Professor Smartass

Davis Guggenheim's ''blame the teachers, trust the corporate CEO's'' documentary has done less than a third the box office of his AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH at the same point.

Maybe the public put two and two together and figured out that it's unlikely that the bad guys in AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH are the SUPERMAN their kids WAITING FOR.

Don't you think there could be ways to fix our schools without making the rich richer?

Do you really think we can attract the best teachers if we take away their union and make their job security subject to the whims of a trust fund baby CEO, who spends all his time figuring out how to reduce labor costs or goose quarterly profits by FIRING people?

We can fix schools within the public sector. The contribution CEO's, corporations, and hedge fund managers can make is PAYING THEIR FAIR SHARE OF TAXES and improving pay and working conditions so parents have time to supervise their kids and help them with their homework instead of working three jobs just to make the rent and put food on the table.

We could take that extra tax money and reduce class size, something that would make it easier for more teachers and students to succeed and make the job more attractive since it will involve more teaching and less crowd control.

Then when schools are failing, bring in MORE resources, tutors, after school programs, social workers, whatever it takes to get the kids up to speed, and encourage collaborations between teachers instead of competition so they can ALL do the best job possible.

Most people must have some intuitive sense that what I just said is closer to the way to go, and that trusting the people who outsourced our jobs, gambled with and foreclosed our mortgages, crashed our economy then asked for bailouts greater than the whole defense budget just a few years before, is not.

Labels: an inconvenient truth, bill gates, box office, charter schools, eli broad, grosses, privatize public education, waiting for superman