WON’T BACK DOWN IS NOT FRONT AND CENTER ABOUT SOLUTIONS
Compulsory public education began in part to serve the demands for literate workers in the early industrial revolution. Nowadays, the presumed purpose is to provide a path to social mobility in a country with much less social mobility than was once the case. Those for whom schools do not meet expectations, thus find, scapegoats. For many years, segregation was the obvious problem for African Americans. After desegregation was ordered, that was no longer an acceptable scapegoat because the stigma was removed even though the extent of statistical segregation is as much a problem now as then. Today, one narrative is that there are bad teachers, who in turn are protected by unions. Won’t Back Down, directed by Daniel Barnz, argues that thesis, though the only bad teachers at Adams elementary school are caught texting in class. Parent Jamie Fitzpatrick (played by Maggie Gillenhaal) and teacher Nona Alberts (played by Viola Davis) mobilize parents and teachers in a failing school to take control and strip teachers of union protection by substituting performance-based evaluations as a basis for their pay and continued employment. They think that they have a number of curricular and extracurricular ideas to make the school better but do not share their innovations with filmviewers or parents. But the underfunded school administration is obviously the real problem, as they do nothing for Jamie’s dyslexic daughter, and student bullying is left unpunished. The union does not design programs for special needs students and has no role in student discipline. So the solution (a privatized charter school without tenure) seems entirely unrelated to the problem of a failing school and irrelevant to the lack of discipline and special education. The epigram “Change the school: change the neighborhood” is the apparent rejoinder to the argument that poor neighborhoods breed bad schools. Although the film tries to present all sides, one unexplained fact is that most beginning teachers quit long before they might be granted tenure. The plot is based on a parent takeover of a Los Angeles school during 2010, but the film pretends to take place in Pittsburgh and appears very relevant to issues in the Chicago teachers strike of fall 2012. According to educational expert Diane Ravitch, however, charter schools on average have not been a panacea. An alternative view is that parents often struggle to pay their bills with two badly paying jobs, leaving children to fend for themselves in violent neighborhoods that traumatize young minds. MH