TWS: Bright Lights, Bad Schoolhouses

THE WEEKLY STANDARD, July 26, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 42, by Sonny Bunch - Teachers’ unions as big-screen villains. ∴ Facing thousands of worried members at the annual convention of the National Education Association on July 3, the head of the nation’s largest teachers’ union sounded a little whiny. ∴ “Today, our members face the most anti-educator, anti-union, anti-student environment that I have ever experienced,” said Dennis Van Roekel, the NEA’s president. Leaving aside the bizarre suggestion that there is burgeoning anti-student sentiment in America, Roekel’s concerns are well-founded: For the first time in living memory, poor-performing teachers and the unions that protect them are under real scrutiny. So much so that even documentarians—the most liberal enclave of the most liberal institution (the entertainment-industrial complex) in American society—are now taking aim at union excesses. ∴ Theaters across the country have seen an explosion of films that cast a critical eye on public schools and the reasons for their failures. Read more at the Weekly Standard...

Three of the films are: The Cartel, The Lottery, and Waiting for “Superman”