Won’t
Back Down, financed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and businessman
Philip Anschutz, promoted by Michelle Rhee, and touted by conservative school “reform”
advocates, makes its point in a predictably hamfisted fashion so that even the densest teabilly Wal-Mart
shopper can figure it out.
I thoroughly hated it, as I expected to.
The story was inspired by a real-life incident a couple of years ago
where parents used California’s parent-trigger law to convert a failing public
school into a charter institution.
The producers signed a raft of well-known
names for the project. Maggie Gyllenhaal
plays the main character, Jamie, while Viola Davis plays Jamie’s ally,
Nona. Clearly the project was
well-financed, considering they also brought on Ving Rhames and Holly Hunter.
Despite the strong cast, I was underwhelmed by
the acting. There was very little
chemistry among the actors, and I just wasn’t convinced by their performances. Also, and I can’t explain why, the Gyllenhaal
siblings have always rubbed me the wrong way.
And so I couldn’t help but chuckle at thought of Maggie Gyllenhaal, a
paragon of liberal smugness, cynically accepting the lead role in a right-wing
propaganda flick. Really, Maggie? Did you need the money that badly?
Back to the film: Jamie is a plucky single
mom who works two jobs while raising a daughter with learning disabilities. Frustrated by her little girl’s lack of
progress in school, she joins up with burned out elementary school teacher Nona
after discovering a loophole in the law which allows parents and teachers to take
over a school if it is failing.
Gyllenhaal and the scriptwriters self-consciously
strive to imbue Jamie with an air of blue collar authenticity. Jamie speaks in malapropisms while letting
her daughter watch TV and munch Snickers bars after school. She’s awed by Nona’s neatly kept home. Her sense of boundaries is poor at best as
she importunes parents, teachers, and administrators alike to do what’s right
for her daughter.
Won’t
Back Down is a mostly conventional buddy film / fight-the-system
tale. Predictably, it concludes with the
obligatory corny feel-good scene I remember in every Eighties inspiring teacher
movie from Stand and Deliver to The Dead Poets’ Society. But that’s not its worst sin. At least twice in the film, Jamie quotes Gandhi’s
purported aphorism, “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” as
justification for her efforts. It’s like
when wingnuts such as Bill O’Reilly or Glenn Beck quote Martin Luther King; it
just comes off as vaguely sacrilegious.
At its heart, Won’t Back Down is an odious anti-union, anti-public education
screed. Throughout the movie, Jamie and
Nona are stymied at every turn by two-dimensional cardboard cutout foes in the
form of a sclerotic school bureaucracy, a do-nothing board of education, and a union
which protects incompetent teachers through tenure. (A “job for life after two years,” as one
character puts it, perpetuating a cherished conservative myth.) Unionized teachers, we’re given to
understand, have no incentive to educate beyond collecting their inflated taxpayer
underwritten salaries.
While Won’t
Back Down is a poorly made hack piece which will be soon forgotten, I wish
I could say the same for the movement that spawned it. We are on a slippery slope toward school
privatization and teacher deprofessionalization because of the moneyed
conservative forces working toward this end.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is one well-known culprit. The Walton Family Foundation and the Hewlett
Foundation are two others.
But the worst of the rogue’s gallery of
charitable foundations, to my mind, is the Eli and Edythe Broad
Foundation. Mr. Broad, who made his
fortune in insurance and by building innumerable subdivisions of tacky tract
houses, did what any other egotistical plutocrat would do when faced with the
prospect of paying taxes. He simply
donated a fair chunk of his wealth to a charitable foundation he created then devoted
himself to doling it out as a means of wielding power. Among its programs, the Broad Foundation
sponsors an “academy” to train school administrators for the new reality of
K-12 education, which is that public schools must produce a uniform “product”
regardless of students’ widely varying individual aptitudes. The test will tell: Poor scores equal
unemployed teachers.
Eli Broad suffers from the same conceit other
wealthy individuals share. Because he
was successful at business, this makes him an expert in every other field of
endeavor. This is especially true when it’s
a service provided by the public sector.
As we all know, government’s sole raison
d’être is to siphon off the hard earned wealth of job creating entrepreneurs. Therefore, it can only be made efficient when
business people either privatize, or at least apply private sector practices to,
government work. (Never mind the non sequitur underneath this assumption;
there’s no moneymaking potential in taking the liberal arts courses where you
would learn what one is.)
The Broad Foundation is gradually making
inroads into higher education. My alma
mater recently opened a new field house built with money donated by the
Broads. To my deep distaste, the
president of the endowment foundation of the college where I work is the CEO of a real
estate development company owned by Eli Broad.
I believe these are harbingers of a larger trend. It won’t be long before pressure is brought to bear on college
presidents and boards of trustees to scale back or eliminate general education
requirements and non-vocational majors in favor of the University of Phoenix
model of workforce training. It’s never
a good idea to encourage the life of the mind when the kind of people you want
working for you are narrowly trained technicians who don’t ask a lot of probing
questions.
If there is a hell, I hope there is a special
corner reserved for Eli Broad. As it is,
the evil he’s done in his lifetime will be perpetuated through his foundation. And I
am not one of those progressives who put their faith in the secular eschatology
of revolution. Sometimes the bad guys
win. The hardest part is when everyone
around you is convinced they’re the good guys and are cheering them on to
victory.
Just like in Won’t Back Down.
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