“Won’t Back Down,” a review and fact check

In this morning’s paper, I wrote a preview of what education watchers can expect to see during the upcoming Legislative session. The parts of that story about the governor’s agenda were mostly based on her remarks at a panel discussion Tuesday. What I didn’t mention in the story, which was already kinda long, was that the panel happened after a screening of “Won’t Back Down,” a movie starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis. The screening was largely sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce foundation.

Despite the talents of the actresses involved, especially Ms. Davis, the movie was one of the worst I’ve seen in years. I say this with all due respect to Gov. Martinez and Education Secretary-designate Hanna Skandera, who seemed to really like it a lot. I also want to emphasize that my dislike of the movie was not about the ideas it presented, but with its quality as a film.

The ideas were a problem though: not what the ideas were, but the way they were shoved into the movie like an ed-reform checklist rather than a cohesive script. Every reform idea that is a darling of the reform movement was shoehorned into the story. Abject failure of public schools? Check. Deadbeat teachers protected by tenure? Check. Nasty unions getting in the way? Check. Teach for America to the rescue? Check. Awesome charter schools without enough space? Check. Parent trigger laws that allow parents to take over failing schools? Check.

Whether you like those ideas or not, “Won’t Back Down” felt like it was written as a position paper by the fellas over at the Fordham Foundation rather than as, you know, a movie script. And just to make sure I wasn’t crazy (about this anyway), I checked in with movie review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, which found that reviewers gave it an average ranking of 33 percent. For perspective, that’s lower than Storage 24. The movie also makes Buzzfeed’s list of 2012 flops. All of which is to say that I feel like I’m not an outlier here.

Having established that this movie was lacking as a piece of art, there are two factual corrections I’d like to make. Not to the events in the story, which are fictional, but because of two tropes I hear over and over and over again in my work as an education reporter, which were repeated in the movie. So I’ll debunk them here.

The first one is that Albert Shanker, a grandfather of the teachers union movement in this country, once said that he would look out for the interests of students when they started paying union dues. Here’s a debunking of that. Admittedly, the debunkers are pro-Shanker and may have some interest in protecting his legacy, but no one has been able to produce a good source for the quote. So stop repeating it. Just stop it.

The second one is the oft-repeated insistence by people on every side of the ideological spectrum that unspecified “officials” use third-grade reading scores when deciding how many prison beds to plan for. This always quiets a room with horror at the idea of students being written off at such a young age. It also has no basis in reality (other than the obvious fact that students who don’t succeed in school are more likely to end up in prison. But no one plans on that basis). Here is one of a bunch of debunkings on the web. Stop saying this. We have enough demoralizing education statistics in this country without tilting at windmills.

One take-away from this post is that you shouldn’t bother to see “Won’t Back Down,” even on Netflix. But the more important take-away is the next time you hear someone spout that Shanker quote or talk about third-grade reading and prison, you should ask them for a citation.