“BACKPACK FULL OF CASH” IS THE INDEPENDENT DOCUMENTARY THAT FRIGHTENS CORPORATE REFORMERS.
IT WAS MADE BY PROFESSIONAL FILMMAKERS.
IT IS NARRATED BY MATT DAMON.
PUBLIC TELEVISION IS AFRAID TO SHOW IT (CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?).
IT IS A TRUE GRASSROOTS FILM, MADE BY FILMMAKERS WITH PASSION, AND SHOWN COMMUNITY BY COMMUNITY.
YOU CAN ARRANGE TO SEE IT IN YOUR COMMUNITY!
The photograph below is, from the left, filmmaker Vera Aronow; Nancy Carlsson-Paige (mother of Matt Damon and Professor Emeritus of Early Childhood Education at Lesley College); narrator Matt Damon; and filmmaker Sarah Mondale.
BACKPACK moving full speed ahead!
BACKPACK in the spotlight, igniting conversations worldwide!
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Have you heard? “Backpack Full of Cash” is moving full steam ahead––thanks in great part to your support! Recently, we attended a wonderful screening in Albany, NY, and a big event in Boston with Matt Damon, the film’s narrator, and his mother Dr. Nancy Carlsson-Paige, which drew a crowd estimated at 650. There have been multi-city screenings in New Zealand and an encore event in Canada this fall. Two recent screenings in Denver were sold out, and many others are planned in the months ahead. The film is also continuing its festival run, showing at the Heartland Film Festivalin Indianapolis and the Ellensburg Film Festival in Washington state.
There’s been a lot of positive press, although as you can imagine, there’s push back from advocates of school privatization. Just yesterday, The Hollywood Reporter published an interview with Jeanne Allen, founder of the Center for Education Reform who formerly worked for the Reagan administration and the Heritage Foundation, and who was interviewed for the film. Although she has yet to see “Backpack Full of Cash”, Allen attacks it, Matt Damon, and us, personally. She also attacked our film today in The Boston Globe.
We stand by our reporting and believe Ms. Allen’s words are used in their proper context in BACKPACK. We regret that she doesn’t like her portrayal in a film that she hasn’t seen, but also appreciate that she’s kept the conversation going on the national level about the health of our public school system. Given the policy directives of the Trump administration and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, we feel strongly that these discussions should be taking place in every school, library and community center across the country.
We spent five years making the film to generate deeper discourse on the state of public education — especially the consequences of privatization on public schools and the most vulnerable students who rely on them — and hope that future media attention will focus more on the issues.
Meanwhile, our grassroots screening campaign is catching fire. BACKPACK screenings are turning out to be a powerful tool for informing communities about what is happening in public education today. To find out more about how you can host a screening in your community, go to www.BackpackFullofCash.comand click on Host a Screening. Thanks for your ongoing support!Sarah Mondale, Vera Aronow, and the BACKPACK team
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
Cross posted at Oped News. https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Backpack-Full-Of-Cash-The-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Diane-Ravitch_Documentary_Education_Education-Funding-171007-251.html#comment675844
with this comment “In many places, public education is at a tipping point. Leaders in Washington are calling for a massive increase in funds to expand privately-run charter schools and vouchers. Now is the time to join the movement to stop privatization and strengthen public schools.”
How does the state of its existence here in early October compare with Early September? Is it actually making enough noise to not be handled by St. Louis style…..don’t say anything—-just let it go away.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
This is the film the media won’t review and the film industry won’t show. Guess who owns the media and the film industry — not the children and not the working class.
This is a note to Stephen Ronan,
I will respond to your long comment about “Backpack,” which you admit you have not seen.
To answer your comment about Paul Tough’s book, I have to get my hands on my copy, which is in Brooklyn (I am on Long Island). I will discuss what he wrote then.
When I confronted Geoffrey Canada with this story on “Education Nation,” he claimed he didn’t just kick out the eighth grade, he closed the whole school because it was a bad school.
Meanwhile, read this account about the HCZ charter schools, which has some interesting details about the lavish spending and the uneven results.
Lauded Harlem Schools Have Their Own Problems
Haven’t had a chance to see Backpack Full of Cash yet, but I did look at the film’s accompanying Discussion Guide and Frequently Asked Questions: http://www.backpackfullofcash.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/backpack-guide.pdf http://www.backpackfullofcash.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/backpack-faq.pdf
Unfortunately, as I read it, I ran into some items that seemed misleading. For example, there was this in both the Guide and FAQ: “Some charter schools aggressively push out students they deem undesirable. The Harlem Children’s Zone, which has been a darling of the charter movement, once kicked out an entire class of middle school students because of their low test scores.”
I figured that may have derived your review, Diane, of the Waiting for Superman movie, where you wrote: “It should be noted—and Guggenheim didn’t note it—that Canada kicked out his entire first class of middle school students when they didn’t get good enough test scores to satisfy his board of trustees. This sad event was documented by Paul Tough in his laudatory account of Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone, Whatever It Takes (2009).”
So, I ordered a cheap, second-hand copy of Tough’s book and read a chunk, particularly chapter 10. Excellent book. I learned from it that, like most middle school classes, the sixth grade class of middle schoolers that Backpack apparently alluded to was “kicked out” after graduating, after completing 6th, 7th, and 8th grades. As chapter 10 concludes: “In unison, grins on their faces, they made a show of shifting the tassel on their mortar-boards from left to right. And then, with a shout, they all tossed their caps straight up in the air, as high as they could throw them.”
Confusion potentially arose from the fact that the school and students had hoped that they could attend a new high school that HCZ had planned to open. But the board of directors feared that the HCZ schools were expanding too quickly; they weren’t confident that they were sufficiently successful (partly reflected by test score analysis) and decided to hold back until they were more confident. As it turned out the final official test scores when they arrived weren’t too shabby. In sixth grade, just nine percent of the “class had scored on grade level in math. In seventh grade, 34 percent of them did. Now, in eighth grade, the number had jumped all the way to 70 percent.” Overall, the city’s subsequent Report Card gave Promise Academy middle school an A. Of course, without a clear understanding of attrition patterns (at least one kid had been expelled) it would be a mistake to put too much stock in test score gains.
Understandably, there was some serious disappointment at the failure to start the promised high school on time. But I’d guess that most folks would agree, after looking closely at the circumstances, that the Backpack Full of Cash statement on its own is misleading. Given the vast amount of good work that the Harlem Children’s Zone accomplishes, it is a real shame to seem them treated so shabbily.
Also in the Backpack document, I see this: “A 2016 study from the University of California-Los Angeles, the first comprehensive analysis of suspensions by charter schools, found that the average suspension rate for all charter schools in 2011-12 was 7.8 percent compared to an average for non-charter schools of 6.7 percent. While seemingly a small difference, this means that the charter school suspension rate was 16 percent higher.”
That study by the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the University of California compared charter schools to all schools throughout the United States. I think most would agree that that makes less sense than comparing each charter school with traditional public schools in the same general locale. According to a report authored by Nat Malkus, who used the latter approach: “Compared to their neighboring TPSs, more charters have lower suspension rates than reference TPSs. Unbridled discipline policies are problematic in any school, but the idea that charter schools suspend students more than traditional public schools do is a myth.” https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Differences-on-balance.pdf
Again, Backpack cites the Civil Rights Project here: “In addition, charter schools tend to be hyper-segregated, facilitating rather than challenging our society’s return to educational apartheid.”
But according to Matthew M. Chingos: “There is actually a slight positive (and statistically significant) relationship between choice and diversity, but it is very weak… The lack of any consistent relationship between charter enrollment and segregation does not eliminate the possibility that such a relationship exists, but suggests that it is unlikely. https://www.brookings.edu/research/does-expanding-school-choice-increase-segregation/
Probably worth reading Chingos’ analysis before accepting the Backpack/UCLA assertions as conclusive.
Stephen,
You must have read Chapter 10 of a different book than the one I read.
Paul Tough, “Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America”
I couldn’t find my personal hardcover copy so I ordered one on Kindle and just re-read the pages 234-256.
Your description of it is wildly inaccurate and misleading.
The kids in the eighth grade had low scores. Three years at Geoffrey Canada’s charter school had failed to raise them. The wealthy board of directors was unhappy.
Canada sent a letter home to parents to tell them that there would be big changes. There would not be a lottery for a new sixth grade; the eighth graders would “graduate,” meaning that they would not be promoted to ninth grade. The school would “shrink to only two grades.” p 234.
p. 234-235: “To the students in the eighth grade, though, the message seemed a lot simpler: ‘They’re kicking us out.'”
p. 236: “Twenty-four hours earlier, their academic futures had all seemed secure. Next September, they had assumed, they would be advancing from eighth grade to ninth grade at Promise Academy. Technically, they would be moving from middle school to high school, but the transition would barely have been noticeable: the same building, the same principal, and many of the same teachers. Now they had no idea where they would be next year.”
p. 236: “‘All of the high schools are full already,’ said Joel…Basically, Shaquille said, ‘They’re kicking us to the curb.'”
On p. 239, Canada convenes an assembly to explain to the students why he is not allowing them to remain. Many of the students, he said, had done a great job. “But there’s a group of kids that, as hard as we try, we have not been able to get them to a level where I can look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘I’m running a better school than other schools in the neighborhood.'” Too many schools in Harlem kept going even when they got poor results, and he wouldn’t do that.
P. 240: Tough writes that Canada “felt awful.” Then he explains that Canada had hoped for a big jump in test scores, but it didn’t happen. Only 24% of the kids reach grade level on the state English test. When he saw the scores, “Canada was crushed.” For three years, this class of eighth graders had had low scores.
Canada knew he couldn’t continue to run a school with such poor results.
He knew he had three options: 1) continue the status quo; 2) close the entire middle school; 3) “graduate” the eighth grade to other schools, cancel the sixth grade lottery, and ask KIPP to take over the middle school. KIPP, however, was not interested unless they could start fresh with all new students, and it would take a year to train a new principal. But shrinking the school would demoralize the staff.
P. 241: Canada settled on a tweaked version of option 3. Suspend the lottery, graduate the eighth grade to other schools, and keep talking to KIPP. The board agreed. In his plan to the board, Canada acknowledged that the students would be “upset,” the parents would be “very upset,” and the community would lose confidence in HCZ, at least temporarily. But that was the option chosen.
P. 241-242, Canada has to explain to the students and the parents why the eighth graders were being terminated and sent to other schools. It was difficult for him because he had known these students for three years and felt badly for them. He worried that they would feel “abandonment issues.”
P. 243: He is meeting with small groups of students. Xavier raises his hand and says, “The thing I don’t get is, why didn’t you give us some warning?” Canada nodded, no answer. Xavier asks again, why no warning, “so we could prepare,” so we could apply to other high schools? Canada answers, I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this. I thought we would do better (on the state exams).
pp. 244-245: Canada meets with parents, who had believed him when he said their kids would be prepared for college. He tells them same things he told students. Scores were disappointing, it wasn’t their fault.
pp. 245-246: He then changed the subject to what happens next to their children. The high school admissions process for the public schools was already over. He said he had called the Chancellor and had brought together a team of “experts and advocates” to help figure out how to get the students into high schools of their choice. His staff handed out folders with information about how to apply to high schools, deadlines, applications, etc.
p. 247: parents were not happy. Some cried.
p 248: Canada offered to enroll the students in HCZ after school programs and tutoring. As soon as he could, he slipped away. The principal of the school was angry that Canada had pinned the blame on the staff, not including the students themselves for their own failure. He said, “It can’t be just us…The truth of the matter is, we’ve got great teachers, we’ve got great staff, and if we had willing participants, we would have great students.”
P. 248: When Tough interviewed the principal a few weeks later, he had changed his tune. He said he understood that Canada had to say what he did. “One way to interpret this is, we’re getting rid of the riffraff so we can move forward. That’s how I feel. They were a cancer on the whole school. But you don’t want to communicate that to the parents.”
p. 252: Some of the 8th grade students asked Canada if they could have a graduation ceremony. The principal thought it was a bad idea. “But Canada said yes. He felt it was the least he could do.”
So yes there was a graduation ceremony. There was “Pomp and Circumstance.” There was a fiery speech about believing in yourself and let no one put you down. And yes, they threw their caps in the air when the ceremony ended.
But if you read these pages, there is no question that Geoffrey Canada pushed out the entire eighth grade because their scores on the state tests were too low and the school couldn’t get them up.
Stephen, your comment was dishonest. I am very disappointed in you.
I would continue to contend that when most folks read this “Canada kicked out his entire first class of middle school students” they would get a false impression that a class of middle school students has been kicked out of middle school.
Not that they completed 6th, 7th and 8th grades and then graduated, but been deprived of a chance to attend a high school that did not exist and whose opening would be delayed. We can both certainly appreciate how deeply disappointing that must have been if they loved their middle school and wanted to continue on to a new high school that would be run by some of the same folks.
I think most readers of Tough’s chapter would agree that what I initially wrote here in this thread provides a more accurate picture of what happened than what you stated in your film review, or what is found in the backpack folks’ materials.
But that’s a testable/wagerable hypothesis.
Are you game? I am.
Stephen,
You are lying. A decision was made by Canada and the board to kick out the entire eighth grade and call it a graduation. If you read that chapter, it is clear that the students were shocked and disappointed. So were the parents.
As the student said, “They just kicked us to the curb.”
I have never before called anyone on this Blog a liar. Your reading of that chapter is a lie. I will never believe anything you write in the future.
Diane, perhaps you could get Professor Beatty at Wellesley College to commit to showing “Backpack Full of Cash” in a town/gown setting? Though the privatizers are gunning for higher education, those in the ivory tower seem to blissfully believe it’s not their issue. In addition, Alice Peisch, who represents Wellesley in the Massachusetts House, is among a cabal of elected officials who are trying every way they can to do an end run around the voters’rejection of lifting the charter cap. Wellesley is also one of the 14 towns of 351 which voted in favor of charter proliferation – for other people’s children, as there are none in Wellesley.
If the college got the ball rolling, perhaps other Boston area universities might do the same.
Being honest and compassionate is very different from being gullible and emotional.
The difference is that being honesty and compassion is to put the common good ahead the personal pleasure and to completely detach fame and fortune whereas being gullible and emotional is to tangle with fame, fortune and lust of ego.
We cannot expect those authorities who are without talent, but a leech after fame and fortune, can be honest and compassionate. As a result, all conscientious veterans in educational field need to unite and do whatever they can to save and to sustain American Public Education. Public shall learn fast enough in order to support all conscientious educators. Back2basic
And from your overnight correspondent ….
Looks like “The 74” have already seen the movie … or maybe they haven’t? Hard to tell from the ridiculous “review” that also tries to slander Diane:
https://www.the74million.org/article/matt-damon-chose-private-school-for-his-kids-great-but-why-is-he-making-a-film-about-denying-school-choice-to-poor-families/
Read this amazing screed — masquerading as a movie review — by Citizen Stewart, and you can see all the rhetorical tricks that privatizers use are on display.
Divert and change the subject
Public school teacher bashing (Why, they’re all “aging”, don’t you know? How dare they get old, and remain on the job as teachers?)
Misleading use (misuse) of the the word and concept of “choice.”
https://www.the74million.org/article/matt-damon-chose-private-school-for-his-kids-great-but-why-is-he-making-a-film-about-denying-school-choice-to-poor-families/
(CAPITALS are mine, Jack)
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CITIZEN STEWART:
“Matt Damon is an awesome actor. He shouldn’t be a bald white hammer against SCHOOL CHOICE or charter schools for families that will never make it to Hollywood.”
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(NOTE — in the next excerpt, Stewart’s age-ist pejorative description of all or most public school teachers:
— “throngs of aging unionized teachers” —
WTF??!!! For one thing, what qualifies for “aging” in Stewart’s deranged mind? A teacher over 50? Over 40? Over 30? And so what if some teachers are older? Don’t they get better with experience?)
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“While aping all the motions his mother would have him do before throngs of aging unionized teachers who rally to keep kids without his astounding privilege trapped in schools he would never CHOOSE for his adorable youngsters, Damon is willing to pay whatever it costs to defend their advantages.
(For the ka-jillionth time, I’ll respond to this.
Those “throngs of aging unionized teachers” are rallying to fully fund their public schools, and reverse the trend of deliberately defunding those schools into a state where they perform badly — sky high class sizes, elimination of a full, rich curriculum of arts, music, P.E., sports, libraries, etc.
This defunding, of course, is a tactic employed so that privatizers can use that bad performance — that bad performance that the privatizers actually caused via that deliberate defunding — as justification for closing those public schools and turning them over to private sector management, and for trying to lure parents by characterizing traditional public schools as hopelessly failing, and then convince those parents to choose to leave those deliberately defunded public schools for the privately managed charter schools — whose leaders are, not incidentally, paying Stewart and countless others big money to promote the replacing of public schools with privatized charter schools.)
“Be a public school advocate who CHOOSES private schools for your kids. Fine. But don’t use your power, privilege, and social position to mislabel those who claw their way out of (i.e. exercise “CHOICE”) the same public schools you avoid as politically motivated and socially irresponsible tools of big business.”
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WTF???!!!
What the hell is he talking about? That’s never been an argument against corporate education reform.
It’s the privatized charter schools and voucher-funded schools that are “politically motivated and socially irresponsible tools of big business.”
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Digression about Damon’s “hypocrisy’:
The idea that Damon sending his kids to private school is some kind of ultimate “GOTCHA” is the biggest bunch of baloney.
Damon said that he’s avoiding those public schools because he believes, with some foundation, that the last two decades of “reform” have led to a disgusting over-emphasis on testing and test prep, with an accompanying de-emphasis on the creative curriculum, project-based learning, etc.
This, by the way, is where I respectfully part company with “Good Will Hunting”, as this is a partial misperception on his part. What he says is true for some, BUT NOT ALL PUBLIC SCHOOLS — not the schools in more upscale communities.
Just off the top of my head, I can name four LAUSD public schools that offer everything that Damon claims he wants in a school. Had he toured these with his wife, he would have discovered this to be so and sent his daughters there, and we wouldn’t have to endure this specious non-GOTCHA being vomited up over and over and over by privatizers such as Stewart and others (It’s not too late to do so, Matt. Check these schools out.)
Mind you, these are schools that prominent LAUSD privatizers send their kids: Ivanhoe (privatizer Steve Barr), Warner Avenue (privatizer Ben Austin), Wonderland, and Third Street. Why aren’t those charter-loving’ privatizers sending their kids to the “no excuses” charters such as KIPP?
Hmmmm … now there’s some REAL hypocrisy. If public schools are so miserable, and charters are so great, why aren’t your own kids in one of your beloved charters?
Part of the reason that these traditional public schools can provide the things that Damon desires is because the parents are wealthy, and contribute at fundraisers that enables them to fund things such as a dedicated Music teacher with instruments for all, and on and on. Those parents can and have petitioned for those schools to be waived from following the same onerous curriculum forced on schools in non-wealthy neighborhoods.
End of digression
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In the article infamously banned from FACEBOOK by its content editor Campbell Brown, Steven Singer debunks Stewart’s “choice” canard::
https://gadflyonthewallblog.wordpress.com/2017/10/06/school-choice-is-a-lie-it-does-not-mean-more-options-it-means-less/
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STEVEN SINGER:
“Neoliberals and right-wingers are very good at naming things.
“Doing so allows them to frame the narrative, and control the debate.
“Nowhere is this more obvious than with “school choice” – a term that has nothing to do with choice and everything to do with privatization.
“It literally means taking public educational institutions and turning them over to private companies for management and profit.
” … ”
“Despite these facts, when we talk about privatized schools, we ignore the real distinctions and focus on the fake ones. We overlook the salient features and instead describe privatized schools as vehicles for choice.
“They’re not.”
“FAKE CHOICE”
“School choice.”
“Got choice?”
“Parents should have the freedom to ‘choose’ the school their children attend.”
“But using ‘choice’ as the ultimate descriptor of what privatized schools are and what they offer is at best misleading and at worst an outright lie.”
“They are essentially private businesses existing for the sole purpose of making a profit.”
“Yes, parents ‘choose’ if they want their children to enroll in these schools. But they also ‘choose’ if their children enroll in the neighborhood public school.
“Critics say the public school option is not a choice because there is only one public school district in a given neighborhood. Yet isn’t it the parents who decide the neighborhood where they live? In most cases, even the wealthiest district has rental properties where people can move to take advantage of an exceptional school system.
“Certainly the quality of a school shouldn’t be determined by a zip code. But this is an argument for funding equity, for providing each district with the resources necessary to educate the children in their charge, not an argument for privatization.
“In BOTH cases, public and privatized schools, parents exercise choice. But the propagandists choose to call only one of them by that name.
“And it is a misnomer.
“Privatized schools – both charters and voucher schools – are under no obligation to accept all students who seek enrollment. Public schools are.
“If a student lives in a public school’s service area, the district must accept that student. It doesn’t matter if educating that child will cost more than the average per pupil expenditure. It doesn’t matter if she is easy or difficult to educate, if she has a record of behavior or discipline problems, if she has special needs, if she has low test scores. The public school must accept her and give her the best education possible.
“Privatized schools are legally allowed to be selective. They can deny enrollment based on whatever reasons they choose. Charter schools may have to be more careful about their explicit reasoning than voucher schools, but that’s just a restriction on what they say, not on what they do. The results are the same. If they want to deny your child entry because of her race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, whatever – they can. They just have to put something more creative down as the reason why.
“Vouchers schools don’t even have to give you a reason at all.
“And charters have a multitude of ways to avoid accountability. They can simply pretend to have conducted a lottery. Or they can include an onerous series of demands for enrollment such as expensive uniforms, school supplies and parental volunteering at the school, to discourage difficult students from applying.
“Moreover, even if they let your child enroll, they can kick her out at any time if she proves to be too expensive or it appears she’ll make the school look bad. This is why every year charter schools send a stream of struggling students back to the public schools just before standardized test time – they don’t want the students low test scores to reflect badly on the school – yet they’ll use the fact that they enrolled difficult students at the beginning of the school year to “prove” they aren’t selective!
“That’s not ‘choice.’ It’s marketing.
“At best, it’s not ‘choice’ for the parents or students. It’s ‘choice’ for the operators of privatized schools.”
Damon lives in NYC now, which is why he tried getting his kids into St Ann’s. However, I’m sure it’s not too late for him to get his kids into the NYC public school system!
Matt Damon can send his kids wherever he wants. If he chooses a private school, he pays for it himself.
I remember back in LAUSD’s John Deasy era — 2011-2014—there was an article in the LA School Report about Damon choosing a private school in Los Angeles instead of a public school, and I thought then, and think now that he was mistaken in writing off all LAUSD public schools.
Here’s that article:
http://laschoolreport.com/matt-damon-and-his-public-school-dilemma/
TIME Magazinealo wrote a GOTCHA piece, accusing Damon of hypocrisy — which, as I talk about above, is a bunch of baloney.
Perhaps Damon and his family have since moved east. I don’t know.
More on the canard of “choice”.
Here’s an article from a parent and her experiences with navigating the “choice” system in Chicago:
http://www.chicagonow.com/chicago-public-fools/2017/10/looking-behind-the-curtain-of-school-choice-again/
BACKPACKS is finally starting to get reviewed.
Check out this one:
http://www.vueweekly.com/bleak-world-of-education-reform/
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Film
“Bleak World of Education Reform”
May 25, 2017
by Stephan Boissonneault
BACKPACK FULL OF CASH sheds light on various methods of schooling
Narrated by activist and actor Matt Damon, BACKPACK FULL OF CASH holds back no punches. Set in 2013 and 2014 Philadelphia, PA, the film paints an accurate picture of the United States’ education system. The 90-minute documentary details the alarming trend of American public school privatization.
“Save Our Schools” protests led by teachers and students are the norm, and there is a constant battle between the public school system and education reformers determining who should be in control.
Unfortunately, the education reformers are winning by a landslide and privatization is taking the United States by a relentless storm.
In a perfect world for education reformers, schooling is run like a business. Each school is privatized and teachers are only providers while parents shop around for the best charter school possible.
Philadelphia is ground zero for the education reform movement. The film states that after he was elected, former governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Corbett cut an estimated $1 billion for public education. This leaves institutions like South Philadelphia High School with no librarian, limited teachers and custodians, and one school nurse for 1,500 students.
On the other side of Philadelphia, a 12-year-old student from William C. Bryant Elementary School died from an asthma attack and there was no available nurse at her school.
Classes are stuffed to the brim. One powerful scene in the film shows a 9th Grade biology class with close to 70 students in attendance. They study with worn out textbooks and are forced to stand during the lecture. All of these things happen within the first eight minutes of the documentary. Like I said, the film holds back no punches.
Then come the charter schools—private institutions built on privilege. Many charter schools are run strictly from iPads are unwelcoming to students with disabilities or stricken with poverty. Due to the funding they receive from taxes and various celebrities like Bill Gates, charter schools are amazing at marketing, presenting them as schools that produce “better, smarter, students,” potentially luring parents into a financial hole.
What parents are not told is that many charter schools hire non-licensed teachers and there is no proof that they produce better students. Many of them have also been in the news due to fraud and money laundering. Still, they are on the rise.
Next are the scary education models from the education reform movement—vouchers and cyber schools.
Vouchers are essentially scholarships that pay for a student’s tuition with taxpayer dollars. While this may seem fine, most voucher schools are run by churches and non-licensed teachers who use the model to indoctrinate beliefs, such as creationism. Many also perform corporal punishment like paddling.
The cyber school model has students studying at home on a computer. All learning is done online and taught by unexperienced teachers who oversee close to 100 students. The classes are built with minimal effort in mind and classes like physical education are based on yes or no questions like:
“Did you run today?”
Type in “Yes” and you get an “A”.
Backpack Full of Cash shows a ray of sunshine when touching on New Jersey’s public school system. The state is proof that the public school system can work based on property taxes and funding to every school.
Although, under President Donald Trump education reform is being pushed more and more. The newly elected Secretary of Education, Betsy Devos, is known to be a prime advocate for charter schools, vouchers, and cyber schools.
If Trump gets his way, public schooling could be completely erased within the next decade, leaving thousands of teachers and public school buildings abandoned.
The Hollywood Reporter had an article about the movie, quoting Jeanne Allen who runs Center for Education Reform. She told THR that the teacher unions did more political spending ($300 million per year) than “we” do, presumably meaning CER.
This is an extremely deceitful claim – the “ed reform” movement as a whole spends far more than teacher unions. In NY, they outspent the unions and have swept the last few elections.
But look at CER specifically. Here is their list of supporters, a murderer’s row of political donors. To say the unions outspent this group is PANTS ON FIRE:
The Achelis and Bodman Foundations
The Anschutz Foundation
The Apgar Foundation
The Laura and John Arnold Foundation
Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Bakke
Mr. Tim Barton
Mr. Brian Bauer
The Honorable and Mrs. Frank Baxter
The BelleJAR Foundation
The Blackie Foundation
The Bonsal Family
Ms. Katherine Brittain Bradley
The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
The Broad Foundation
Mr. Eric Brooks
Mr. S. Joseph Bruno and Building Hope
Mr. Kevin Chavous
Ms. Kara Cheseby
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The “choice” on offer from the charters is one the scions of The 74 would never make for their own offspring. Hyper disciplined, test-taking widgets of color in uniforms is not what folks like Citizen Stewart would accept for his kids. By the way, his nasty, dismissive tone was often on display here in Massachusetts last year during the fight to keep our cap on charters.
Above, I wrote a response to corporate reformer “Citizen Stewart” pseudo-review of BACKPACK FULL OF CASH, and was struck by a slur that Stewart just threw in there in passing.
Attempting to put down public school teachers. Stewart disparagingly referred to them as “aging” as in “throngs of aging, unionized public school teachers.”
(That’s in the 17th paragraph of his non-review, about 2/3rds of the
way through the piece at
https://www.the74million.org/article/matt-damon-chose-private-school-for-his-kids-great-but-why-is-he-making-a-film-about-denying-school-choice-to-poor-families/
)
What’s up with that? I mean Stewart is African-American, so perhaps one might expect him to be a little more sensitive to the negative stereotyping of a certain group — in this case, older people.
Again, what constitutes “aging” for Stewart? Over 50? Over 40? Over 30?
So let me get this straight: if a teachers older than WHATEVER age, that means exactly WHAT to Stewart? That that teachers is automatically lousy — in Stewart’s eyes at least, such older teacher are guilty until proven innocent?