Diane knocks out Guggenheim from Oscar contention?

Diane Ravitch has written a superb critique of Waiting for Superman in the NY Review of Books that is already being hailed as damaging this film's prospects for an Oscar.
(See David Bellel's inspired illustration to the right; that's the film's director with a bloodied brow, Davis Guggenheim.)

Also check out the review by Shino Tanikawa in this week's Villager, and my take on the film's biases in the Huffington Post called The Blind Side, and what scenes an anti-Superman film would look like.

The best analysis of the money behind the film and the charter school movement in general, and how its hedge fund supporters are making millions off charter school endowments, is provided by Barbara Miner of Rethinking Schools on the "Not Waiting for Superman" Facebook page.

And this video, called the Inconvenient Truth behind Waiting for Superman, made by the people at GEM, with parents and teachers expressing their point of view.

No wonder NYC public school parents are so annoyed by the continual exhorting of DOE educrats to go see the movie, including repeated offers of free tickets.

As Diane Ravitch commented rather ironically on the NYC Education list serv,

"This is odd. Why is the NYC Department of Education promoting a film that claims the public schools managed by DOE are failures and children must flee DOE schools to enroll in a charter? I don't understand."

But that's the upside down version of reality, in the land of Tweed.

One thing for sure about Wendy Kopp

There's a good summary by Teacher Ken at Daily Kos here of a new book by Barbara Torre Veltri, called Learning on Other People's Kids: Becoming a Teach For America Teacher. There's a good summary by Teacher Ken at Daily Kos here.

The book adds to the growing body of critical evidence about TFA. This includes the excellent article by Barbara Miner in Rethinking Schools, (registration necessary); and the policy brief, Teach For America: A False Promise, by the Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) at the University of Colorado and the Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) at Arizona State University.

A statistic from Teacher Ken's review of the Veltri book that caught my eye:

Veltri provides a table using data from TFA, showing that in 2006-06 the 4,700 corps members were served with an operating budget of $39,500,000, while for 2009-10 the projected figures were 7,300 corps members with an operating budget of $160,000,000. Let's put those numbers on a per capita basis. In 2005-06 the cost per corps member was $8,400, while in 2009-10 it had ballooned to $21,917, or more than half what most teachers in this country make in their first year. I question whether that is money well spent.

One thing is for sure; Wendy Kopp is incredibly gifted at raising money.