NEA Weighs Campaign Against Pro-Reform Films, Charter Schools

Delegates to the National Education Association’s annual convention on Tuesday voted down a measure to spend $3.5 million on a campaign to “counter the media propaganda” of several critically acclaimed documentaries promoting school reform.

New Business Item 91, which delegates defeated after several minutes of discussion, singled out four “anti-teacher union” documentaries for attack: Teached, The Cartel, The Lottery, and Waiting for Superman.

‘Farcical’ Debate

“These documentaries are the latest effort to convince American public opinion that education’s ‘inconvenient truth’ is that teacher unions are the problem, and that charter schools are the reform to save public education,” alleged Dan Moran, a union delegate from California, in his written argument for the measure.

Moran also sponsored NBI 99, another measure drafted in reaction to the pro-reform documentaries. That measure, which passed without debate, instructs NEA officials to counter the “misleading impressions” created by charter school lotteries. 

“Each film is presented as an objective look at today’s public schools, when each is anything but that,” Moran argued. “In addition to all of these films being filled with lies and distortions, and each film being secretly funded by pro-charter organizations and individuals who stand to gain financially from charter school expansion, they also all have the same ending: a charter school lottery.”

Mike Antonucci, who covers teachers unions as director of the Sacramento-based Education Intelligence Agency, described the debate over NBI 91 as “farcical.”

Moran “went on at length about how these documentaries distort the truth—an argument I didn’t hear at the 2004 NEA convention when the union hosted a special screening of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11,” Antonucci reported on EIA’s Intercepts weblog.

Filmmaker Fires Back

Bob Bowdon, the New Jersey filmmaker who wrote, directed and produced The Cartel, blasted the NEA resolution.

“They should get their facts right,” Bowdon said. “This movie was funded entirely by myself. I only accepted distribution money after the movie was finished and had already been shown at a film festival, where it won an award.”

Bowdon received a grant from the Moving Pictures Institute, whose mission is to “[nurture] promising filmmakers who are committed to protecting and sustaining a free society,” according to the group’s website.

Bowdon says the NEA prefers to “focus on the messenger, rather than addressing the substantive arguments” he makes in the film.

“Ad hominem attacks have been the union’s favored approach because they ignore the argument of the movie, which is very simply that consumer choice works in every other aspect of our lives, so why would it not work in K-12 education?” Bowdon explained. “It certainly works in higher education.”

Bowdon predicted the union could not counter all of the success stories coming out of charter schools in urban districts with mostly low-income and minority student populations.

“This union has their work cut out for them,” he said.

Focus on Pro-Charter Groups

The defeated propaganda measure was among several dozen new business items considered by 9,000 delegates to the union’s representative assembly, which began Friday and ended late Tuesday. Another late amendment called on the NEA to produce a $25 million documentary against charter schools. It was also voted down.

Another item, which passed, directs the NEA and its affiliates “to expose and educate the media and the public about allegedly grassroots, pro-charter ‘parent groups’ that are popping up with greater frequency on both the national and local level.”
 
The NEA is the largest teachers union in the United States, with more than 3.1 million dues-paying members.

Ben Boychuk (bboychuk@heartland.org) is managing editor of School Reform News.