karen Francisco

The key to improving schools isn't found in vouchers, charter schools, teacher evaluations, merit pay and all of the other current approaches, according to Ravitch. Schools must end the punitive approach to education. They must identify their best performers and allow them to share what they know with other educators. It's making the arts a key piece of the curriculum and ensuring that students learn how to think critically and write well. It's ensuring health care for all children – including prenatal care – and quality early childhood education.

Read it all HERE


Educator criticizes Indiana reforms: Sees trend as threat to public system by Devon Haynie

Ravitch lamented that some Indiana legislators had jumped on the national education reform bandwagon, and she expressed concern that Daniels had successfully campaigned for the most expansive voucher program in the country – a system she said would weaken public education.

“There are no new ideas here,” she told a group of reporters before the lecture. And “no research” to support the ideas.

Ravitch questioned Indiana’s expansion of charter schools, which she said have no record of outperforming traditional public schools, and expressed dismay over how many for-profit charter management companies do business in the state.

She dismissed teacher merit pay as ineffective and said standardized tests were designed to evaluate students – not teachers. Moreover, she said, standardized tests aren’t the best way to measure whether students are getting a great education.

“I’m not opposed to tests,” she said. “I’m opposed to the usage of tests.”

Ravitch also called for an end to the “attack on teachers” – a trend she said was turning people away from the profession.

The entire article is on the Journal Gazette web site.

Education Issues: 2012 #1

Teacher Satisfaction and Morale, Corporate Reformers, Charters, ALEC, New York City Teacher Evaluations

The MetLife Survey of the American Teacher

Teachers are less satisfied with their careers; in the past two years there has been a significant decline in teachers’ satisfaction with their profession. In one of the most dramatic findings of the report, teacher satisfaction has decreased by 15 points since the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher measured job satisfaction two years ago, now reaching the lowest level of job satisfaction seen in the survey series in more than two decades. This decline in teacher satisfaction is coupled with large increases in the number of teachers who indicate that they are likely to leave teaching for another occupation and in the number who do not feel their jobs are secure.

‘You are so smart…why did you become a teacher?’

One of my finest teachers was near tears the other day. Her student had asked her, “You are so smart…why did you become a teacher?” Within the context of this teacher-bashing climate, that remark was just too much to bear, and I hugged her as she cried. Less than a mile away, her Governor had thumped on a podium at Molloy College saying “if they want the money, perform” as though she and her colleagues were trained seals.

Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools

Drilling students on sample questions for weeks before a state test will not improve their education. The truly excellent charter schools depend on foundation money and their prerogative to send low-performing students back to traditional public schools. They cannot be replicated to serve millions of low-income children. Yet the reform movement, led by Gates, Broad, and Walton, has convinced most Americans who have an opinion about education (including most liberals) that their agenda deserves support.

Corporate Foxes in the IN DOE Henhouse: The Chain School Gospel of Jeb Bush, Jon Hage and WalMart

When the Indiana Charter School Board recently approved two new Charter Schools USA schools to open in Indianapolis, the corporate school honeymoon was on. The East Indianapolis Charter Academy and the South Indianapolis Charter Academy, Charter Schools USA claimed, would be “feeder schools” for students to eventually enter the three other Indiana public schools the Florida for-profit company will be handed $2 million yearly to “turnaround.” “Feeder schools” is an appropriate term, for what these schools do is “feed” taxpayer’s money to Charter Schools USA (CS USA) and whatever other for-profit companies it brings to Indiana.

A Smart ALEC Threatens Public Education

A legislative contagion seemed to sweep across the Midwest during the early months of 2011. First, Wisconsin legislators wanted to strip public employees of the right to bargain. Then, Indiana legislators got into the act. Then, it was Ohio. In each case, Republican governors and Republican-controlled state legislatures had introduced substantially similar bills that sought sweeping changes to each state’s collective bargaining statutes and various school funding provisions.

What was going on? How could elected officials in multiple states suddenly introduce essentially the same legislation?

The answer: The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

A Dark Day for New York

Last week, with Cuomo's deadline looming, the state and the unions reached an agreement. It says that 20 percent of teachers' evaluation will be based on the state tests and another 20 percent on locally designed tests, or on the state tests used in a different way. (It's the same scores, used for the same purpose; I have no idea how those scores might be used in "a different way,") The remaining 60 percent is supposed to consist of classroom observations and other measures. All teachers must be rated on a scale from 0 to 100, using these multiple measures. This draconian point system will guarantee that a teacher with a perfect 60 out of 60 on teaching skill will nonetheless be judged "ineffective" if he or she is in the ineffective range on scores. As it now stands, the rating system is so bizarre that a teacher could be rated effective in all three categories and still be rated "ineffective" overall.

Secretary Duncan hailed the pact and urged other governors to follow Cuomo's example. I am sure that Secretary Duncan knows that President Barack Obama wants teachers to "stop teaching to the test," as he said in his State of the Union address, and to teach with "creativity and passion."

Does anyone seriously believe that teachers in New York state will dare to stop teaching to the test? How many will be fired if they take that risk?

In addition to the parties involved, charter school supporters hailed the agreement, which was odd because teachers in charter schools will not be subject to its provisions.

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