Waiting for Superman (pro-public school privatization) trailer from director of INCONVENIENT TRUTH

[yurbud]

Run time: 02:32 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Awirom2bh0s   Posted on YouTube: May 08, 2010 By YouTube Member: CinemastarTV Views on YouTube: 2899   Posted on DU: July 28, 2010 By DU Member: yurbud Views on DU: 1167

 
It looks like the hard sell to privatize public schools and cut Wall Street in on K-12 public school spending is in the pipe.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, both the GOP and the DLC wing of the Democratic Party have the same vision of education reform: underfund and over-regulate traditional public schools, call them failures, then use that failure as an excuse to divert public money to private for-profit charter schools that don't have to comply with the same rules like accepting special ed, behavioral problem kids.

The other thing these charter schools won't have is unionized teachers.

The bitter irony is this trailer starts with a little girl who says she wants to be a teacher when she grows up, but if the makers of this film have their way, it will be harder for her to support her family as a teacher, and if she works in a traditional public school, she could lose her job as part of a mass firing by someone with no expertise in education like Michelle Rhee.

Half of new teachers quit after five years. If these reformers have their way, the best and brightest will increasingly wonder if taking the job is worth the abuse in the first place.

If these people were serious about education reform, they would give public school teachers the tools they need: smaller classes, smaller schools, enrichment programs like art and music, and some kind of support for kids OUTSIDE the classroom who have fractured family lives.

Those things would cost money and maybe require taxes to go up slightly on the wealthy, but obviously, the sole purpose of our government now is to make the already wealthy even wealthier.

[bluestateguy]

1. I have seen the trailer and I will watch the movie when it comes out

I will then form an opinion about it.

[yurbud]

2. do some research before you see it.

[kenfrequed]

5. uhm

I don't just watch a propaganda BS job and then make decisions about it in a vacuum.


I actually do my homework about the absolute screaming fail-train of Edison schools and other for-profit private enterprises in education. Oh yeah, facts and common sense too. If you privatize something there is this magical thing called profits that appears, and once it appears the profit gnomes (read:investors) will constantly want more profit and more.

Eventually services will have to be cut and quality will have to drop to the lowest common denominator, like cheeseburgers at a fast food stand. (which is, by the way, what most students will eventually be good for)

[Joanne98]

3. I hate traitors!

[madfloridian]

4. Guess who pushed the film at Sundance. Yep!! Bill Gates.

http://kara.allthingsd.com/20100125/education-documentary-featuring-bill-gates-gets-first-distribution-deal-at-sundance/

"Bill Gates was at the Sundance Film Festival this weekend–not just to sample some of the fare at the well-known independent film festival, held annually in Park City, Utah, but also to appear at the screening of a documentary about the crisis in public education in which he appears and that scored the first distribution deal at the event.

The worldwide rights for “Waiting for Superman,” directed by Davis Guggenheim and produced by Participant Media, were sold to Paramount Vantage, a unit of the Viacom (VIA) movie studio.

The film premiered Friday at Sundance, with Gates in attendance. The Microsoft (MSFT) co-founder took questions at the screening and made it to several Sundance events, surprising several film types.

“I couldn’t believe it was him,” said one participant at a filmmakers’ gathering.

Yes, it was him, especially since issues in public education have been a big focus of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he has been spending most of his time since leaving day-to-day work at the software giant in 2008."

It is a pro-charter pro-reform documentary like all the others coming out this year. Coincidence...No.

Planned by the reformers?

Yes.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-06-30-edufilms30online_ST_N.htm

"This summer, no fewer than four new documentaries, most of them independently produced, tackle essentially the same question: Why do so many urban public schools do such a bad job — and what can be done to help kids trapped in them?

Among the new films:

"•Teached, directed by activist and one-time Teach For America corps member Kelly Amis: It tackles teacher tenure, bureaucracy and "anti-child work rules that permeate every school in America," among other issues.

•The Cartel, directed by former TV news anchor and reporter Bob Bowdon: It takes on the "unconscionable failure" of New Jersey's public schools.

•The Lottery, an intimate look at four families' attempts to get their children into an oversubscribed Harlem charter school.

•The biggest and flashiest of the four? Waiting for Superman, directed by Davis Guggenheim, who won an Oscar for ... An Inconvenient Truth.

Guggenheim's film, to be released this fall, casts the widest net, following five families, from the Bronx to Los Angeles, as they search for better schools for their kids. At once moving and disturbing, Waiting For Superman illustrates the dysfunction of a system that seems to have lost sight of its most basic function: to educate everyone.

Yes, but school reform as compelling drama?"

[yurbud]

6. it's criminal. Charter schools would be okay if they ONLY let public school teachers

set up and run them with in the public school system, not for-profit scammers.