Sonny Bunch writing for The Weekly Standard describes three new films that expose the damage created by the teacher’s unions. Highlights:
“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…
First up was The Cartel, a look at the impact teachers’ unions have had on schools in New Jersey.
Currently in theaters is The Lottery, an alternately heartbreaking and infuriating work. Madeleine Sackler follows a quartet of students as they enter a lottery to attend a charter school in New York City.
Whereas one in 57 doctors loses their license and one in 97 lawyers, only one in 2,500 tenured teachers is ever removed from the classroom.
Like The Lottery, Waiting for “Superman” follows a group of schoolchildren vying for spots in charter schools. Time and again, Guggenheim and the reformers he interviews come back to the troubling aspects of teacher tenure.
Only [25] percent of Chicago Public School students met or exceeded expectations on the … [science and math achievement test] in the 11th grade. In a district where only one in four students is proficient in math and science, how is it possible that less than one in one thousand teachers is worthy of dismissal?
With a little luck, this spate of documentaries will help highlight [these problems] and lead parents across the country to demand change we can believe in.
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