That’s the question that Sean Higgins poses at American Spectator in a piece that gets linked immediately because it uses the word “scabrous.”
Last year, education reformers had high hopes for a documentary film called Waiting for “Superman.” With impeccable liberal credentials — it was made by the same people behind Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth — the film mercilessly highlighted failures of the American public school system.
It also systematically demolished the argument that the problem was underfunding and instead pointed the finger at government bureaucracy and the control teachers’ unions have over the system.
Hopes that the film would do Fahrenheit 9/11 numbers, though, were in vain. It pulled in about $6 million at the box office. That’s good for a documentary, but far less than the average horror flick or rom-com.
Whereas:
. . . where thoughtful, sober-minded commentary failed, savage mockery might succeed. Another film has hit the theaters and this one may have a far more potent effect on the education debate.
Bad Teacher took in $32 million last weekend and is certain to become a one of the summer’s biggest hits. That’s very bad news for defenders of the educational status quo like American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. This black comedy is the most scabrous portrayal of public education ever put to celluloid.
Here’s the key point:
It is a tribute to the talents of [Cameron] Diaz and the filmmakers that they actually manage to get you rooting for this horrible person. But the fact that the public is ready to accept such a portrayal no doubt played a part as well.
In 2007, leading up to the 2008 election, Hollywood bombarded us with films about the killbot American soldier raping, pillaging and murdering civilians in far away lands where the US had no business being, and almost all of them fell flat. In order to drive the country toward socialized medicine, the MSM did a 180° turn-around from the Marcus Welby depiction of doctors. Movies and MSM narratives idolized investigative journalists and their sources as civic-minded people shocked, horrified and disgusted with the evil machinations of conservatives and free marketers that they uncovered, much to their imminent peril. The was a Bush assassination film that was a liberal wet dream.
But as FLOTUS recently acknowledged, the MSM journos and their editors played a central role in getting Obama elected, by reporting only what was helpful to him, unless, as in the case of the Jeremiah Wright debacle, the bloggers managed to call so much attention to a scandal that it could no longer be ignored. The New York Times deliberately buried the story of Obama’s felonious use of ACORN as a campaign arm. Chris Matthews openly asserted that it was his job to help Obama to achieve his agenda, and wasn’t rebuked by his network for saying so. The degree to which MSM news outlets permitted the Obama campaign to bury information that they went out of their way to dig up before is notorious.
They took a risk. In their arrogance, they believed that the transformational rhetoric Obama spewed would lead to the liberal sociopolitical paradise that they’d been pushing for for decades, and that by the time June 29, 2011 rolled around a grateful populace would strew petals before them for helping give them the government that they were too stupid to realize they wanted. Only it didn’t work out that way.
Obama’s favorables have been dropping like a stone. Bounces from events such as the killing of bin Laden can be measured in weeks. The percentage of Americans who believe that the country is headed in the wrong direction is higher than it was at the tail end of Bush’s second term, when the economy had already tanked. Public approval toward Congress has reached historic lows, but politicians and journalists rank neck-in-neck in many indices of public trust.
More and more papers and magazines have gone out of business, and in their rush to try to regain relevancy, AOL, once the proud purchasers of Time-Warner’s fabulous motherlode of “content,” went out and bought the HuffPo and its uncompensated workforce for over $300 million. They were crazy to pay that much, but one side of the equation they got right: journalism isn’t a profession, and it hasn’t been for awhile in the US.
Oh, I’m not saying that there aren’t some excellent journalists out there. There are. There are intelligent people who take their job seriously and are willing to work to get their scoops, who go where their evidence takes them, who put themselves in harm’s way to get the story, who stand up to their editors, who are willing to go to jail rather than surrender their sources. But there are also a significant number of them who are so lazy and misinformed, and so certain of their intellectual superiority, that they give journalism a bad name. If education were a profession, bad teachers would be brought before boards and stripped of their standing for malpractice; if journalism were a profession, pretentious and incompetent hacks like Time Chief Editor Richard Stengel would be typing up classified.
They don’t realize yet just how much their complicity in electing Obama has undermined their authority, and undoubtedly we will have to regurgitate all of their idiocies from the 2008 election cycle over the coming months, just to remind casual consumers of information, but they’re clearly up to their old tricks, as witnessed by their treatment to date of Bachmann. The time has come to put a fork in them, because, as Da Techguy says, they’ll just go on Weinering themselves.
- Excited
- Angry
- Not as Angry
- Bored
- Indifferent
- Sad
Perhaps you’re correct, and “Bad Teachers” will be a pop culture breakthrough where “Waiting for Superman” wasn’t. I’d like to see serious reform in education; clearly throwing money at the problem hasn’t worked.
The problem, at its root, is more closely related to the hackish performance of journalists; and I don’t mean simply the ideological agenda and the replacement of classical pedagogy with indoctrination in the post-modern articles of faith.
I suggest it’s a more complete breakdown, related to the “Big Education” connivance…
People have been sold a bill of goods in our society since the late 70s establishment of the Dept of Education; that being the need for everyone to go to college. Don’t get me wrong, I believe everyone should be educated, but this mindset at the federal level, with a little affirmative action thrown in, mixed thouroughly with diminished performance requirements and cirricula tailored to the low achievers, with a heaping helping of federal tuition money available, have essentially led to the devaluation of a college degree, at least for undergraduates.
But ironically there is still a charade of valuation for said degrees and continues to be propagated by government forces that wish to find ways to give away money to preferred constituencies.
Just as the quality of NFL football, or MLB baseball has diminished over the years as the leagues expanded, owing to a limited number of truly talented players and the expansion necessarily leading to less competent participants making their way into the woodpile-so to speak, so too has our school systems because many of the teachers there aren’t so much educated as credentialed!
Which, as I said, is a society wide problem. There are far too many people who trade on their credentials, but are really not all that bright; one example being a large percentage of journalists. And these large numbers of essentially incompetent, but credentialed, folks truly diminish the value of a college degree for all.
Which, since public school teachers are necessarily credentialed, but seem to attract an outsized number of underachievers, goes on to effect generations on down the line.
/Rambling two cents…