Yes, Won't Back Down Takes a Controversial Stance on Teachers Unions. But That's Not a Bad Thing

Yes, Won't Back Down Takes a Controversial Stance on Teachers Unions. But That's Not a Bad Thing

Won't Back Down

See also:
*California's Parent Trigger
*Parent Trigger's Second Try

Teachers' unions don't want you to see Won't Back Down, an underdog film that opened Sept. 28, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal as a working-class mother in Pittsburgh who will do anything to give her young daughter a great education -- even if it means battling the local teachers union and public school bureaucrats. Viola Davis plays an elementary school teacher who reluctantly teams with Gyllenhaal to take over a chronically substandard public school through a little-used mechanism called the "Fail Safe Law." The two women then inspire parents and teachers to join their cause.

If the plot sounds familiar, you're right. Won't Back Down was inspired by the real-life Parent Trigger movement in California, which started in 2010 when working-class parents and a Los Angeles-based organizing group called Parent Revolution used the little-known Parent Trigger law to attempt to take over a failing school in Compton. Just like the characters in the movie, the parents and organizers in Compton faced charges of being anti-union for using a petition drive to turn a public school into a private one that didn't have to be unionized.

Media critics have charged that Won't Back Down is anti-union, too. As a result, the movie, in its own odd way, probably is considered by various left-leaning ideologues as one of the most dangerous films of 2012.

Maybe so, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, and Won't Back Down clearly goes out of its way to explain the pro-teachers union side of the issues.

But if pushing the notion that all kids, especially poor ones, should receive a good education is somehow subversive, then certain people need to take an unblinking look at the mirror.

In fact, Won't Back Down may have missed an opportunity to more fully explain how many public education school systems have burdensome rules and regulations that stack the deck against parents and kids, where instead it wastes precious screen time on the love lives of the two leading women.

Still, the underlying theme of the movie is not outrageous: When it comes to education, the needs of kids, not adults, should come first.

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rdsathene

Trust teabagger Patrick Range McDonald to provide political cover for Philip Anschutz and Rupert Murdoch's latest fringe-right propaganda film. Spare us the platitudes about the needs of kids coming first. Trigger has always been about increasing CMO market share and putting more taxpayer money into the pockets of charter industry executives.

No mention from McDonald about how the trigger law is American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) template legislation or how The Heartland Institute is its biggest proponent? Only the right-wing libertarian LA Weakly would catagorize this vile film under "social justice." Corporate profits would have been far more appropriate.

alliewall

CORRECTION TO THE LAST POST:

One sentence in the fourth-to-last paragraph SHOULD HAVE read:

"A mere 12% of the McKinley parents actually chose to send their kids to the new Celerity charter across the school, WITH THE REMAINING 88% CHOOSING TO REMAIN IN McKinley."

instead of...

"A mere 12% of the McKinley parents actually chose to send their kids to the new Celerity charter across the school, and remain in McKinley."

alliewall

Patrick,

There seems to be seems to be two competing versions of what happened in to Compton two years ago:

the pro-Parent Trigger side (which includes you and the L.A. Weekly... although your weekly film reviewer apparently never got the memo, and trashed WON'T BACK DOWN as inept propaganda); this side claims that there was overwhelming support from the McKinley parents for the trigger and the Celerity charter school; based on your cover story, this was a highly organized group of people who claimed they and their outside Parent Revolution organizers never lied to or misled any parents into signing; they were honest and upfront throughout the process; they also claimed the other side was telling lies about how Celerity currently does not and would not educate special ed kids on site, but farm them out... or would not admit them at all;

AND

the anti-Parent Trigger side, which included barely organized groups of parents who claim they were, indeed, lied to (i.e. "This is for new computers for the school... sign here!" "This is to beautify the campus... sign here!") by paid outside signature gatherers who also went around falsely claiming to be both Compton residents, and McKinley parents; according the the live blog from a Compton School Board meeting on December 14 (by the Weekly's own Simone Wilson) dozens of parents over three hours gave their names, and publicly went on record making these claims... during that meeting, not one pro-Parent Revolution / parent trigger person came up to refute any of these claims; (ask Simone, she was there)

Furthermore, parents of special ed kids investigated Celerity, and found that they do not service Special Ed kids on site, or perhaps not at all; they claimed that hordes of parents wanted to rescind the signatures they made because they were lied to and tricked into signing it; furthermore, they said that any remaining pro-parent trigger parents were but a small minority, and that your (COUGH! COUGH!) "award-winning" (COUGH! COUGH!) L.A. Weekly cover story was just lie-filled flacking for the corporate-backed, privatizing Parent Trigger forces.

Well, it would be nice if we had some way or some metric to measure which of these two sides is telling the truth...

Oh, wait! We DO. Shortly afterwards, Celerity was authorized to open the exact kind of charter school to start in Fall 2011, and it would be just across the street from McKinley in an abandoned Catholic school building. Celerity then heavily campaigned to all the McKinley parents to abandon their miserable public school as the forces of evil had now been defeated, and there was now nothing stopping them from matriculating in the new Celerity school.

Surely, at this point, according to the pro-Parent Trigger forces, there would be hordes of dissatisfied McKinley parents lining up at the new Celerity charter school desperate to have their kids there. After all, the overwhelming majority of parents had been clamoring for it, and now nothing was stopping them from signing up.

Well, Patrick, you and I both know what happened next... even though you've never had the guts to report this follow-up in either your own blog, or the print edition itself.

A mere 12% of the McKinley parents actually chose to send their kids to the new Celerity charter across the school, and remain in McKinley. Celerity them filled up more seats with a creamed, screened subset of easy-to-educate kids from a much wider geographic area... standard-operating-procedure for corporate charters. After all, thanks to your cover story, Celerity got what it REALLY wanted... free real estate to open what amounts to a segregated private school with public money.

One more thing: how many special ed classes does the current Celerity school in Compton have? ZERO.

Honestly, Patrick, if your story about the vast majority of McKinley parents being eager and ready to send their kids to Celerity was true, how come only 12% actually joined up? (Oh that's right. They were brainwashed into it by the teachers' unions... Hey, there's another idea for an INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS-type movie. It would probably do better than WON'T BACK DOWN, which had the worst opening weekend in movie history.)

Perhaps it's time you give back that award, as the latest developments prove it to be a total crock. Or, to quote Quint (the late Robert Shaw), from the movie JAWS, "It proves one thing... that you fancy college boys don't have the courage to admit when you're wrong."