Briggs, Daley To Show Anti-School-Privatization Film
The Washington Post described the film, first relased in 2016, as “a 90-minute documentary about the real and ongoing movement to privatize public education and its effects on traditional public schools and the students they enroll. With actor and activist Matt Damon narrating, ‘Backpack’ tells a scary but important story about corporate school reform policies that critics say are aimed at destroying the U.S. public education system, the country’s most important civic institution.”
Click above to see “Backpack Full of Cash” Trailer
The film draws its name, “Backpack Full of Cash,” from words that Jeanne Allen used in an on-camera interview (see video above, 0:30) with Nancy Mondale (one of the film’s makers and former Vice President Walter Mondale’s daughter).
Allen is the founder and CEO of the Center for Education Reform, an organization that advocates for “School Choice” and charter schools.
“A poorly contrived documentary with a storyline worlds apart from the reality of education for most”
Is how Jeanne Allen described the film. In an October, 2017 article that appeared in Real Clear Education, Allen wrote, “It [the film] posits that the point of any form of education choice – charter schools, opportunity scholarship programs and other alternatives to traditional public schools – is to privatize American education, hence the use of my comments to frame the documentary.”
“Unless you have the money, a proverbial backpack full of cash, to go to private school or move, you are stuck.”
Allen continued, ‘The traditional school system and its protectors have a captive clientele. Unless you have the money, a proverbial backpack full of cash, to go to private school or move, you are stuck. Being stuck is precisely why charter schools and myriad other options were created. These tools that give parents real power have mitigated poverty, criminality, dysfunctional communities and discrimination – all conditions prolonged by an education system that fails approximately 60 percent of its students year after year.”
Says she was misled by the filmmakers
Shortly after the trailer for the film was released, the Hollywood Reporter wrote that, “Allen claims that Turnstone Productions, Stone Lantern Films and producers Vera Aronow and Sarah Mondale misled her about the nature of the film they interviewed her for, then turned her into the antagonist while her ‘nemesis,’ American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, was made one of the heroes.”
AFT President (American Federaration of Teachers), Randi Weingarten: taxpayer-funded private school vouchers, tuition tax credits and the like ‘only slightly more polite cousins of segregation.’ (USA Today)