Some people have wondered what happened to the much ballyhooed film “Won’t Back Down.”
Recall that it was featured on NBC’s “Education Nation,” which is the showcase for the corporate reform movement; one of its stars was interviewed on “Ellen”; it had an elegant opening party at the New York Public Library; Michelle Rhee hosted showings at the two national political conventions.
Should have been a big hit, right? Wrong.
It opened in 2,5000 theaters and disappeared within a month. Hardly anyone wanted to see it.
But it lives! The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is showing it around the country to business organizations, to convince them that the local public schools are awful and that they must support charter schools. Think of it: Schools where children learn to obey or get kicked out.
Here are the events planned for this week in Birmingham, Alabama, where businesses are still looking for the best way to train their workforce:
“Greetings,
On behalf of the Birmingham Business Alliance, I would like to thank each of for agreeing to participate in our panel discussion next week in conjunction with our “Breaking the Monopoly of Mediocrity in Education” tour. As we continue to work towards providing all students in the state of Alabama with quality education options and creating a dynamic workforce, it is important to have dialogue with those who are not only advocates for better education but, who are also actively working to bring about change. Attached you will find the final agenda as well as talking points for each panel. Within each panel, if there is an issue that you feel should be addressed, please don’t hesitate to send your suggestion. A more detailed email will be sent on Tuesday of next week and will address any concerns or changes that are brought to my attention by panel participants. Again, we are excited to have each of you participate in this interactive forum. Please feel free to forward the invitation and registration link to any of your contacts or distribution list who would be interested in attending.
Thank you and we look forward to your participation.
L. Waymond Jackson, Jr.
Director – Education and Workforce Development
birminghambusinessalliance
THE CHAMBER FOR REGIONAL PROSPERITY
505 20th Street North, Suite 200
Birmingham, AL 35203
(205) 241-8117 (office)
(205) 324-2560 (fax)
www.birminghambusinessalliance.com<http://www.birminghambusinessalliance.com/>
On January 24th and 25th please join the Birmingham Business Alliance, the U. S. Chamber of Commerce and the Institute for a Competitive Workforce as we kick-off their national tour “Breaking the Monopoly of Mediocrity in Education.” The tour will focus on the various methods of education reform, business community involvement and engaging the community to become catalyst for change in education and workforce development. Most recently, this tour has visited cities such as Memphis, Indiana, and Phoenix to name a few.
Day one consists of a screening of the movie “Won’t Back Down” featuring Academy Award Nominee, Viola Davis (The Help), immediately followed by a networking reception and opportunity to discuss the education reform issues addressed in the film.
Day two features a panel discussion comprised of area business and education leaders sharing ideas regarding education reform and how best to align the workforce needs of industry with K-12 , post-secondary, and higher education. Topics to be discussed include, The Importance of Pre-K and Early Childhood Education, and How to Achieve a Ready to Work and Engaged Workforce.
Registration for this event is free and due to limited seating we encourage you to register before the event. For a complete listing of panel participants please view the attached agenda; to register click on the link below. Also, included in your “free” registration on Thursday, January 24th are popcorn, drinks, and hors d’ oeuvres and breakfast and lunch are included on Friday, January 25th. Thanks and we look forward to seeing you next week.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What does the community care about quality graduates from the public school system, or any system for that matter, when they can simply outsource?
I should have said “business community”.
This is heartbreaking. I am so demoralized. I am soooo tired of hearing how badly we are doing as teachers. I am not mediocre. My students are not mediocre. Our efforts are not mediocre. Any mediocrity in my opinion is due to the over-emphasis on standardized testing. I am just so very, very saddened by what is happening.
Take heart, Ms. Simonis!! Diane brings to our attention a victory! The corporate-funded propaganda film WBD was a giant expensive flop! American public did not flock to see the business-friendly distortion of the schools. This tells us that Rhee, Gates, Duncan, Obama, Broad, and others supporting charterization haven’t won over public opinion despite vast control of mass media to promote their pov. There’s still time to turn their mess back on them.
Yeah but… When will we have time to undo the damage to the current learners?
When this movie first came out I was floored to hear about the two women who were involved in the movie. Both these women are strong activists. From what I understand Maggie Gyllinhals parents were hippies who are strong union supporters. I just can’t understand how so many intelligent human beings are so taken in by these reformers.
How about showing some real movies both fictional and nonfictional to that list. I found and liked
http://bestonlineuniversities.com/2011/25-best-movies-about-education-ever-made/ these are the heart moving, great teachers, and unusual students i.e. Dead Poets Society, Stand by Me.
Also listed are best commentaries but they did not include the counter-arguments so you decide on those i.e. they had Waiting For Superman but no Inconvenient Truth about Waiting for Superman. Does anyone have the time to make up that list? The Balanced truth about public education commentary and contra-commentary. That would be good to pass around the country via PTA’s, those that still exist.
Have you seen the quote from Malcom X about how the media is the most powerful tool? I know school district employees who want to send their children and grandchildren to charter schools “so they can get a better education.” As a product of private schooling and a 41 yr public school teachers I am amazed at the mind control exercised by the media and the fact that it actually works. This is our fault! We have allowed this to happen and I am embarrassed to have ever been a member of the NEA.
This reference to a “docile workforce” is not about the future, it’s already here!
In this morning’s PLC, the math department was informed that we are the “least well behaved” of all departments in the building. That we must not spend valuable PLC time questioning why something is being implemented, or the way in which it is to be implemented.
No matter if we are being required to participate in fraudulent documentation or not, “We can’t change anything anyway, so we just need to get to it” is what we were told today.
Frightening, isn’t it?
Did they really call you the “least well behaved”? In those words? I know everyone fears for their job, but really I’d have to wear that as a badge of honor. I might even get buttons made up for the department.
Congratulations! Remember the advice to a young student from Fredrick Douglass when asked what to do with his life. Agitate, agitate! was the response. Your math dept. is heroic. Thanks.
This movie is also coming out on DVD very soon. I believe the US Chamber of Commerce is aligned with reformers. But it makes sense that the Walton family doesn’t want this piece of trash to go to waste, so they are turning it into a propaganda film.
This movie recently came up on a photography page I really like. The photographer (who is expecting) and her husband were recently at the movies in a Southern state and a clip of WBD came on. It showed a child being held captive in a closet. (Probably by a teacher) and her husband was upset by that scene. I did leave a message that the movie was pure fiction, got terrible reviews, and how parents around the country started a movement to boycott that film. Walton is obviously still running ads for it–probably to increase DVD rentals to help offset his loss.
I too wish that the stars of that movie have made a statement apologizing for taking part in it. None of those actors were at the Golden Globes. Unfortunately Davis will most likely appear at the Oscars to present since she won last year.
Margaret Spellings was CEO of the US Chamber of Commerce when last I checked. She also advises the Boston Consulting Group, which advises districts to turn public schools over to private management.
I had the displeasure of being in the same room as M. Spellings last year, and she was still defending NCLB.
It is important to note that there is a distinction between the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Chambers of Commerce of individual cities, towns, counties, etc. Many individual chambers are allied with the U.S. Chamber, but not all are, especially after the big stink the U.S. Chamber made about “ObamaCare”.
My town’s local Chamber of Commerce divorced itself from the state chamber. Perhaps there is as much diversity of opinion among business leaders as there is in the population as a whole.
As I remember one of the actors was so upset at the editing that she approached a lawyer. We should all boycott Wal Mart anyway due to them being the largest gun dealership in the country.
There is a long history of business organizations using their influence to shape the educational system. There are direct efforts –such as the efforts to build up vocational education in the early 20th century — and there are indirect effects, such as the belief that schools should be modeled on businesses.
You can see this in how autonomy is treated. Amy Gutmann’s book, Democratic Education, said it was essential to Democracy to grant autonomy to teachers so that they may “exercise intellectual independence in their classrooms,” which is a necessary precondition if one wishes to “teach students to be intellectually independent.” This, however, is simply not very often the case when reforms espouse business models.
Ironically, a robust anti-demcratic movement has grown up in the quarter-century since Democratic Education was published. Here assumptions are heavily influenced by Chubb and Moe, who in the early 1990s made a seminal call for principal autonomy. Their book, Politics, Markets and America’s Schools, presented a market-based system of school choice as a pathway to excellence because it would shift “responsibility to parents [and] their choices would have consequences” for the quality of education. They were (and presumably still are) also explicitly against democratic control of schools and advocate, above all, giving managers autonomy.
But here there is is also an interesting contradiction, one which, considering this happened after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, is even more richly ironic. While in many ways granting autonomy is proposed as an alternative to a command economy model –which old public school systems supposedly resemble–, in promoting autonomy for managers as opposed to teachers, something is lost which both the free market and democratic institutions value: the knowledge, expertise and judgment of the individual.
John Gray, in discussing Miser and Hayek, claims that the problem with planned economies is that they do not take advantage of the information possessed by individuals. In other words, a plan thinks of the individuals implementing it as mere executors of the plan. However, this underestimates them — they can adjust for specific conditions which the planner could never anticipate. In sum, they can use their knowledge and information, which otherwise is underutilized or lost completely. In terms of investment, this knowledge does not provide any return.
So, are our business leaders relying on authoritarian methods? From what I have seen, they do not want a docile work force, they want enthusiastic and grateful workers — people who have a passion for their work, whatever drudgery it entails and whatever moral compromises it requires.
When I think of that movie, I also think of Roger Water’s 1979 song trilogy, Another Brick in the Wall. Part II (protested rigid schooling and boarding schools in the UK. The same song could app;ly here in 2013. It was, I believe their only #1 in the US, UK and former West Germany.
Another Brick in the Wall – Part II – Education
We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teacher leave them kids alone
Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall
(With kids)
We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teacher leave us kids alone
Hey! Teacher! Leave us kids alone!
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall
sorry about not prooofing. The parens and ; in apply.
But how are we going to catch up to the Russians after Sputnik? Oh, wait that is what they told me in the 60’s. I get so confused about which hysterical rantings are current. It must be my parochial schooling. I did have to stop listening to Pink Floyd because it made me angry. I listen to opera now and have become comfortably numb.
Free food always brings ’em in!
stop the handwringing and the gnashing of ‘poor me’ teeth and start fighting back…
I so agree, sahila. Look at Garfield H.S. Look at Glenda Ritz in Indiana. Look at what happened to the Idaho (?) Luna-tc. Look to Chicago, again. So much pushback on school closings by parent & community groups. A CPS-appointed commission (after much noise made by aforementioned groups) found that CPS should not, in fact, close any high schools, and the CPS CEO agreed. Although there is still a huge list of elementary schools on the chopping block, the school communities are organized and ready for the fight. Start by acting locally–yes, WE can!
I used to think of the Chambers of Commerce as merely small businesses’ community outreach groups. Maybe at one time they were, darn sure aren’t any more! They are
corporate mouthpieces for causes that are anything but locale in concern. To see that they are throwing their weight to this disgusting piece of charter school propaganda only proves that point more! Just as I saw Senator Bennett, with his sycophantic grin,
trying to be included in the inauguration grand stand, I once more wondered if O’bama was aware of his major contribution to the destruction of Denver Public Schools? The
answer is probably the same as President O’bama’s awareness of the Chamber of Commerce’s new “interest” in trashing public education for the Trojan business horse of charter schools with all their sophistic front groups? As a fellow teacher once opined to me after she was reprimanded for teaching analytical reading skills, “We aren’t teaching students, we’re teaching ditch diggers!” Sure could substitute “docile, automatons” As well in her prescient prediction!
What happens when businesses that invest in charters go bankrupt? It’s time to make a movie called “Michelle and Me”. Would Michael Moore be interested in making that film?
Hey, let’s all email him and give just some of the horror/true state of affairs in public vs
charter schools! He could sure give the public a shot of reality about throwing away public schools and enriching the corporates, which Michael knows all too well, have NO
interest in the betterment of our country and only the bottom line, no matter who suffers or what destruction they wreck in their mindless madness for control and money!
Typical bogus hustle. What else would you expect from them as they do not have real arguments in their favor considering the lack of performance since the beginning of charter schools.
A local manager of a multi-state grocery store chain told me that her company actively searches for employees with college degrees who have huge debt. She assured me that these employees need less training and retraining and are totally obedient and docile. They desperately need the money simply to survive, yet stay with the company because they cannot get out of debt at that pay level.
Sounds like Winn Dixie?!
One of the bothersome details about the situation is that most of the defenders of public education really don’t seem to understand that most of the deformers are not evil people trying to do harm. They genuinely believe that we are not doing our jobs. They mean well but if you are into history you will remember that Hitler wrote that history would proove him right. He actually believed he was doing a good thing. So do the deformers. Of course Hitler was nuts but read on. Remember “it is always the ‘good men’ who do the most harm.” That was an argument for hanging Robert E. Lee instead of forgiving him after the Civil War as a counter to “He is a good man.” Bill Gates really believes that all students can learn the same way via computers.
It is our responsibility to inform citizens about what we are doing and it should be the responsibility of the WEA and AFT etc. to do so but why are they so quit? We should occupy the WEA and ask why they have been so reluctant to spread the word.
I see paid advertisements for private schools and for newly accepted charter schools in Washington State but where are the news releases and infommercials about public education? We have brought this upon ourselves and the onus of harm to young learners has to be shared by us. When I talk to local citizens about what a good job we do in public schools they just look at me as if I am stupid and wonder off.
I was fortunate enough to be able to work my way through school as a union bricklayer in the Summers and I gladly signed with the NEA along with my first contract. My dues immediately doubled but I see that the appropriate use of my dues has become nil. It is almost as if the union is either afraid to stand up or in businesses pocket. Thanks.
I agree with much of what you said about the deformers, but I don’t agree that we, teachers should bow our heads and say, “We’s bad!”
Granted, there are poor teachers, just as there are poor doctors, lawyers, etc. but your sure don’t hear any of these professionals starting off a discussion of their practices by saying there are rotten apples in their barrels! To say that is to load bullets in their guns, ever aimed at our pummeled profession! The full frontal assault on teachers and public schools use such posits as the rationale for shredding unions, pensions and positing the chimera that charter schools heal all wounds. What a twist of reality! When one says that there are bad teachers, our opposition ends the conversation at least in their minds. Rather than take that servile tact, it would be more powerful to dig up statistics about public education scores, be it the Iowa tests, SAT, etc. before all these draconian LCLB, RTT and now the Rhee cabal with their false facts and distorted figures to push charters whose REAL record is less, far less than public schools presently accomplish! To say Gates heart is in the right place, he’s just uninformed is not the situation at all. He has an
agenda for corporate control over education and could care less
about educational excellence! Denver Public Schools have gotten “gifts” of multi-million dollars repeatedly, and the harassment, increased and meaningless overload of computer work that does nothing, in fact deprives teachers from former planning time has lowered the effectiveness of their teaching! Is that reality attributable to “bad teachers” OR corporate gurus who know nothing of education practice or theory. Add to that the Jeb Bush, as well as his relatives who have been enriching themselves in this LCLB, etc. corporate money mill. He and Rhee are partnering up to perpetuate their red herring of charters and lying about public schools.
Bottom line: Don’t castigate teachers! They are the victims of corporate invasion of education just as much as are the students!