Movies: The School Behind "Won't Back Down"
You might be surprised to find out that "Won't Back Down" -- a screening of which I snuck into the other night -- isn't actually the fictionalized story of Desert Trails, site of the real-life still-unfolding parent trigger attempt outside of Los Angeles.
It's actually the fictionalized story of Locke High School, the struggling South Central LA school that in 2008 was wrestled away from the Los Angeles public school system (and the teachers union) and taken over by Green Dot charter schools and run by Locke teachers who remained.
Of course, it's entirely self-serving of me to make the comparison to Locke, given my book about the Locke rescue effort.
And, to be sure, Won't Back Down maps the Locke story imperfectly (just as it does the Adelanto story).
But the similarities are striking and the issue of teacher empowerment has been missing from much of the discussion of the movie so far, and the historical connections between the teacher trigger and the parent trigger are important.
As you may recall, Locke was liberated/stolen from LAUSD by a teacher trigger -- a majority vote by tenured teachers -- under a mechnism created several years ago in state law that had previously been adopted by a
