Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, said in an interview on Real News, "50 percent of people that come into teaching leave within the first five years because they cannot do this job. This is a tough job. It's emotionally draining. It requires you to do so much other than what you learn in a book. So there's no other profession that self-selects like we do in the beginning." But, that element of the profession is not in the film; nobody like Lewis .
All professions are going to have bad people. There will be bad doctors, bad lawyers--Hell, have you seen Wall Street lately? Bad financial industry staff and executives. Why the focus on teachers being the problem?
One, blaming and firing teachers is an easy solution to the problem. Closing schools and firing teachers is also easy. Building alternatives is a market-based solution and an opportunity for someone to make an investment in education and possibly make financial gains from such an investment. It doesn't address the root factors for why children are coming to school unable or uninterested in learning, incapable of passing high-stakes tests, or why parents are not around to support them properly because their parents are having arguments, have to work multiple jobs, and can barely put food on the table each week.
It's much harder to change the political culture that is
imperiling public education, its funding and the children who attend the
schools, than it is to "turnaround" a school or start from scratch. As Guggenheim rightfully points out, U.S. presidents since the 1970s have claimed to be "education presidents" but none have truly turned around the deterioration of education in the country.
Two, the wealthiest in America who control America's economy and make the decisions, people like Bill Gates who have starring roles in the movie, view the crisis as not just one in education but one in the capitalist economy of America. They look at the economy and education and suggest that public schools are designed to train students to do what they were supposed to do fifty years ago--produce workers for skill jobs. They haven't changed when the world has, and, consequently the film explains, for example, businesses in the high tech industry have had to go halfway around the world to find workers because they could not find qualified workers in America.
The wealthy and our political leaders are worried about losing to countries like China or India in the new globalized economy. Guggenheim highlights this making it clear that America now longer is a key leader in the world on education. Inability to compete is partly characterized as a national security issue.
Charter schools are held up as a viable option. Guggenheim
provides little information on studies indicating whether these schools perform
better than public schools. He quickly mentions a Stanford study that showed only 1 in 5 charter schools get the results they like to celebrate, but as former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch writes:
"...Nothing more is said about this astonishing statistic. It is drawn from a national study of charter schools by Stanford economist Margaret Raymond (the wife of Hanushek). Known as the CREDO study, it evaluated student progress on math tests in half the nation's five thousand charter schools and concluded that 17 percent were superior to a matched traditional public school; 37 percent were worse than the public school; and the remaining 46 percent had academic gains no different from that of a similar public school. The proportion of charters that get amazing results is far smaller than 17 percent.Why did Davis Guggenheim pay no attention to the charter schools that are run by incompetent leaders or corporations mainly concerned to make money? Why propound to an unknowing public the myth that charter schools are the answer to our educational woes, when the filmmaker knows that there are twice as many failing charters as there are successful ones? Why not give an honest accounting?"
Guggenheim does not bother to get into a discussion of privatized education versus public education in society. The impact of allowing charter schools to spring up all over the country as a place for children who are not getting what they deserve from public education is not part of the documentary at all.
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