My Review of the documentary 'Heal Our Schools'
Pick up a newspaper or turn on the television and reporters and other talking heads describe the grand experiment that is corporate education 'reform' with buzz words like 'accountability', 'data', 'innovation', 'testing', 'rigor', 'choice' and 'transformation'. A few words you won't hear too often are 'research', 'proof', 'access', 'stress', 'burnout' and 'anxiety'. That's because those words don't fit into the reformy one-size-fits-all plan of education. Education 'reform'—like climate and vaccine denial—is a faith-based movement in that they believe in their cause rather than rely on empirical studies and peer-reviewed research by actual educators, and they have the money to make you believe it, too. See, facts are messy. They point straight to poverty, and you can't make a profit fighting poverty the way you can by flipping a school to a charter and firing veteran teachers.
Those who are leading the 'reform' movement are some of the richest and most powerful people in the world. Since they control the message, educator voices go largely unheard.As a result, we have taken to social media, book publishing and documentary film making—places where we cannot be censored—in order to challenge the giant corporate interests that have lied to the American public about the state of our public schools. In the past few years, the number of educator-driven blogs, Facebook pages, websites, Twitter accounts and published books has exploded. Diane Ravitch's site alone can command over 1 million hits a day, and her latest book, Reign of Error, debuted at number ten on the NY Times best seller list. The documentary, Standardized, is drawing crowds of parents at pop-up viewings all across the country, and has fueled the opt-out Marie Corfield: My Review of the documentary 'Heal Our Schools':