Archives for category: Parent trigger
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Anti-Union Film Bombs at Box-Office

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2012 //
16

A reader wrote to say that he went to see “that movie,” and there were only eight other people in the theater.

The Hollywood media says that his family’s experience was not unusual.

Despite a huge publicity campaign involving promotion by NBC’s Education Nation and full-page ads in major newspapers, the film opened to weak sales at the box office.

Here is another report:

Hotel Transylvania’ Tops Box Office on Friday

After a month of consistently awful box office, audiences came back to the movies on Friday for Hotel Transylvania and Looper. Pitch Perfect also did great business in limited release, though not everything was sunshine and rainbows: Won’t Back Down performed terribly, and is on track for one of the worst openings of the year. Hotel Transylvania debuted to an estimated $11 million yesterday, which tops Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs ($8.1 million) for best opening day ever for a fully-animated Sony Pictures Animation movie (though it does lag a bit behind The Smurfs’ $13.3 million). Using Cloudy as a comparison (since it opened around the same time), Hotel Transylvania could be in line for over $40 million this weekend; Sony is being a bit more modest with a $38 million projection. Regardless, the movie is well-positioned to top Sweet Home Alabama’s $35.6 million to claim a new record for a September opening weekend.In second place, See more »
– Ray Subers

Categories Education Reform, Parent trigger

New Jersey Parent to Daniel Barnz: You Lied

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2012 //
10

Darcie Cimarusti blogs under the name “Mother Crusader.”

She is a parent activist in New Jersey who joined the battle to save her community’s public schools from privatizers.

She was one of the parents who protested outside the opening of “Won’t Back Down” in New York City.

In interviews and articles, the film’s director Daniel Barnz made condescending comments about the parents. He said that they didn’t know what they were protesting against. He claimed they were misinformed.

Mother Crusader calls out Barnz for slandering her and her fellow parents. She knew why she was protesting. She saw the movie. She was not ignorant, misled or misinformed.

The parent protesters are in fact, as Darcie shows, very well informed about the film and its political message, even if its director is not. He comes across as a political naif.

Was Barnz unaware that the “parent trigger” is heavily promoted by rightwing groups like ALEC? Was Barnz ignorant of the political agenda of his billionaire producer, Philip Anschutz, owner of Walden Media? Did he know nothing of Anschutz’s political activism, his funding of anti-gay initiatives in Colorado and California, his hostility to unions, his antagonism to public education, his anti-environmental hydro-fracking business, his contributions to rightwing think tanks? Five minutes on the Internet would have informed Barnz.

Who is misinformed? Not Mother Crusader, and not the other parents who picketed Barnz’s movie. The best one can say about Daniel Barnz is that he is misinformed.

Categories ALEC, Parent trigger, Parents

Won’t Back Down: The Hilarious Sequel

By dianeravitch
September 29, 2012 //
15

Jersey Jazzman has written a brilliant screenplay that tells what happened after the characters in the movie opened their charter school.

This is hilarious!

Categories Charter Schools, Parent trigger

A Teacher Responds to “Won’t Back Down”

By dianeravitch
September 29, 2012 //
4

Julie Cavanaugh is a special education teacher at PS 15 in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

She was one of the makers of the documentary “The Inconvenient Truth Behind ‘Waiting for Superman'”

She now reviews “Won’t Back Down” and explains what is really necessary to reform schools today.

Categories Charter Schools, Parent trigger

Who Gets to Pull the Trigger?

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2012 //
8

Rightwing think tanks, ALEC, and the big corporations are excited about the idea of parents “seizing control” of public schools and handing them over to private corporations. But this parent wonders who will be allowed to pull the trigger and who will be left behind:

….. who does and does not have “trigger rights”? My children went to the public schools but have since graduated. Do I still have trigger rights, or did I lose them when my youngest child graduated? Conversely, if your children are not yet school-age do you get a say because any decision will affect your children when they reach school-age? Do people with more children get more votes? Do parents who do not pay property taxes lose their trigger rights? It seems somewhat unfair to make this decision based on a single year, so maybe there should be a vote before each school year begins. Do teachers get a say? What about nurses, social workers, guidance counselors, custodians, and administrators? Do they only get a say if they live in town?

And, OMG, I almost forgot…we definitely need to enact stringent picture ID requirements before trigger voting. I have a driver’s license, but I know one young teacher who does not (she grew up in a big city). Should she apply for a hunting license? If that trigger is pulled, what does the new charter get to keep from our former public school? There are several murals painted by students in years past (my son helped with one). Do they have the right to paint over the murals? So many questions…

Categories Parent trigger, Parents

More Bad Reviews for Anti-Union Movie

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2012 //
20

I will see “Won’t Back Down” soon, I promise.

I don’t want to, but I will do it because I have to.

Meanwhile, movie reviewers are rendering their judgment.

They say it is a lousy movie.

The best lines so far are in the review in the Los Angeles Times:

That’s because unions turn out to be the most pernicious of all the obstacles to healthy schools, worse even than the stick-in-the-mud school board. While no one, not even unions themselves these days, denies that there are things that must be changed about how they operate, the notion of them as total evil only makes perfect sense to companies that believe in unionless, private charter schools that increase profits by paying teachers whatever they can get away with…

Though the film’s pernicious propagandistic bias is irritating and misleading, it can’t be overemphasized that what is really wrong with this film is how feeble it is dramatically. When Nora is trying to decide if she should work with Jamie, she remembers her mother’s question: “What are you going to do with your one and only life?” Anyone who values their one and only life would be well-advised not to spend two hours of it here.

Categories Parent trigger

Mr. Barnz, Please Read the New York Times Review

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2012 //
14

Daniel Barnz, the director of “Won’t Back Down,” continues to insist in various forums, most recently in an article he wrote for Huffington Post, that the movie is not anti-union. It’s just a good story. It has no political agenda. It has nothing to do with the rightwing sponsored “parent trigger” law that it celebrates. It is not a vehicle for union-bashing and privatization of public education. It is nothing like the anti-union documentary (“Waiting for ‘Superman'”) that his producer sponsored two years ago.

The review of the film in the New York Times, written by a regular movie reviewer, not a union shill or an angry parent, calls the movie for what it is:

…“Won’t Back Down” ultimately has no use for nuance, and its third act is a mighty cataract of speechifying and breathless plot turns that strip the narrative down to its Manichaean core. Once teachers give up job security and guaranteed benefits, learning disabilities will be cured, pencils will stop breaking and the gray skies of Pittsburgh will glow with sunshine.

A.O. Scott, the reviewer, says that this movie is evidence that Hollywood is not a “liberal propaganda factory.” The odd thing about the movie is that everyone in it belongs to a union, even as they portray the teachers’ union as the villain.

Did you read that, Mr. Barnz?

Categories For-Profit, Parent trigger, Privatization

The Absurdity of the “Parent Trigger” Idea

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2012 //
6

The movie “Won’t Back Down” is being heavily promoted by its backers.

But there is lots of pushback from parents and teachers. And the reviews have been almost uniformly bad, including those from non-educational sources.

This article, by a retired teacher, cites many of those reviews and asks a fundamental question: If taxpayers support the school as a public benefit, why should parents have the power to privatize it?

Categories Parent trigger

A Naive Film Director? UPDATE!

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2012 //
3

How could the director of this film not know that he was promoting an idea dear to the agendas of rightwing think tanks and ALEC?

Categories ALEC, Education Reform, Parent trigger

A Clueless Review of Anti-Union, Anti-Public Education Film: UPDATE WITH LINK!

By dianeravitch
September 27, 2012 //
28

The Los Angeles Times published a review–maybe it is an article, not a review, it is hard to tell–of the anti-union, anti-public education film “Won’t Back Down.” The article reaches no judgments about anything, other than the opening box office, which does not look good.

It says that critics claim the film is anti-union, but its director and writer don’t agree. Critics say that the producer is a rightwing zealot, but the director and writer say it doesn’t matter. Presumably the conservative billionaire Philip Anschutz, who also underwrote “Waiting for Superman,” just wanted an inspiring parent-teacher story. An uplifting story about how parents and teachers together can take over their public school and give it to a private corporation and live happily ever happy.

Anyone who knows anything about education issues knows that the point of the story is to promote the “parent trigger” law, which has converted no school anywhere as yet. The “parent trigger” law was first passed in California, and is now model legislation heavily supported by the far-right group ALEC and the equally far-right group Heartland Institute. But ALEC and Heartland and Anschutz don’t have a political agenda.

But here is the good news:

Opening weekend expectations for “Won’t Back Down” remain soft, with the $19-million movie on track to pull in less than $5 million when it opens against the sci-fi time travel film “Looper” and the animated comedy “Hotel Transylvania.”

Categories ALEC, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Parent trigger, Privatization, Unions
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »