Won't Back Down - Christianity Today

A recent teachers strike in Chicago—shutting down schools for two weeks—was accompanied by biting, often-personal rhetoric that spilled across the country via national press coverage. Classes are now in session as the union and administration dot the i’s and cross the t’s on a compromise contract. If ever there were a time for a movie about the promise of education to put a soothing and inspirational salve on angry wounds, now is that time.

Give us a Stand and Deliver, Lean on Me, Dead Poets Society, or even Dangerous Minds. Unfortunately, Won’t Back Down is no salve and will only soothe those who are happy to lay all of our educational system’s woes at the feet of teachers and their unions. And it’s stirring up controversy with critics—film critics as well as educational experts—who say it oversimplifies a complex problem while pushing an agenda of its own. (More on that later in this review.)

Maggie Gyllenhaal as Jamie, Emily Alyn Lind as Malia

Won’t Back Down opens with the camera tight on the face of Malia Fitzpatrick, a young, blonde, blue-eyed school girl struggling to read words on the chalkboard. She’s panicking as her classmates jeer and as the teacher, clearly annoyed as she looks up from texting on her cell phone, watches the student struggle. A wider shot of the teacher at her desk includes a computer screen with a shoe shopping website loaded. Malia eventually gives up trying to read the sentence. “I can’t,” she says and hangs her head. And so begins this modern fairy tale that comes complete with a princess in distress (Malia), dragons (Malia’s teacher, the teacher’s union, and administration), and a knight in shining armor (Mom).

Jamie Fitzpatrick, Malia’s mom, is played with wild-eyed optimism by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Jamie is a low-income, single mom struggling to ensure her daughter gets a good education. Fueled by bad coffee, Jamie trots everywhere, her fluid energy pulling Malia out of bed, down the street, and into hugs like she’s an eight-year-old rag doll. Keenly aware of her own academic shortcomings, Jamie wants something better for her daughter—and it’s one of the movie’s few laudable nods at complexity that it doesn’t make the knight perfect. She feeds her daughter Pop-Tarts, gives Malia a DVD player to keep her occupied, and falls asleep in front of the TV. And she’s frantic that Malia get help with her dyslexia. We’re told that Adams Elementary, Malia’s school, is failing. Malia’s teacher might be especially bad, but they’re all pretty bad if only two percent go on to college.

When Malia’s teacher is unresponsive to a rather clumsy request for additional tutoring, Jamie assesses their options. She can’t afford the private Catholic school, so she enters Malia in the lottery for the local charter school. Ving Rhames takes a messianic turn as the principal of the charter, preaching to his congregation of hopefuls about the educational salvation promised through his school. Unfortunately his salvation is only available to a chosen few, and those who’ve seen the Waiting for Superman documentary will recognize the unique and maudlin agony that is the lottery system.

Viola Davis as Nona

Needless to say, Malia doesn’t get in. But instead of sinking into resignation, Jamie enlists the help of another teacher at Adams to take over the school via a law—so-called “parent trigger” legislation—allowing parents to do so if a school is failing. Played by Viola Davis, Nona Alberts is a formerly effective teacher who has been beaten down by the system. She takes some convincing, but eventually gives in to Jamie’s optimism and joins the effort to turn Adams Elementary around.

Won’t Back Down is light on details, including what needs to be done for the Adams turnaround. The one thing we know is that it will mean doing away with union contracts. Why? The only thing I could make out was that contracts allegedly don’t let teachers work as much as they want to. Teachers need to be able to stay late and give out their personal numbers, and unions won’t let them do that. Aside from work hours, it sounds like Nona and Jamie are going to get to come up with new ideas—like more field trips and visioning exercises in which students imagine themselves on college campuses.

Concerns about the plan are met with platitudes: “It comes down to expecting more from yourself, the teachers, the kids.” “What are you going to do with your one and only life?” “We have to start somewhere!” Helpful thoughts, yes, but not substantial enough to be philosophical or operational foundations for reform. There is a lot to be said for parental involvement and subverting bad bureaucracies through the democratic power of committed communities. But Won’t Back Down would be more powerful if it provided a vision of reform that didn’t feel so naïve.

The union and the school administration are unhappy with the reform effort because it cuts them out of the picture. As union official Evelyn Riske, Holly Hunter is ambivalent in her role as bad guy, but for the most part, these folks are examples of the worst kinds of caricatures of money- and power-grubbing education professionals. It’s easy to root against them. That is unless you know more of the story—like the fact that the idea for charter schools originated in a teachers union.

Won’t Back Down has been touted as “Inspired by Actual Events.” But if you watch the movie all the way through the credits, you’ll read that this movie is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places or events is entirely coincidence. As I left the theater, I overheard people discussing theories about where the actual events took place. (They apparently missed the memo at the end of the credits.)

Holly Hunter as Evelyn Riske

The movie sidesteps the complexity that characterizes our educational systems, and it’s inspirational as long as you don’t have much need for the facts. I happen to think that education is important enough to warrant spending time with the facts—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Acknowledging that our abilities to assess the facts at any given time are imperfect, I think we still need to try to understand what it means that the most recent studies indicate charter schools have a high failure rate. How should this fact reshape our ideas about charters and our understanding of the wide variations among them? How should it affect our investment in other options for reform? I don’t have the answers, but these are the questions we should be asking.

Won’t Back Down is produced by Walden Media, which specializes in family-friendly films that are often based on respected literature; they’ve done the Narnia movies, the Journey to the Center of the Earth films, and more. Walden is also serious about education, and thus its occasional forays into films like Won’t Back Down and Waiting for Superman. But both films had their critics; see Diane Ravitch’s review of Waiting for Superman in the New York Review of Books. I believe similar problems plague Won’t Back Down, and so do others. The Huffington Post says it mischaracterizes teachers’ unions—especially the false notion that unions disallow teachers from staying after school to work with students. In New York, a group has created a video criticizing Gyllenhaal for siding against them.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, says Won’t Back Down includes “the most blatant stereotypes and caricatures I have ever seen, even worse than those in Waiting for Superman.” She goes on: “Instead of focusing on real parent empowerment and how communities can come together to help all children succeed, Won’t Back Down offers parents a false choice—you’re either for students or for teachers, you can either live with a low-performing school or take dramatic, disruptive action to shut a school down.”

Rosie Perez as Breena Harpe

CNN’s education blog compares the film to “Soviet-era propaganda” and that it’s “lousy at orienting viewers to the complexity of our current efforts to improve public education.” Other critics are also ripping it: Minneapolis Star-Tribune: “Won’t Back Down is to school reform what Reefer Madness is to drug policy. [Gyllenhaal and Davis] play the heartstrings like Yo-Yo Ma in service of a story that is emotionally manipulative, dramatically crude, factually challenged hero/villain hokum.” New York Times: “The film upholds a dreary tradition of simplifying and sentimentalizing matters of serious social concern, and dumbing down issues that call for clarity and creative thinking. Our children deserve better.” Newsday: “There are grains of truth in this story, [but it’s] still propaganda …. [T]his movie fears nuance, pushes an agenda and demonizes its opposition.” NY Daily News: “The plot is just a clothesline on which to hang an unabashedly biased diatribe. Director Daniel Barnz and his co-writer, Brin Hill, offer us carefully-chosen platitudes, beatific heroines pitted against cartoonish union villains and absurdly one-sided talking points.”

Ouch.

Of course there’s room for creative license when telling stories. And it’s possible to respect movies even when you disagree with them. But Won’t Back Down’s script seems to me blatantly polemical, full of plot points and characters calibrated to stress the point that teachers unions and administration wonks are inherently bad. Teachers are bad too, unless they can be redeemed by righteous parents or (what are often for-profit) charter schools. This characterization of the problems of our educational system and subsequent work of reform is so stilted, I don’t see how it’s helpful. Unless your task is not educational reform and is instead (or also) letting the free-market mentality permeate every aspect of our society, including the most basic shared project of educating our children. In which case, the Latin carved on the venerable social institutions of our future might as well be caveat emptor.

Talk About It

Discussion starters

Discuss a good educational experience you’ve had. Discuss a bad educational experience you’ve had.
What do you think is the most important aspect of education reform? Why?
Discuss a time when you felt compelled to stand up to a person, group, or institution that you felt was in the wrong.
Some critics say this film pushes an “agenda” for charter schools, while others say they’ve oversimplified a very complex problem—that if you can just get a few concerned parents riled up enough, they can turn a failing school into a great one. What do you think?