New York Magazine Features Waiting For ‘Superman’ |
posted by: Alix | September 10, 2010, 02:38 PM |
Not too often a forum for education reform, New York magazine ran a piece this week entitled, “Schools: The Disaster Movie”. The article features the upcoming release of the much anticipated film by An Inconvenient Truth director, Davis Guggenheim, and what most certainly will be a rallying cry for reformers and an outrage for the unions.
“'Superman' affectingly, movingly traces the stories of five children—all but one of them poor and black or Hispanic—and their parents as they seek to secure a decent education by gaining admission via lottery to high-performing charter schools. At the same time, the film is a withering indictment of the adults—in particular, those at the teachers unions—who have let the public-school system rot, and a paean to reformers such as Geoffrey Canada and Michelle Rhee who have waged an epic campaign to overhaul the notoriously dysfunctional system…” In the vein of creating an “op-ed” style movie, Guggenheim has created a film that showcases with simplicity the problems in education today. You may draw your own conclusions about the “villains” and “heroes” of the movement and the motivations of the filmmaker himself. What is clear is that we must recognize that teachers are not synonymous with unions like Ms. Weingarten suggests; rather they are individual professionals with ideas and opinions to bring to the education reform dialogue. In fact, about 900,000 teachers do not belong to a union. Of those, over 300,000 teachers belong to non-union associations like the Association of American Educators.
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