This year’s liberal stand-in for the devil incarnate are the
Koch Brothers, who have forked over millions of dollars to establish the Tea
Party, push Tea Party candidates, raise doubts about climate change and promote
legislation that guts environmental regulations and reduces taxes on the
wealthy.
It’s hard to vote against Dave and Charles when it comes to
spreading around the bucks for bad causes, but how about Phillip Anschutz, the
Conservative billionaire who financed the current anti-union melodrama, Won’t Back Down.
Won’t Back Down
paints an ugly imaginary world in which all unionized teachers are lazy,
uncaring incompetents. A sexy babe single parent played by Maggie Gyllenhaal
organizes a charter school that saves the children.
According to Wikipedia, the film is “loosely based on the events surrounding the use of the parent trigger
law in Sunland-Tujunga, Los Angeles, California in 2010, where several groups
of parents attempted to take over several failing public schools” using a
new law passed in California in 2010 which enabled parents “to direct changes such as dismissal of staff
and potential conversion of a school to a charter school.”
The right-wing backing of Won’t Back Down begins with the studio that produced this fantasy,
which also made Waiting for Superman,
the documentary on charter schools that uses argument by anecdote to convince
us that charter schools will save American public schools. Anschultz, famous for his values campaigns
and support of conservative think tanks, put up the money. The U.S. Chamber of
Commerce, known for its stands against unions, the minimum wage and any kind of
government regulation of business, contributed $2.0 million to a national
publicity campaign for the movie.
By the way, Ms. Gyllenhaal went to the ritziest of private
schools, belongs to a fabulously wealthy family and descends from Swedish
royalty. A lot of wealthy and connected
people who send their own children to private schools like Bruce Rauner and
Malin Burnham have put their money and influence behind the charter school
movement.
The question is: why would these right-wingers create and
promote a slickly sentimental inspirational tearjerker about establishing a
type of school that is known to fail?
Despite the glossy but distorted images of educational
success in both Won’t Back Down and Waiting for Superman, charter schools
are known to fail.
Let’s remain in the reality-based community that Karl Rove likes
to belittle and look at the facts: Virtually all studies show that the charter
school movement has yielded disappointing results in the area of student
performance in school and standardized tests (which don’t test all skills, but
do test a lot of skills such as reading and math that are needed to get through
life and hold down a job). For example, a recent Stanford University
study found that the math performance of 46% of charter schools is
indistinguishable from public schools, 17% had substantially higher scores and
37% of charter schools had substantially lower scores than their public school
equivalents.
Why do conservatives support charter schools? Can the answer be anything other than
breaking teachers’ unions? What I find so amazing is that so many people buy
the argument that less experienced, lower paid teachers in charter or private
schools or in the Teach for America program (which lets high-flying recent
college graduates without education degrees teach in disadvantaged schools for
a year or so) will do a better job than higher-paid teachers in unions. We
think that higher paid actors, athletes, musicians, attorneys, physicians and
business people are better at what they do. What’s different about teachers?
And yet all these popular education reform movements seem to have as their goal
the destruction of teacher unions and the lowering of salaries for the
professionals who educate our young.
What we need to improve public education are more teachers
and better facilities—smaller class sizes, more specialists helping kids with
learning disabilities and those who are gifted, more computer labs and science
labs, a shorter cycle of replacing text books and larger budgets for supplies. A
recent study showed that better-performing schools spend more money on the
classroom and teachers than do underperforming schools.
Of course that takes money, which mean that Phillip Anschutz
and the other rich folk backing the attack on traditional public schools will
have to pay more in taxes.
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