Silver Screens and Blackboards

In the summer of 2010, USA Today’s Greg Toppo asked, “Is 2010 the year of the education documentary?” The article seized on a striking trend: the sudden emergence of films examining the problem of public education in the United States. Three of these, 2010’s highly acclaimed Waiting for “Superman,” the lesser-known 2009 film The Cartel, and the soon-to-be-released TEACHED come from different political perspectives and focus on different aspects of educational reform. They even use some of the same footage, including a rather jarring clip of New York mayor Michael Bloomberg saying, “A parent says to me, ‘Oh, my kid goes to a great school,’ and I said, “Lady, your kid can’t read or add two and two. What do you mean it’s a good school?’” Yet the fact that three such different filmmakers have created films around the theme not only demonstrates Hollywood’s interest in educational films like these but also a widespread, national interest in seeing them.
The education films signify a newfound interest in the country’s education problems, but they still have a tremendous role to play in taking that interest and galvanizing it into action. Films enjoy the potential to take nuanced policy debates to the public level in the way that An Inconvenient Truth, the last film by “Superman” director David Guggenheim, did for the climate change debate. USA Today speculated that the arrival of Michelle Rhee on the national stage brought other education reformers out of their shells. The existence of the documentaries show that the educational reform movement enjoys tremendous potential, but like its filmmakers, the movement’s leaders are still trying to figuring out how to convert the momentum they build into electoral and policy reform at both the local and national level.
Waiting for Change
One signal of the broad attention that education reform enjoys remains the diversity of these filmmakers. Guggenheim is a professional filmmaker, and his film benefits from a highly professional level of production. “Superman” follows much more of a plotline than the other films, centering on the stories of several young children entering lotteries for their charter schools, to make clear that lotteries for charter schools are not the answer to our country’s education problems. The film gives history lessons, using old footage of public schools in the postwar era. The film also explains why unions came to be while suggesting that their original purpose is no longer relevant. Guggenheim also uses heavy-hitting public figures— experts like Geoffrey Canada, Bill Gates, and Michelle Rhee—to give their expert testimony throughout the film; their strongest points are about the difficulty of eliminating bad teachers and administrators, and the need for great ones.
Attacking the Cartel
Bob Bowdon, the director of The Cartel, is a journalist by training, and it shows. His entire documentary has the feel of a prolonged Dateline special. Most notable about Cartel is that it focuses entirely on Bob Bowdon’s home state of New Jersey, though many of the local issues in Camden, Trenton, and Jersey City are identical to those in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., or the Bronx discussed by “Superman”: bloated bureaucracy, unresponsive school boards, and hegemonic teachers’ unions. Unlike Guggenheim, Bowdon remains visible, conducting interviews throughout much of the film, and his frequent appearances should remind the audience that his own political views permeate his investigation. As a result, the film serves both to uncover corruption within New Jersey’s education system and to advance Bowdon’s own agenda, which is anti-union, pro-charter, and pro-voucher. At times he gets carried away with scoring political points, especially against the leader of the New Jersey Education Association union; Randi Weingarten, who appears in “Superman,” proves more adept with her talking points. While Cartel was criticized for its lack of intellectual depth, Bowdon’s film succeeds at debunking one of the most pervasive myths in education: that more money means better results.
Lessons TEACHED?
TEACHED creator Kelly Amis brings her experience as a teacher to her project. In an email to the HPR, she said, “We let teachers talk…instead of mostly talking about them.” Amis is the least political of the three filmmakers and seeks to show as much as tell her viewers. She has already put a series of short films online which will target a wide audience through digital media. The first, “Path to Prison,” features a former convict who taught himself to read at age 17 after being pushed through the Los Angeles school system without so. In five minutes of one man’s experience, we hear about inept teachers, ineffective evaluations, and the socioeconomic consequences of a broken system. Amis’s project “will not necessarily follow the traditional film trajectory,” but the series strives to be both a rallying cry to galvanize those who would fight for change and a source of hope for those who have lost faith in the system.
Galvanizing a Movement
Despite their differences, these three films express a number of common goals: emulating good teachers and effectively replacing bad ones; reassessing the process of school funding and budgeting; and considering the broader consequences of race relations, crime and poverty rates, and economic competitiveness in America. “Superman” and Cartel both argue that the main problem with the education system today is a lack of focus on the children, as opposed to, say, budgets, union contracts, or other institutional regulations. They also point to the contradiction that exists between rewarding and imitating good teachers and reforming the union institutions which protect bad teachers. Finally, they are all convinced that the solutions to the education problem do exist, that these aspirations are not pipe dreams but promising solutions with concrete illustrations already in action, but have not yet been effectively scaled up on a statewide or national level.
These films are a part of a movement. They are both responding and contributing to a growing national discomfort with the state of public education, and their separate investigations are reaching common conclusions. What is also clear from “Superman,” Cartel, and Amis’s comments, though, is that they are not yet in dialogue with one another and that no concrete solutions have yet emerged. These three filmmakers have set up websites to compel their audiences to take action, but for the time being these are disparate branches of what could be—and some day likely will be—a national movement.
Alec Barrett ‘11 is a Senior Writer
Editor’s Note: This article was updated on May 18, 2011 to reflect the fact that TEACHED has evolved from a full-length documentary to a series of short films.