Authors: Mickey Huff
President of the National Historical Association William Cronon was personally targeted for critiquing Governor Scott Walker’s attempt to end public employee collective bargaining rights. Cronon, a distinguished professor of history, geography, and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, posted a blog and published an op-ed in the
New York Times
in which he placed Gov. Walker’s effort to diminish public union rights in a greater historical context of the rise of conservative thinking since the late 1960s.
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In his blog, Cronon attributes this success to the well-funded conservative intellectual infrastructure, especially the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a free-market organization that drafts “model” bills which conservative legislatures use around the country. “Each year, close to 1,000 bills, based at least in part on ALEC Model Legislation, are introduced in the states. Of these, an average of 20 percent become law,” ALEC’s website claims, a fact Cronon also pointed out.
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Following his blog and
New York Times
essay, the Wisconsin Republican Party filed an Open Records Request to access his e-mails, requesting “copies of all e-mails into and out of Prof. William Cronon’s state e-mail account” which referenced terms like “Republican, Scott Walker, collective bargaining … rally, [and] union.” The search also asked for names of Republican legislators.
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Further, The Mackinac Center, a Michigan based conservative think tank born of the GOP political turnaround Cronon describes, filed a similar Freedom of Information Act request for the labor studies departments at Wayne State University, University of Michigan, and Michigan State University.
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“Legally, Republicans may be within their right,”
New York Times
columnist Paul Krugman observed. “But there’s a clear chilling effect when scholars know that they may face witch hunts whenever they say things the GOP doesn’t like.” And while Cronon will be able to withstand the assault, he claims that “less eminent and established researchers won’t just become reluctant to act as concerned citizens, weighing in on current debates; they’ll be deterred from even doing research on topics that might get them in trouble.”
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This “chilling effect” goes against the principles of academic freedom, part of the bedrock of a vibrant democracy, like a free press. Also, this First Amendment intimidation came far sooner than Krugman might have predicted. Around the same time as the Cronon controversy, two labor studies professors at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, and the University of Missouri, Kansas City, were targeted by Andrew Breitbart’s conservative
Big Government
blog. “We’re going to take on teachers next, we’re going to go after the teachers, the union organizers,” Breitbart told Sean Hannity on Fox News.
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Shortly thereafter, Breitbart released videos of the professors purportedly promoting violence, which he titled “advanced thuggery.”
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Much like with Shirley Sherrod (discussed earlier in this chapter), it turned out that Breitbart’s video of her speech was edited to take parts of it out of context. Sherrod was made to appear to be saying the opposite of what she really was, just as the professors were made to look like they were supporting the use of violence in protests, which is not at all what they were advocating. Gail Hackett, provost of the Kansas City campus, released a statement denouncing the videos: “From the review completed to date, it is clear that edited videos posted on the internet depict statements from the instructors in an inaccurate and distorted manner by taking their statements out of context and reordering the sequence in which those statements were actually made so as to change their meaning.”
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In other words, the Breitbart videos were doctored—they were propaganda passed on as news and just another form of News Abuse.
Despite the fact that the film was factually inaccurate, adjunct professor Don Giljum resigned under what he claimed was pressure from his Dean, who in turn had been told by “higher ups” to get his resignation—much like the Sherrod incident in the federal government. Gilgum, in an interview with
Inside Higher Education
, described the
chilling effect of Breitbart’s attack: “Teachers here are no longer going to be able to express comments, theories or counter-positions or make statements to force students to push back and critically challenge the comments and statements of the teacher.”
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In that type of educational climate, it seems critical thinking will be impossible to teach, and free speech will be difficult to encourage inside the classroom where it is supposed to be modeled as a great American virtue.
In the 2011 Columbia Pictures film
Bad Teacher
, Cameron Diaz is the titular awful instructor, slouched behind her desk with dark glasses covering her sleeping eyes, who “doesn’t give an ‘F,’ ” according to the tagline. In the preview, she gets motivated to teach only when she can get a bonus for test scores so that she can buy breast implants to impress the new substitute teacher played by Justin Timberlake.
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Diaz’s Bad Teacher is much like the Welfare Queen or the Public Employee: it is no one specifically, but rather a sort of free-floating, ill-defined stereotype, one who is an inept, uncaring, and self-interested bureaucrat waiting for an oversized pension—one not only disinterested in students, but actively engaged in standing in the way of student achievement, rather than encouraging it. Comedy Central’s
The Daily Show
captured the bad teacher stereotype hilariously, as faux-reporter Samantha Bee showed off the “luxurious” apartments of middle-class public school teachers.
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Following the 2010 release of the education documentary
Waiting for Superman
, however, this bad teacher and her protector, the Evil Union, were no laughing matter. These lazy, self-interested, poorly trained, and overpaid public workers appeared to be endemic, and primarily responsible for the state of ruin in public schools—at least according to persistent and consistently misleading coverage in the corporate (and even some independent) media.
Waiting for Superman
(WFS) promotes the myth of the Bad Teacher, the Broken School, and the Evil Union most vividly and forcefully. The promotional poster for
WFS
looks like the set for the zombie TV series
The Walking Dead
, as an innocent, uniformed child sits attentively at her desk amidst a bombed-out wasteland, the undead surely waiting just outside the frame, hungry for her youthful brain. This apocalyptic
imagery is reinforced by the dire title—Superman, after all, is only called in to save the world from crashing asteroids or malevolent plots by arch-nemesis Lex Luthor. And to make this end-times comic book real, disaster documentarian Davis Guggenheim, famous for the global warming documentary
An Inconvenient Truth
, was tapped to direct the film. Just as
An Inconvenient Truth
highlighted the emergency of global warming, so did
WFS
seek to highlight the disaster happening in American public schools. AEI’s Hess wrote that
WFS
“chronicl[ed] the travails of five students seeking spots in heavily oversubscribed charter schools.”
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The “superheroes” of the film are charter school advocates like Geoffrey Canada, and “teacher’s unions are big screen villains,” as a review in the conservative
Weekly Standard
observed.
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The head of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, is painted not just as a villain, but as “something of a foaming satanic beast,” a reviewer from
Variety
magazine noted.
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A conservative blogger’s post on Weingarten depicts a devil, and added “teacher union leaders have approximately the same level of credibility on education reform as tobacco executives have on cancer research.”
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WFS
, in short, pits Bad Teachers and Evil Unions against education reformers and engaged parents trying to save innocent children, in an epic battle worthy of an action-packed comic book. The script for this comic book version of education reform comes straight from the pages of neoconservative educational philosophy.
Hess observes that
WFS
has been powerful in calling attention to the free-market reforms he advocates at AEI: “[WFS] drew rave reviews, star-studded premières, and breathless talk of a new era of reform. While the American Federation of Teachers and a handful of liberal publications tut-tutted the film’s critical portrayal of teacher’s unions, its clarion call for change has been embraced by opinion leaders across the political spectrum.”
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President Obama had the children from
WFS
visit the White House,
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Roger Ebert initially gave it a thumbs up,
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and former sitcom star Alyssa Milano tweeted the film’s greatness to all of her 1.5 million followers.
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Despite the powerful emotional pull of the film, scholars on both sides of the political spectrum have serious concerns about some of its questionable factual content. Diane Ravitch, the Secretary of Education under President George H. W. Bush, former supporter of President
George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” policy, and author of the best-selling book
The Death and Life of the Great American School System
, calls
WFS
“propagandistic” in an extensive review of the film. The film, she argues, maligns public schools and places charter schools on a pedestal through selective reporting of facts. The children—and the charter schools they try to attend—are supposed to present a typical view of American students, and America’s public and charter schools. Yet, “No successful public school teacher or principal or superintendent appears in the film; indeed there is no mention of any successful public school, only the incessant drumbeat on the theme of public school failure,” Ravitch observes. Further, she claims that the film oversells the success of charter schools.
WFS
“quietly acknowledges” a study that finds only one in five get “amazing” results, which means performance superior to public schools; yet, it doesn’t acknowledge that in the very same study, 37 percent of charter schools are considered worse than their public counterparts. Further,
WFS
paints the charter schools portrayed in the film in a more flattering light than the evidence suggests: even though Canada’s school purports to have “amazing results,” the film neglects to note that in its 2010 tests, “60 percent of fourth-grade students in one of his charter schools were not proficient in reading, nor were 50 percent in another.” The film also neglected to point out that “Canada kicked out his entire first class of middle school students when they didn’t get good enough test scores to satisfy his board of trustees.” Finally, even as the film maligns unions as an impediment to school reform, it applauds Finland as a country “the US should emulate.” Yet the documentary neglects to tell viewers that Finland has a “completely unionized workforce.”
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Even Hess—who would no doubt disagree with Ravitch on many of these points—agrees that the film has created a “goopy groupthink symbiosis with the Paramount marketing operation,” which left him feeling that “large doses of cynicism are in order.”
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Still, despite the fact that two influential scholars on the left and right of the education debate called for further exploration of the claims made in the film,
WFS
met with almost no criticism in the corporate or so-called liberal media, as a result of an enormous, exceptionally well funded and strategized marketing campaign. Thus,
WFS
was able to perpetuate negative stereotypes about public schools and their teachers, and to pave over any dissenting opinions.
WFS
was more than a film: it was a corporate media movement heavily cross-promoted across highly influential platforms on the air, in print, and online.
WFS’s
end-times vision of education was brought to life on
Oprah
in a TV segment cross-promoting “The Shocking State of Our Schools,”
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in which Oprah Winfrey interviewed Guggenheim, then Washington, DC, superintendent and icon of the free-market reform movement Michelle Rhee, and billionaire Bill Gates, whose Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave Paramount a two million dollar grant to market the film, and has spent hundreds of millions focused on the reforms it documented.
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In the program, Oprah claims that the students featured in the film are “eager to get an education,” but have to fight their way through a “system riddled with ineffective teachers.” NBC stalwart Tom Brokaw echoed Oprah in a report for
NBC Nightly News
. Promoting the NBC Special Program
Education Nation
, Brokaw broadened the bad teacher motif to more of a systematic educational conspiracy that ensured students wouldn’t learn.
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Brokaw asked a new teacher if she had met resistance from “the teacher establishment,” authoritatively confirming to any naysayers that a) there is one, and b) it consists of “unions” and “veteran teachers.” Brokaw, echoing
WFS
, stated as fact that unions were impeding students and contributing to problems in education.
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According to the
Education Nation
press release, the program was promoted for an entire week on NBC programs
Meet the Press, Nightly News, Today, Your Business
, as well as on network affiliate stations MSNBC (partially controlled by Bill Gates’s Microsoft), CNBC, Telemundo,
MSNBC.com
, and
NBCLearn.com
.
It is not surprising that
WFS
gained such mass attention while providing a platform for free-market education reform as it was heavily financed by billionaires invested in the very reforms applauded in the film.
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In an e-mail conversation with coauthor of this chapter Adam Bessie, Ravitch explained the complex web of interests of those who financed the film, which included several free market think tanks and organizations, but also, and perhaps especially, Microsoft’s Bill Gates. Gates seems to have exerted the most influence in pushing the national dialogue toward focusing on bad teachers and broken schools. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation helped subsidize
Education Nation
, which Gates appeared in. Brokaw interviewed Gates but did
not challenge the corporate reform ideas or present any opposing views.
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Similarly, a
Time
magazine editorial promoting the film, “ ‘Waiting for Superman’: Education Reform Isn’t Easy,” was written by an educational policy analyst whose blog is underwritten in part by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
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