Patriots, I am heart broken and extremely angry. TEA for Education, a non-profit, invited me to a viewing of the documentary, “Waiting For Superman”. Wow, talk about powerful. I realize many of you are familiar with this movie, but many are not.

The movie exposes how America’s public education system is about keeping the teachers unions fat and happy at the expense of our kids. The devastating affect on the lives of “real people”, students and their parents is infuriating.

Despite what libs would have you believe, we spend a ton of money, per child, on education. And yet, public school test scores continue to plummet. Your money is not going to teachers, it is going to bureaucrats and union dues. The democrat party receives 90% of teachers unions political contributions.

In the movie, committed good teachers and administrators attempted to implement common sense changes to better educate students. They were politically beaten down and kicked to the curb by the teachers unions. How dare these teachers and administrators buck the system!

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Last year, even as education reformers all across the country were turning cartwheels in celebration of Davis Guggenheim’s “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” I remained skeptical.  I’ve been keeping tabs on the teacher unions for years, and understand how they work hand-in-glove with the Democratic Party. Since Guggenheim is a well-known liberal (who famously directed Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”), I was certain that “Superman” would tiptoe around the destructive influence Big Labor has on the education system.

Last fall, during some down time on a business trip to New York City, I finally gave in and bought a $13 ticket at a Times Square movie theater to watch “Waiting for ‘Superman.’” I was pleasantly surprised.

I’d gone in expecting Guggenheim to make excuses for the state of public education.  Instead, Guggenheim grabbed the whole thing by the throat and didn’t let go.

He told stories of children who were victimized by a system that puts adults first. He told of union campaign contributions that go to politicians who, in turn, act as the teacher unions’ political puppets. He showed rowdy union rallies and rubber rooms and classrooms that were out of control.

I marveled that a mainstream (liberal) movie maker was exposing the sorry state of public education and the destructive nature of the well-heeled teacher unions.

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Chicago parents are fed up with the shoddy education many of their kids are receiving in Chicago Public Schools and they’re no longer being silent.

As a part of the DoneWaiting.org coalition – a collection of hundreds of organizations that joined together after the release of the unflinching documentary film “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” parents protested outside the school board meeting last week.

Parents are fed up with the ineffective teachers, violence and adult-first attitude that is pervasive in many public schools.  But instead of demanding more money be spent, they’ll calling for options.  Instead of fixing it with money, they want out alltogether.

Father Michael Pfleger, who, as a Barack Obama ally, gained notoriety during the last presidential election for saying some eyebrow-raising defenses of Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan, is leading the call for parental choice.

This shows this is an issue that cuts across partisan and ideological divides.

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As “Waiting for ‘Superman’” so eloquently points out, the industrial assembly-line model of America’s public schools, created decades ago, isn’t working.  In fact, it’s setting us further and further behind our global competitors.

Today, it is essential that our children graduate high school and college prepared for the fierce competition they will face in the global marketplace.  Their economic survival will be determined by their ability to compete with countries like China, India, and other emerging economies.

This requires that our public schools be innovative and effective.  Instead, our schools are using a failed, one-size-fits-all approach to education that may actually end up hurting our children.

It’s interesting that our slide began in the 1970s.  Just ten years earlier, collective bargaining, the crowning glory of labor unions, took root in our public schools. Coincidence?

Collective bargaining agreements, which carry the weight of law, enshrine such policies as seniority (last hired, first fired), tenure (lifetime job protection in as little as two years) and due process (an extra-legal process outside the court system).  Oh, and automatic yearly raises– not for performance, but simply for logging another year in the system.  In other words, we give teachers raises simply for not dying over the summer.

This is a beautiful system – if you’re a public school employee.  But if you’re a student in the public school system, well, it’s like being drafted by the Detroit Lions.

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The New York Times described this movie as presenting “a blood-curdling, nightmarish picture of monstrous disorder in a public school.”

Variety said the film displays a moral rage at the “pattern of society acceptance of things as they are because no one troubles to devise a better way.”

Critics across the country agree that few movies have been so ground-breaking and controversial.

There is no question that “Blackboard Jungle” was one of the most important movies of the 1950s….what’s that? You thought I was talking about “Waiting for Superman?”  Oh.

I guess I should have been more clear.  After all, it’s difficult to keep track of all the Hollywood movies that depict the lousy state of America’s public education system.  Let’s see, there’s “Blackboard Jungle” (1955), “Up the Down Staircase” (1967), “Stand and Deliver” (1988), “Lean on Me” (1989), “Dangerous Minds” (1995)…and those are just the memorable ones.   There’ve been scads of films and TV shows over the past four or five decades with the same theme.  “Waiting for Superman” (2010) is just the latest installment.

And that, dear reader, is the point.  Americans have been talking about the need to fix our public schools for decades.  There have been movies, documentaries, books, newspaper stories, panel discussions, academic studies, and presidential speeches all pointing to the problem within America’s public school system.

And yet here we are – still talking.

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It should come as no surprise that unions are spending big bucks to keep their Democratic friends in power.  And with good reason:  Does anyone honestly believe with fiscal conservatives in control of Congress, legislation like last summer’s $10 billion “education jobs fund/teach union bailout” would stand a chance?  Of course not.

November is shaping up to be a historically bad year for Democrats, and the teacher unions know they’re living on borrowed time.

Not only will the money spigot be turned off, but Americans are beginning to realize the corruption of the nation’s public education system that serves adult interests very well, but fails so many kids. Americans wonder:  How can a system graduate a child who cannot read?  Yet, it happens every year.

The teacher unions say they care about such problems, but it’s so hard to tell.  They resist education reform and accountability at every turn.  And when the union stages a protest, it invariably revolves around protecting their pay, benefits and power.

Now comes word that the National Education Association, the largest labor union in the country, is digging deep into its members’ pockets to spend $15 million on protecting vulnerable Democrats, as well as a few big spending Republicans.

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This guy puts on a good game until he’s asked by EAGtv: “Did you see the movie?”  The movie, of course, is “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” the new documentary on public education.

Then his critique is as hollow as his pecs!

“Waiting for ‘Superman’” is not only the most important documentary made in many a year but it might also help to restore a little of your faith in humanity, and I’m not even talking about the movie itself, which I’ll get to in a bit. I’m talking about its creator Davis Guggenheim, best known for directing and winning the Oscar for Al Gore’s alarmist global warming screed “An Inconvenient Truth.” In an era when, in order to hold on to power and take control of our lives, the Left tells Big Lies just as quickly as they can make them up, along comes Guggenheim, an acknowledged pro-union liberal, to take on the most powerful, and in my opinion destructive, special interest group in America: the national teachers union.

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Whatever his personal beliefs were as he began the process of documenting the fate of five children whose very futures rest on the less-than 10% chance of being accepted into a charter school, in the end Guggenheim risks the grave sin of apostasy as he courageously bucks the left-wing narrative to present a heartbreaking and damning exposé of the American public school system.

Had the exact same film been brought forth by a right-winger it would have had zero chance of creating any kind of national debate, much less change. But coming with Guggenheim’s clout and left-wing bona fides, there’s a chance his noble effort could spread a Road to Damascus virus among those who have for too long turned a blind eye towards an indefensibly immoral system propped up at the expense of children. Armed with facts and actual inconvenient truths, “Superman” deconstructs every lie told by politicians, union officials and bad teachers in defense of a status quo that destroys as many, if not more lives than drugs or gangs. (more…)

It hasn’t been a good week for American Federation of Teachers’ president Randi Weingarten.

After being on defense the entire time during NBC’s “Education Nation” multi-day event, she was put on a list of “Most Hated People in America,” alongside Osama bin Laden.

Now I know what you may be thinking: what conservative teacher-hater could be so over the top?

Try *Huffington Post* writer Keli Goff, who wrote:

“American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten is about to join Osama bin Laden on the list of Most Despised People in America. And if even one tenth of [Davis] Guggenheim’s film [“Waiting for Superman”] is to be believed, then this distinction is well earned and well deserved.”

Wow!  Randi Weingarten, who has been described as willing to “protect a dead body” in the classroom, is taking heavy fire from the Left.  This is big.

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As of right now with 31 reviews posted, “Waiting for Superman” sits at a healthy and much-deserved 94% fresh on the Rotten Tomatoes’ scale with the only negative reviews coming from, not so surprisingly, the Village Voice and Salon.com, two hard-left outlets [my review is here]. But let’s stop for just a moment to appreciate those predominantly liberal critics who are out there supporting a film that most likely presents them with a reality that goes against their own personal beliefs.

Okay, moment over. How much time do we really want to spend crediting people for doing what they’re supposed to do?

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As far as the negative reviews go, to be honest I find the Salon.com critique so long and lacking in focus that I’m not at all sure what Andrew O’Hehir’s problem is. Melissa Anderson’s Village Voice pan, however, brings up a number of arguments I’ve heard before — mainly from teachers bitterly opposed to charter schools. It’s that old canard our friends on the left call “economic justice”:

I have a choice,” [director Davis] Guggenheim, who narrates throughout, admits, before asking an important question: What is our responsibility to other people’s children?

Maybe, for starters, demanding a stronger, securer social safety net. But macroeconomic responses to Guggenheim’s query—such as ensuring that all parents earn a living wage so that the appalling number of kids living below the poverty line in this country is reduced—go unaddressed in Waiting for Superman, which points out the vast disparity in resources for inner-city versus suburban schools only to ignore them. …

Guggenheim’s insistence on not engaging with the injustices that children of certain races and classes face outside of school makes his reiteration of the obvious—that “past all the noise and the debate, nothing will change without great teachers”—seem all the more willfully naïve.

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There is common agreement between education reformers and the status quo protectors that the most important element to a good education is a good teacher.

Teachers unions suggest that the way to retain “good” teachers is to pay them all more.  The collectivist mentality is that every teacher is equal, works equally hard and should be compensated equally.

Many reformers believe that the way to spur improvement and innovation is to reward success, hard work and hold the adults accountable for student achievement.  That, of course, flies in the face of collectivism because it incentivizes individual teacher achievement.

This is a result of organized labor having such an iron grip on many American public schools.  Weak-kneed school boards and administrators have allowed Big Labor to be the gate-keepers of reform efforts.

And worse, apathetic taxpayers allow Big Labor to call the shots.  Just ask Washington, DC Mayor Adrian Fenty.

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American Federation of Teachers’ president Randi Weingarten’s new line is, “suddenly, everyone’s an education expert.”

She first trotted this phrase out in response to a positive review of the upcoming documentary film, “Waiting for Superman,” posted on the liberal Huffington Post.  Produced by the director of Al Gore’s, “An Inconvenient Truth,” the new movie and the education reform movement has now breached the teachers unions’ Bastille: the American Left.

Weingarten’s objective seems to be to dismiss anyone outside of the Education Blob as little more than a naysayer who obviously doesn’t know what they’re talking about.  She’s attempting to insulate herself and the education system from increasing criticism over spending habits and flatlining results.

From Weingarten’s recent AFT convention speech:

And I never thought that I’d see a documentary film about helping disadvantaged children in which the villain wasn’t crumbling schools, or grinding poverty, or the lack of a curriculum, or overcrowded classrooms, or the total failure of No Child Left Behind.

No, the villain was us.

Look, I can take it. It’s part of my job.

But taking abuse shouldn’t be in the job description of more than 3 million public school teachers who work hard every day to do right by their students.”

She also dismissed the critics of the bloated system:

And I remain hopeful. Hopeful that we can overcome the formidable obstacles before us: an economy that has battered families and state budgets, an energized and concerted movement to tear down public service and public institutions, and a growing pundit class that has engaged in the browbeating of unionized teachers and public schools in other words, affixing blame rather than fixing schools.”

So to the Queen of Gall, I say this: yes, everyone IS an education expert.

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