The new movie “Won’t Back Down” will be opening in late
September, just as the presidential race is approaching its final stretch
drive. In case you haven’t heard, the
movie is about two mothers, a bartender and a teacher, who butt heads with a
powerful and corrupt school district and teacher’s union in an effort to “transform”
their children’s failing school.
If you thought social security and Medicare were the third
rails of politics, this issue is the power grid. There isn’t a parent out there today –
Democrat or Republican – who is happy over the current state of public
education in America, and rightly so.
And while it’s correct to say that this movie paints and unfair
portrayal of the problems that best the system itself and then adds insult to
injury by over simplifying the solution, the potential pull and sway it will
have on movie goers could be enormous.
Remember the uproar over “Lean on Me?” That was the movie where Morgan Freeman
played Joe Louis Clark, a radical principal of a New Jersey school that was in
danger of being taken over by the state because of poor student test scores.
Clark proceeded to expel students – the majority of which were suspected drug
pushers – whom he felt were preventing other students from succeeding in
class. Once expelled, a student was
banned from reentering the school.
While Clark’s methods were highly controversial, drawing
both praise and condemnation all at the same time, they ultimately proved to be
successful. The school did eventually
turn around its performance and avoid a state takeover.
But, more importantly, the movie hit a raw nerve with the
public. The image of a failed school,
where students’ needs came second to preserving the power structure, rubs an
awful lot of people the wrong way. And some of those people are Democrats.
My guess is that “Won’t Back Down” will do the same when it
opens this month. Critics are already
assailing the movie as biased against teachers unions. That may well be true; it is also quite irrelevant. When it comes to children’s education the one
thing Republicans and Democrats have in common is their commitment to it.
If I’m the DNC and the Obama Administration, I’d stay as far
away from this movie as humanly possible.
This is a potential lose, lose for them.
Whether it’s fair or not, the fact is that there are incompetent teachers
who are still in the system today and, thanks to teacher tenure laws, there is
very little that can be done to remove them.
This does NOT sit well with parents.
The last thing Democrats need this week is to be caught blasting a movie
that, while overly simplistic and melodramatic, nonetheless makes an effective
pitch to millions of voters. There’s
toxic and then there’s toxic on steroids. Guess which one this issue is?
In an election that could well be decided by less than a
million votes – in some states by as little as several thousand – every vote
counts. Now would not be a good time to
piss any of them away.
Links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Won't_Back_Down_(film)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_on_Me_(film)
Comments
my web site :: blu-ray
my web site > new releases,dvd,blu-ray,movies,tv shows