Don't be fooled by "Won't Back Down"!

Credit: Center for Media and Democracy

Over the next few weeks, we will be running pieces describing real-life “Won’t Back Down” stories from parents and teachers.  If you’d like to share yours, please email us at info@classsizematters.org

Last night I attended a screening of the controversial new film, “Won’t Back Down” about a parent and a teacher who take over their “failing” public school.  I have written a FAQ about the movie which is posted here.  The film was produced by Walden Media, owned by right-wing billionaire Phillip Anschutz, who also co-produced “Waiting for ‘Superman.’” 

Advance screenings have been held around the country, organized by Michelle Rhee’s Students First and other pro-charter lobbying organizations, to promote the “Parent Trigger,” which allows a school to be turned over to a charter operator if 51% of the parents sign a petition calling for this. Here is a good analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy.  

The movie itself is badly written, poorly acted, and full of exaggerated characterizations and unconvincing plot twists. Its message, transmitted with sledgehammer subtlety, is that the only reason that schools in poor communities are failing is because of incompetent lazy teachers who are protected by the union.  The film also implies that in turning around a school, all that needs to happen in addition to getting rid of the union is to change the school “culture” which is done by scheduling more field trips and telling students that they can learn and go to college.  

The two main characters, played by Viola Davis and Maggie Gyllenhall, both have children who are struggling in school; one with dyslexia and the other [spoiler alert!] who towards the end of the film is revealed to be  possibly brain damaged.  Somehow getting rid of the union and converting to a charter school will magically help these kids learn; though in reality, many charters discourage parents from enrolling their children if they have disabilities, or are quick to push them out after they enroll.

The main villain in the film is the teacher of Gyllenhall’s daughter.  This teacher spends time playing with her cellphone during class, and prevents the little girl from going to the bathroom and then locks her in a closet when she wets herself.  The evil parents and teachers who oppose the takeover of the school carry signs saying “Public school advocate” and “Taking over neighborhood schools destroys neighborhoods."

 If I hadn’t been on a panel to discuss the movie afterwards, I would probably have walked out. 

The panel also included  Christina Grant, formerly the deputy Director for the DOE Office of Charter Schools and now head of NYCAN, a charter lobbying organization, and Kate Hayes, a parent with a Kindergarten child who has been shut out from attending her neighborhood public school because of overcrowding.  Hayes is also on the founding board of a prospective charter school called Great Oaks, which has applied to the state to open in the fall of 2013.

I pointed out that though the movie claims repeatedly that the union prohibits public school teachers from staying after 3 PM to help struggling students, this is factually untrue.  Many teachers do indeed stay late helping students, and according to the recent Gates-funded Scholastic survey,  they work an average of 10 hours and 40 minutes a day  -- a 53-hour work week.  Also, according to international comparisons, our teachers spend more time actually teaching than in any other developed nation.

When Christina said that when she was a charter school teacher at KIPP she made herself available nights and weekends, I pointed out that most charter schools like KIPP have extremely high levels of teacher and principal attrition; this is not sustainable model nor one we should want to replicate if we want experienced teachers and school leaders in our schools. 

I also pointed out that every year in NYC, the top priority of parents is reducing class size, and the union is the only thing standing in the way of Bloomberg doubling the class size, as he has said he would like to do.  Michelle Rhee, on the other hand, as well as other members of the corporate reform crowd, would like to eliminate all limits on class size, as well as to bar teachers from being able to negotiate on this issue, and would limit them to arguing over wages and benefits. 

I also provided some historical background.  Here in New York State, we already have a form of the parent trigger.  With the assent of the district, a school can convert to a charter if 51% of the parents at the school vote to do so.  Despite the fact that under Bloomberg , the DOE has been extremely charter-friendly, they have never tried to put conversion to a vote of parents, probably because they know it would be roundly rejected. 

The last time such a conversion was attempted was in 2001, when then-Chancellor Harold Levy allowed Chris Whittle, the CEO of the chain of Edison for-profit chain of charters to try to convince parents at five public schools to let him operate their schools. Despite promises to parents of more funding, computers, etc., this attempt sparked big protests and opposition in communities all over the city, and Edison lost the vote at all five schools.  Now Edison operates only one charter school in New York City, the Harriet Tubman school, which gets very poor results, and Whittle has moved on to greener pastures by starting the much hyped private school Avenues, charging $40K per year in tuition.

 Christina Grant countered that the Parent Trigger legislation they are now lobbying for, which in its current form would just pertain to the city of Buffalo, is better than the existing charter conversion law, because it gives parents more options, such as closing the school, restructuring it, etc. 

I don’t think most parents want to close their neighborhood school – or to fire 50% of the teachers, another negative option that the bill provides.  Why a rigid quota that would require that half of all teachers at any school should be fired could be seen as a way to empower parents or to improve a school is beyond me, though it is one that the DOE and the Wall St. hedgefunders seem to favor.   

And these sorts of high-stakes decisions should never be made through the mere signing of a petition, without holding a real vote with proper oversight; this is an open invitation to manipulation and abuse.  In fact,  the two times the Parent Trigger has been tried in California, hundreds of parents asked to have their signatures rescinded.  A PTA election would never be allowed to occur in such a slipshod fashion, no less turning a public school over to a private corporation to run.

Now, I have spent over a decade as a parent activist in NYC, and I have yet to see any parents rise up on their own in an effort to privatize or close their neighborhood public schools.  I have seen thousands of parents – along with teachers – working together to protest school closings, fight budget cuts and rising class sizes, and/or to obtain the right to opt their children out of high stakes testing, and yet these efforts are usually met with scorn from the same people who are pushing this movie.  Don’t be fooled: the movie “Won’t Back Down” is not really about parent empowerment; it is instead a massively financed PR campaign, engineered by billionaires and hedgefunders who couldn’t care less about what parents actually want, but want to take down the teachers union and take over our public schools.

Over the next few weeks, we will be running pieces describing real-life “Won’t Back Down” stories from parents and teachers.  If you’d like to share yours, please email us as info@classsizematters.org

Parents give a thumbs down to NY-CAN and the "Parent Trigger"

For immediate release:
January 11, 2012

Leonie Haimson, Class Size Matters, leonie@classsizematters.org, 917-435-9329
Caroline Grannan, Parents Across America, cgrannan@gmail.com, 415-412-5758

Today, a pro-charter school organization launched in New York called NY-CAN, and announced they will be advocating for a version of the so-called "Parent Trigger" legislation to be passed in New York State.  The organization is headed by Christina Grant, former deputy director of NYC Department of Education's Office of Charter Schools.

The Parent Trigger law was first passed in California in 2010, the creation of by an astroturf group based in Los Angeles called the Parent Revolution.  Since then, model legislation based on the Parent Trigger has been written and promoted by ALEC, the shadowy organization backed by the Koch brothers that has a radical right-wing agenda.

In California, the Parent Trigger law was first tried at a Compton CA elementary school  in 2010. The efforts of the Parent Revolution to turn the school into a charter failed, because some of the signatures on their petitions were not dated and many parents said that they had been misled about what the petitions called for. So far, the Parent Trigger has never been used in California or in any other state, which makes it unclear as to why the NY State Legislature would want to approve similar legislation here.

According to Leonie Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters and a public school parent in NYC, "The Parent Trigger was devised as an underhanded trick by the charter lobby to manipulate parents into letting them privatize more public schools.  The fact that it has aroused huge controversy and has so far failed to achieve any results in California is one more reason legislators should be wary of passing it here in New York State. Parents want to be involved from the ground up in devising positive reforms to improve their children's schools, like class size reduction or offering a more well-rounded curriculum.  They do not want their schools either closed, converted into charters or half their staff fired."

Caroline Grannan, one of the founders of Parents Across America, adds: "Here in California, the Parent Trigger has never been  used successfully in any school, and the organization behind it, Parent Revolution, has admitted that they "made mistakes"  and say that they are now organizing parents to advocate on whatever school improvement issues that concern them. The Parent Trigger is not real parent empowerment, but the attempt of wealthy edu-entrepreneurs to take advantage of parents for their own narrow ends."

For more on why Parents Across America opposes the Parent Trigger legislation, in New York and elsewhere, see our position paper.  Background on recent events in California involving the Parent Trigger is here.

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Video: NYC parent activists get a moment to challenge the corporate reform movement on Education Nation

Last week, NBC ran three days of programming called Education Nation, filmed at Rockefeller Plaza, which was primarily dominated by representatives from the corporate reform movement, who define accountability as more high-stakes testing and promote privatization through charter school expansion, both trends that in the view of many public school parents undermine our public schools and offer simplistic solutions to complex problems.

Many of the panelists and speakers were from organizations funded by the program's sponsors, which included the Gates and Broad Foundations, and echoed their pro-testing and pro-privatization views.  There was much talk about how we need "great principals" and "great teachers" and "great schools" with little realistic discussion of how we get there.  One panelist, Ralph Smith of the Annie Casey Foundation, offered a contrary thought:  that perhaps instead of relying on "greatness" we should build a system that enables ordinary people to be successful.

In general, there was little or no recognition of the frustration parents feel about the overwhelming obsession with standardized testing in our schools, the devastating impact of deep budget cuts and growing class sizes, and the way our voices have been increasingly shut out of the debate over education reform.   Even the panel on the role of parents included only one person who identified herself as a parent leader.  Rather than invite  any NYC parent to sit on the panel, Chancellor Walcott was included instead, despite the fact that the Bloomberg administration has consistently ignored parents and  treated our priorities with utter contempt.

This panel discussion, called Stepping Up: the Role of the Parent Advocate, focused  on the controversial proposal known as the “Parent Trigger", developed by the organization the Parent Revolution, which is headed by a Beverly Hills attorney named Ben Austin.  The Parent Revolution was started with funds from the Broad Foundation to encourage charter school expansion.  More information on this astroturf organization can be found on the Seattle 2010 blog, and on Diane Ravitch's blog Bridging Differences, where she calls the Parent Trigger "a stealth assault on public education."   ALEC, the secretive right-wing organization, has written a model Parent Trigger bill that has been introduced in state legislatures all over the nation, and reportedly, DFER and other pro-charter organizations are busy hiring staff to try to get a Parent Trigger bill passed here in NY state this session.  The Parent Trigger is particularly deceptive, because while it claims to empower parents, it is actually offering them only a limited number of damaging options, imposed from above. The Parents Across America position paper on the Parent Trigger is here.

At Education Nation, I challenged both Ben Austin and Dennis Walcott, pointing out that the Bloomberg administration as well as the US Department of Education have completely ignored our voices.  Most parents don’t want their schools closed or turned into charters, but yearn instead for their neighborhood public school to be strengthened with smaller classes and a well-rounded education, but this is not the choice they have been offered. 

Ben Austin responded with a sleazy attack that Parents Across America is entirely funded by the National Education Association, which is untrue.  (We received a $25,000 start up grant from the NEA, and have since raised money elsewhere, including a $5,000 gift from Diane Ravitch.)  I was followed shortly afterward by two other questioners, parent activists Mona Davids of the NYC Parents Union and Ocynthia Williams of the Coalition for Educational Justice.

But even during Ben Austin’s remarks the truth occasionally shone through.  He admitted that no parents want their schools closed, and that charter schools "are not remotely scaleable” – that is, they cannot be replicated on a large scale.  (Never mind that Walcott, who was sitting right next to him, appears to see both continued school closures and rapid charter expansion as the DOE’s top priority over the next two years.)

Other valuable moments on Education Nation were provided by Diane Ravitch during her debate with Geoffrey Canada.  Ravitch pointed out that Canada had fired his whole 6^th grade class when they didn’t test well enough; countered by Canada’s misstatement that he had “closed” the school instead.  Also you should check out the student panel,  which, among many other issues, discussed how important class size is, in allowing  them to develop closer relationships with their teachers and enabling teachers to show how much they care.

Below is video of my remarks and Austin’s response; followed by the comments of Mona and Ocynthia.  The entire segment on the Power of a Parent Advocate is here.  And don't forget to check out the video of MisEducation Nation  that followed on Tuesday night.

Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters and Parents Across America on what most parents really want:



Mona Davids of NYC Parents Union on Ben Austin's divisive tactics and her version of the "Parent Trigger":



Ocynthia Williams of the Coalition for Educational Justice on the failure of Bloomberg administration and Chancellor Walcott to collaborate with parents: