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Friday, September 28, 2012

Diane in the Afternoon 9-28-12 Diane Ravitch's blog

Diane Ravitch's blog:




More Bad Reviews for Anti-Union Movie

I will see “Won’t Back Down” soon, I promise.
I don’t want to, but I will do it because I have to.
Meanwhile, movie reviewers are rendering their judgment.
They say it is a lousy movie.
The best lines so far are in the review in the Los Angeles Times:
That’s because unions turn out to be the most pernicious of all the obstacles to healthy schools, worse even than the stick-in-the-mud school board. While no one, not even unions themselves these days, denies that there are things that must be changed about how they operate, the notion of them as total evil only makes perfect 

Mr. Barnz, Please Read the New York Times Review

Daniel Barnz, the director of “Won’t Back Down,” continues to insist in various forums, most recently in an articlehe wrote for Huffington Post, that the movie is not anti-union. It’s just a good story. It has no political agenda. It has nothing to do with the rightwing sponsored “parent trigger” law that it celebrates. It is not a vehicle for union-bashing and privatization of public education. It is nothing like the anti-union documentary (“Waiting for ‘Superman’”) that his producer sponsored two years ago.
The review of the film in the New York Times, written by a regular movie reviewer, not a union shill or an angry 


How a Smart Tech Guy Got Duped

Gary Stager knows more about educational technology than almost anyone I can think of. He is one smart guy. Read this and learn how he got taken in by Amplify, the company run by Joel Klein and owned by Rupert Murdoch.
This is how he begins his article on Huffington Post:
Anyone the least bit familiar with my work over the past 30 years knows that I oppose standardized testing, Teach-for-America, school privatization, merit pay, Common Core Content Standards, mayoral control and get-