In 2011, Rocky Killion, the superintendent of schools in West Lafayette, Indiana, had an idea: What if we made our own documentary about the schools? What if we became our own production crew? What if we traveled the country and interviewed experts with our questions?
They did it, and the film premiered in Lafayette to an enthusiastic audience of 1,000 people.
The tile of the film is “Rise Above the Mark.” It was directed by Purdue University student Jack Klink, with author Angie Klink, Jack Klink’s mother was scriptwriter. Political analyst Steve Klink, Angie Klink’s husband, was an executive producer. Emmy Award-winning actor Peter Coyote narrates.
The article says:
“The film was funded completely by donations made to the West Lafayette Schools Education Foundation; no tax dollars were used.
“That’s what the film is about: Let’s have a conversation,” Killion said. “Are we on the right track? If we want to become world class and have the world’s best competitive system, why wouldn’t we look at the best education systems and learn from them?”
“The film opens on an emotional Diana Rathert, a fifth-grade teacher who retired early from WLCSC after 38 years. As Rathert speaks about why she retired, she breaks down into tears.
“I still love what I do and I loved it up until the end,” she said. “But I feel like the legislators have beaten us down, and I hope some way we find a way to fight our way back up to the top.”
“It’s a scene that sets the tone for the 65-minute film, which aspires to shift the national discussion surrounding the education reform movement and speaks out against “corporate reform,” including the increase in public charter schools and an increasing reliance on standardized testing.
“Through stories of those like Rathert’s, the film’s creative team hopes to put a face to those teachers directly affected by reform movements that champion private school vouchers, charter schools and other measures that they say put more restrictions on teachers.”
I was interviewed and I can’t wait to see “Rise Above the Mark.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Here’s the trailer:
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Discontent is always the First Step in the Progress of any Man or any Nation..
Go for it Teachers!
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Please,please. Make these films immediately available. We’re in a war right now. We Ned the resources now. Actually yesterday. School boards and legislatures are passing terrible things right now. Blogs are nice. We need the real stuff.
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There is a film available right now! “GO PUBLIC: A Day in the Life of an American School District”, was just released and is being screened across the nation. GO PUBLIC raises awareness, creates informed advocacy and counters the misperceptions about public education being pushed by the reform agenda. GO PUBLIC is a film that celebrates public education.
The GO PUBLIC feature film recently screened in Pasadena, California, New Haven, Connecticut, Davenport, Iowa and Galesburg, Illinois, with multiple screenings scheduled in the next several months. College education departments across the nation have purchased the film including Kent State, American University, UNC Chapel Hill, Knox College, Westmont College, Loyola Marymount University, Austin Community College and Cal State University at Long Beach. Schools boards and community groups have hosted screenings and the NEA featured GO PUBLIC during American Education Week and is continuing to encourage local NEA chapters to host screenings. GO PUBLIC was also the featured film at the NEA Student Conference in Las Vegas in November and has won several film festival awards.
We have discussion guides available for both community screenings and college education departments to help engage audiences in the urgent conversation about public education today.
Please check out the GO PUBLIC website at http://www.gopublicproject.org for how you can access the film via Tugg screenings, license the film via the GO PUBLIC store or utilizing the short films which are all available on the GO PUBLIC website. http://gopublicproject.org/ Let us know if you have any questions at gopublicproject@gmail.com.
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I was in the audience, and I thought it quite good–but the spirit and rhythm are different than in the trailer (and for the better). I thought the last 10 minutes were too preachy, but otherwise it was excellent. West Lafayette, the home of Purdue University [whose President is never mentioned, but knowledgable viewers who follow the historical discussion contained in the film know that in Indiana Mitch Daniels was the big cheerleader and power-broker for this attack on the public schools] and so in some ways the student body as atypical of the US. But the film indicates that there are still many children who are at a severe disadvantage for the test-is-everything regime. An especially effective portion was devoted to the problems the Munster school district had (they got a `C’, since they did not have the advocacy that Superintendent Tony Bennett showed to the charter school managed for one of his big contributors). Apparently one difficulty the film has is over copyright issues, and one amusing note which might be related was that any time Indian’s Tony Bennett was on the screen, they would play some of the old-guy-Tony-Bennett’s hit songs. Here is another local blog post on the film http://www.masson.us/blog/rise-above-the-mark/
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I liked the blog post much more than I liked the trailer, which seemed a little hung up on a knowledge based economy and world competition. I’ve never been quite sure what a knowledge based economy is other than a bunch of people telling others how to do things that they just think about. I know I’m being a bit snarky about it, but, really, it doesn’t matter how knowledgeable a consultant sounds if somebody doesn’t do what they say (and meet with success). We have a bit of trouble seeing over the ends of noses when we compare jobs that require people who can actually do a job. I think that is why experience matters. I want a doctor that has done a procedure not just read about it. I want a mechanic that has the experience to go beyond computer diagnostics. I want a teacher that has spent time in the classroom. I want a musician that loves playing music. And I want all of them to have something other than dollar signs or gold ribbons for a soul.
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One addendum–the film premiered in Lafayette, not West Lafayette. The commercial center of the area is Lafayette.
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Boy, do public schools need it.
Did you know teachers are also responsible for income inequality? You are!
Here’s the NYTimes and the American Enterprise Institute, on why income inequality is the fault of teachers:
“This is a major problem, and advocates of free enterprise have been too slow to recognize it. It is not enough to assume that our system blesses each of us with equal opportunities. We need to fight for the policies and culture that will reverse troubling mobility trends. We need schools that serve children’s civil rights instead of adults’ job security. ”
How wonderfully convenient for politicians and the monied interests who purchase them!
Income inequality is the fault of “adults” seeking “job security”. No explanation of why this “teacher problem” that has created income inequality didn’t appear until 1980. Were teachers unions invented in 1980? I wasn’t aware of that 🙂
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This looks like another documentary worth seeing. It will be showing at South Side High School, Rockville, NY.
https://sites.google.com/site/rockfishproductions/Films/standardized-lies-money-civil-rights
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Jennifer,
I drove from Philadelphia to Reading to see the premier showing of the film “Standardized”.
It is outstanding. The Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools is planning to co-sponsor this film in the Philly area towards the end of January. Date and location pending. It is must viewing for all concerned about the impact of standardized testing on our children. Stay tuned for details in the Philadelphia area.
Eileen Duffey
Alliance for Philadalphia Public Schools
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Thanks Eileen!
It helps to hear from someone who as actually seen the film! I am wanting to get it here to Idaho, but need to work on sponsorship. I would like to do a free showing of it.
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When school boards and administrations produce their own videos, I hope they avoid the meaningless jargon I’ve too often had to edit out of their press releases and news story quotations. What I’ve seen tends to be aimed at serving the egos of the guys at the top (usually male) while ignoring the reader or audience.
I do resent their attacks on charter schools. For many dedicated teachers and students, these alternatives have allowed a place and structure for real education to occur. Not one size fits all, despite the choke-hold attempts by public school systems. I’ve heard the kids’ stories of why the charter schools saved them from dropping out. (And this, in a school that requires an acceptance from a post-secondary institution as a condition for graduation.)
The more I look back on my own public school years, the more I see how wasteful and destructive the system was, saved for me only by a handful of truly wonderful and usually maverick teachers.
We should also note that West Lafayette is a small school district by most standards. I remember that when New York City was considering decentralization, it’s largest new district was still larger than Cincinnati’s.
All the same, I applaud any effort to connect directly with the “consumers,” rather than the board and bosses.
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I don’t think the argument is against charters–it is against using public funds for charters when they do not serve the public. It is against “for-profit” charter schools run by CEOs who are not educators making huge salaries on the backs of the public while “fashioning” their very own version of “successful student populations” and passing off the performances of these populations as a result of charters as “better schools” instead of the real reason: Charters stack the deck with students who are not at-risk.
We’ve all heard the statistics that some charters do take students with learning disabilities or who speak English as a second language, but unless there are multiple scientific comparative longitudinal studies that correlate all the practices and sustainability of charter schools to any measure of success and also take into account equal comparisons between charter populations and public school populations, these stats, which can be easily manipulated, are meaningless.
Nobody is saying that charters should not exist anymore than public or other private schools. The argument is against how charters are allowed to exist, whose money must fund them (the public’s), who is profiting from their operation, and which elite group of students are benefiting from their existence while others are not. The students that lose may be a small portion of the charter school population that are counseled out of charters or emotionally mistreated within the charters, and it also includes the majority of students left to rot in their funding-starved local public schools because charters are syphoning off the public’s money to educate the very, very few.
So all charters are not bad–they’re just run that way.
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In New Hampshire, charters get far less in tax money than it costs to educate a student, and as a public institution, they cannot charge tuition. So nobody’s getting rich.
The kids I see are the ones who are anything but an elite — the charters are their last lifeline.
Actually, in New Hampshire, the charters are saving the kids’ home districts thousands of dollars a year. So we’re obviously in much different situations.
I guess I’m taking a bottom-up view, and asking how a system is serving students at risk rather than the administrators.
Whichever way we’re going, we’re still challenged in getting the public on board. Scratch and you’ll find a lot of people who think parents should be footing the bill for their kids’ schooling. To me, that’s the scariest part.
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“Scratch and you’ll find a lot of people who think parents should be footing the bill for their kids’ schooling. To me, that’s the scariest part.”
I agree–that is very scary indeed.
Thank you for your insight and for showing another side of the debate.
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Check out the film, “GO PUBLIC: A Day in the Life of an American School District”. Trailer https://vimeo.com/68656659 and the website http://gopublicproject.org/. One of our favorite quotes from a viewer, “”Drove 65 miles expecting a political message. Instead I saw a human portrait of the good we do in public schools.”
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This is documentary that needs to be seen by the general public in theatres.
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Let’s all share our edu doc…here is my favorite
http://vimeo.com/69475814
Or
http://www.hacp.org/media/videos/general/enter-to-learn-go-forth-to-serve
Enjoy
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What is the link to view the video?
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A response to “Waiting for Superman”?
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Underdog to the rescue.
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You really are having an impact, though.
The NYTimes finally noticed that “non profit” doesn’t mean “public” 🙂
“In Texas, commercial entities cannot run public schools. But when a school’s management — including accounting, marketing and hiring decisions — is contracted out to a private company, the distinction can become artificial. Such an arrangement raises questions about how to ensure financial accountability when the boundary between public and private is blurred, and the rules of public disclosure governing expenditures of taxpayer money do not apply.”
The wheels of journalism move slowly, but eventually they move.
It’s pretty amazing to me that the public allowed ed reformers to re-define the word “public” to mean “non profit” but that’s what happened.
You know, this doesn’t apply anywhere else. There are plenty of non profit insurance companies on the health exchange. No one would EVER get away with passing them off as “public”. Yet that’s happened in education. It’s remarkable what a sophisticated PR campaign can accomplish.
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In the works: A feature documentary that tells the story of what happens when a school board makes bold decisions and appoints an EDUCATOR as Superintendent.
I’ve been following Cindy Marten, a former elementary school principal, since the day before she stepped into her role as newly appointed Superintendent of Public Education for San Diego Unified – the second largest school district in California.
Clearly a non-traditional appointment, the Board voted for her unanimously.
We’re dreaming big about public education here in San Diego, and we have a vision for quality public schools in every neighborhood – regardless of zip code – that we want to share with communities across the nation.
Lots of challenges, and it won’t happen overnight, but we are working hard and dreaming big… and we are definitely not waiting for Superman!
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Docugirl, I met Cindy Marten when she was a principal and met her again soon after she was chosen as superintendent. I am excited about the prospects for San Diego. Everyone seems to be working together on behalf of the children. Not prattling about putting studentsfirst, but actually working together to do what is right for children.
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Thanks, Diane. Yes, there’s a lot of partnering going on – on so many different levels – it is exciting! As Cindy is fond of saying, ‘don’t do it for us, don’t do it to us… do it with us’. It’s Education – San Diego style! I will keep you posted…
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Maybe your doc could start a trend! I can’t wait to see it!
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I can’t wait to see it either. Thanks for the information.
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We are excited to be partnering with docugirl in support of this important documentary effort to capture the visionary, seasoned and sensible leadership of Cindy Marten.
Docugirl originally become inspired by the topic of public education after working on “GO PUBLIC: A Day in the Life of an American School District”. She was one of 50 filmmakers following 50 subjects for one day, who work, attend or volunteer in the Pasadena Unified School District. Docugirl did a wonderful short film about 2nd grade student, Abby, who attends a Dual Language Spanish Immersion Program. http://gopublicproject.org/2012/08/abigail-abby-griffith/
The story of Abby provides a window into just one of the many terrific programs offered in PUSD and is illustrative of the great opportunities available in public schools across our nation! Docugirl did a wonderful job capturing Abby’s day and we are excited to watch this documentary develop about Superintendent Cindy Marten, a talented, wise, and experienced educator whose leadership will provide great insight and help “restore the promise of public education.”
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Thanks for the frame of reference! I’ve seen many of these Go Public videos….I love them! Super work! I haven’t seen Abby’s story yet, but I know it will be good
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That’s great that you have seen some of the short films. You’ll love the story of Abby. The feature film is now available for groups to screen or a screening can be sponsored at a local theatre through Tugg. http://www.tugg.com/titles/go-public We have a companion discussion guide that works well to engage in a community conversation following the screening. Wanting people to recognize the incredible value of their local public schools and start supporting and advocating not undermining!
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Thank you Dr Ravitch for working with my school district in the making of Rise Above Mark. Several public school organizations want to premiere Rise Above the Mark at Butler University when you are in Indianapolis March 2 or 3. If you’re available we would love to schedule the premiere when you are here in Indiana. Our premiere in Lafayette, IN drew nearly 1,000 attendees. We think we can more than double that in Indianapolis. Thanks for considering.
Rocky Killion
West Lafayette Community School Corporation
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Rocky,
Congratulations on the premiere of “Rising Above the Mark.” I look forward to seeing it. I am coming to Indianapolis to speak to the annual meeting of the AACTE (American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education). I speak on March 1. I leave immediately after I speak. If you want to arrange a showing the previous night, that would be fine with me.
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That sounds great Dr Ravitch. I will let the groups know and we’ll do our best to premiere it Feb 28 should Clowes Hall be available. Also there maybe a panel discussion afterwards in case you’re interested. I’ll be in touch.
Rocky
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Hi Dr. Ravitch
I just heard from Kappa Delta Pi and Butler University. We can show Rise Above the Mark at Clowes Hall at Butler University on Feb. 28. If you can attend, we will secure the date and begin the promotion. I believe Clowes Hall can hold well over 2,000 people, so we think we can fill the building with public school supporters. Thanks for confirming Dr. Ravitch.
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See you there, Rocky.
I have heard great things about “Rise Above the Mark” from people who saw the screening in Lafayette.
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Dr Ravitch
Thank you for attending the Indianapolis premiere of Rise Above the Mark. Dr Robinson and you did an outstanding during job during the panel discussion debunking the junk science being used by policy makers to dismantle public education. Here’s a great letter to the editor written by one of my school district’s parent slamming legislators on the current use of standardized testing. The fire is starting catch on here in Indiana. Thank you for supporting Rise Above the Mark.
Rocky Killion
http://m.jconline.com/opinions/article?a=2014302280009&f=1126
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