Stone Lantern Films
Students entering String Theory Charter School in Philadelphia, 2011
At one point in Backpack Full of Cash, a new documentary about the push to privatize education in America, viewers are ushered into a darkened, empty music room at South Philadelphia High School. Marching band uniforms hang unworn in a closet. The piano sits unplayed.
We learn that this same high school, in its heyday, produced such world-class musicians as contralto Marian Anderson and pop icons Chubby Checker and Frankie Avalon. Now strapped by draconian state budget cuts, South Philly High can’t afford more than one custodian, let alone a music teacher.
The scene came about after filmmakers Sarah Mondale and Vera Aronow approached a school official to nail down details for filming South Philly’s 2014 graduation ceremony.
“We said, ‘What band should be playing, or where will the choir be standing? ’ ” Mondale recalls. “And he said, ‘We don’t have music at this school. We are going to play a tape of “Pomp and Circumstance. ” ’ ”
Mondale, who produced the landmark 2001 PBS documentary School: The Story of American Public Education, says Backpack Full of Cash is a followup of sorts
The film examines a conservative-driven effort to funnel money from public schools into privately-run schools that can cut educational corners and find creative ways around enrolling low-income and special needs children, who often cost more to educate.
Narrated by Matt Damon (whose mother Nancy Carlsson-Paige is a public education advocate and author), the film takes us inside slick charter schools like String Theory School, where iPad-clutching teenagers experiment with motion capture technology, and into tiny religious schools—funded by government vouchers—where paddling students is justified as a “biblical” act. We even visit the pink bedroom of a young girl attending an online charter school, whose science class involves a virtual frog dissection.
We follow South Philadelphia students like Jamie Cruz, a senior with a one-year-old baby, and Henry Pierre Louis, who came to the United States after his home in Haiti was destroyed in the 2010 earthquake there. We get to know the dedicated but overworked South Philly principal Otis Hackney (now the city’s Chief Education Officer) and hear from public school advocate Diane Ravitch and others who defend public education for all as a foundation of our democracy.
At one rally for public schools a young student cries out to a cheering crowd: “I need to play my violin like peanut butter needs jelly! I need art like a tree needs leaves!”
The Progressive spoke with Mondale and Aronow at the Wisconsin Public Education Network’s Summer Summit, held in August at Lake Mills High School in Lake Mills, Wisconsin. The discussion took place in that school’s music room, home to active marching and jazz bands, choirs and an orchestra, programs well-supported by the community and a designated music booster club.
Even in the dead of summer, instrument-toting students and teachers filed in and out of the room. Colorful murals of children playing trumpet and trombone watched from the walls. As we spoke, someone tuned a violin.
Q: At the top of the film, we hear from the Center for Education Reform founder Jeanne Allen, who says, “Every one of our children should have a backpack full of cash strapped on their back, and the schools should vie for the privilege of educating our kids and having that backpack turned over to them.” Why did you make that phrase the title of your film?
Sarah Mondale: We were trying to get a title that would sort of encapsulate in a concrete way what this whole idea is about. The politicians refer to it as “portability,” but it’s the idea that education is an individual matter of individual choice, and this idea of competition. So it runs counter to the idea of public education, which is a collective undertaking that we all participate in, that we all have a stake in for our communities and our democracies. That’s why I thought it was perfect when she said it.
Vera Aronow: As a parent, you know that some kids need a little more attention than other kids. Some have an easier time growing up or getting through from one year to the next, so that idea doesn’t really fit education, that each child has a backpack full of cash that has an exact “x” amount of dollars in it. And that is not really the idea of public education in our opinion. It is to create a system that works for everybody and that takes everybody.
Q: Also at the very beginning of the film, we see Jeb Bush talking to the crowd at his Foundation for Excellence in Education’s National Summit on Education Reform and (former board member) Betsy DeVos is in the crowd.
Mondale: You are right, we spotted her. She was there!
Aronow: We weren't aware of it until later!
Q: Now DeVos is Secretary of Education. You discuss her in the epilogue. How was it to see her appointed after making this film?
Mondale: I just couldn’t believe it. Our friends said, “Well, I guess this is bad for the country, but it is good for your film.” Because, it brings these issues to the fore. I would say most Americans weren't aware of the issues so much. She kind of crystallized it and made a lot of people [tune in] during her hearings. People know Betsy DeVos. Even if they don’t understand all the issues, the difference between charters and vouchers, she is such a polarizing figure [and] suddenly people are very, very interested.
Q: There are large parts of suburban and rural America where many kids still go to the local public school. Diane Ravitch says in your film that much of the nation doesn’t see or understand that public education is being withered away. Why don’t people understand that, and how can they be engaged?
Mondale: Well I think one thing is that the language in this discussion is very confusing and very complex. And there is a lingo, a vocabulary, that has been developed, a narrative, by the market-based reformers that sounds appealing on the face of it. And people have been kind of sold this narrative for many years.
You know, that narrative is what shocks people the most when they see the film. That one statement when Diane Ravitch comes out and says, “That’s not true at all. Actually public schools in the U.S. are doing very well on whole.” There are schools where there are issues of course and problems that we need to address, but overall, graduation rates are going up, test scores are going up for every group, and dropout rates are going down, and the public doesn’t believe this when they hear it because it is so different from what they have been hearing. So that’s one reason I think that people understandably are confused about the issues.
Aronow: I think we ourselves took public schools a little bit for granted at the beginning. I mean when Diane Ravitch made the statement that the public school reform effort could be the end of public schools in America, we thought, speaking for myself, ‘This is a little hyperbolic, isn’t it? Did she really mean it?’ Because it does seem like the air we breathe, it seems like a given of our nation that we have a public school system, but she was serious, and we asked her “What do you mean? Where could we see this in concrete terms?” And she said, “Well look at Philadelphia, go look at New Orleans, it’s really happening there.” And so it was shocking to think of at first, but now it is sort of a little bit more of a possibility.
Q: You pointed to New Jersey as an interesting model for equitable public education, because it has been mandated to fund poor and wealthy districts equally. Are there other examples of places that are providing a glimmer of hope in this battle?
Mondale: We interviewed David Kirp, who is the author of that book Improbable Scholars, which is about Union City. There are many school districts across the country that are doing great things and succeeding even with kids in poverty and Long Beach, California is one that gets mentioned a lot.
There is one in Texas that he mentions a lot, Aldine, Texas. North Carolina there is a district that gets mentioned a lot, there are places, lots of models, and Kirp says but we don’t hear about them because they don’t fit the narrative, they are not in the press. Instead we hear this constant drone about broken schools,. We don’t want to be cavalier about challenges facing public schools, but our whole point of view is why destroy the system? Why not work with the system we have and make it work for all children, make it better? We know how to do that instead of abandoning it.
Q: I had also thought that it was interesting you spent time going into the problems with No Child Left Behind, but also with Race to the Top, and making it clear that these are not just Republican reforms but are also being pushed by Democrats. Can you talk a little bit about that decision?
Mondale: Well, there are many Democratic leaders, including President Obama with Arnie Duncan, who are pro-charter school. In our state of New York, our governor [Andrew Cuomo] is very favorable to charter schools. In California, the board in Los Angeles, which is the city with the most charter schools of any U.S. city, the board has been pretty much taken over by charter school supporters. So it’s not a Democrat or Republican issue but be careful, because one of the things we like to tell people is they should watch the money.
Aronow: It’s a complicated story. Not everybody that is in favor of these so-called reforms and privatization are the same. They are supporters for religious reasons, they are entrepreneurs who hope to make money from it, they are libertarians, they are people who just don’t like any kind of government programs. You can’t really lump everybody together.
Q: Did you learn anything that surprised you?
Mondale: The link between the funding story and the market-based reform—this idea that private sector solutions can do more with less, and therefore they seem to go hand in hand. They are cutting funding on the one hand and then introducing these private sector-based solutions on the other. And that can be an extremely damaging combination, it can drain the public schools. So that surprised me.
Aronow: One thing that I was most shocked by is a growing realization that the public school system really could be undermined by these efforts. But we have learned is there are a lot of citizens and groups all across the country that are so powerfully committed to their public schools and working so hard. Just meeting these knowledgeable, hard-working advocates who feel strongly and are working so effectively to support their schools gives me a lot of hope.
Mondale and Aronow are hosting screenings of Backpack Full of Cash around the U.S. and the globe.