Tainted heroes

As more and more films come out based on the “true stories” of people, we encounter the disconnect between appearance and reality and search for a nugget of truth we can take away.

Feature films are not documentaries and take liberties with their subjects to tell a coherent story in a couple of hours of screen time. That’s no easy task.

Last fall came Captain Phillips, an excellent film with magnificent performances by veteran actor Tom Hanks and newcomer Barkhad Abdi, the latter receiving an Oscar nomination. The film made Phillips into a hero. But many of his own crew sued him because, they said, he needlessly endangered the crew and could have avoided the capture of the ship by pirates.

Now comes Cesar Chavez, based on the life and work of the well-known civil rights activist and labor organizer. The film is well-acted, with Michael Pena in the title role. It doesn’t portray Chavez as without flaws. A major part of the story is his estrangement from his oldest son, who feels his father cares more about the movement than about his family.

This is a common experience, one many children of church workers, for example, can attest to. And while there’s no denying that Chavez accomplished much to bring greater economic justice to farmworkers, his ideals sometimes got in the way of caring for his family.

There is much to like in the film and in the fact of its being released, though it’s not selling many tickets. It portrays the unjust conditions faced by farmworkers in California in the early 1960s, when Chavez and others began organizing them and challenging the growers to pay a living wage. Chavez promotes nonviolence, echoing tactics of Ghandi and King, as he confronts the violence of the growers and the local sheriff.

The film shows how helpful Robert Kennedy was to the movement at key moments and how Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, and President Nixon went out of their way to oppose the farmworkers’ strike against the growers. The importance of Chavez’ Catholic faith is evident, particularly when he goes on a 25-day fast, which he breaks with Kennedy while taking Communion.

The film is also important given today’s realities: many people without a living wage and unions struggling to survive. We need the inspiration of films like this to keep pursuing justice for poor people.

The film ends soon after the farmworkers and growers sign an agreement that ends the strike. In the years following, things got a bit stranger, and Chavez became even more autocratic and controlling.

A piece by Nathan Heller in the April 14 New Yorker discusses a new biography, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez by Miriam Pawel, which “reassesses Chavez’s legacy under a raking light,” writes Heller.

The article shows that while the film is relatively true to the period it covers, it doesn’t tell the whole story of the man. In fact, the film’s original title was Cesar Chavez: An American Hero. It dropped the last three words.

I won’t try to summarize the long article, but one sentence captures some of its point: “Chavez championed peaceful practices but had a warrior’s taste for incursion and righteous conflict.”

Is there a lesson? One might be to watch such movies with the understanding that they cannot tell the whole story. Another is to learn more of that story.

Cesar Chavez is worth seeing. He was an important figure and in many ways more of a hero than Captain Phillips.

Disaster capitalism: the corporate takeover of public education

We’ve all heard the many criticisms of U.S. education, how it’s going downhill, not competitive with the rest of the developed world. But how true is that? And how did it get so bad?

Yes! Magazine devotes most of its spring issue (“Education Uprising”) to such questions and tells stories of schools and people who are doing creative work at educating students in new, effective ways.

In his article “The Myth Behind Public School Failure,” Dean Paton notes that until around 1980, America’s public schoolteachers were held in high esteem. He traces the turn in public opinion to a PBS series in 1980 called Free to Choose, in which Milton Friedman devoted one episode to “the idea of school vouchers, a plan to allow families what amounted to publicly funded scholarships so their children could leave the public schools and attend private ones.”

Meanwhile, Jonathan Kozol, an author and advocate for public schools, called vouchers the “single worst, most dangerous idea to have entered education discourse in my adult life.”

Then, in 2001, comes “No Child Left Behind,” which tied federal funding for public schools to student scores on standardized tests. It also, writes Paton, “guaranteed millions in profits to corporations such as Pearson PLC, the curriculum and testing juggernaut, which made more than $1 billion in 2012 selling textbooks and bubble tests.”

In 2009, after the economy collapsed, came a program called “Race to the Top,” which provided grants to states for their public schools.

Both programs measured school success based on students’ standardized-test scores.

Then, in early 2012, then-Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott called such high-stakes exams a “perversion.” Many Texas school boards agreed that tests were “strangling education.”

In January 2013, teachers at Seattle’s Garfield High School announced they would refuse to give their students the Measures of Academic Progress Test. That school’s boycott “triggered a backlash to the ‘reform’ that began with Friedman and the privatizers in 1980,” writes Paton.

He calls this education crisis a “manufactured catastrophe,” part of what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism.” This follows a formula, writes Paton: “Underfund schools. Overcrowd classrooms. Mandate standardized tests sold by private-sector firms that ‘prove’ these schools are failures. Blame teachers and their unions for awful test scores. In the bargain, weaken those unions, the largest labor organizations remaining in the United States. Push nonunion, profit-oriented charter schools as a solution.”

Why do corporations want to get involved in charter schools? Because, says Chris Hedges, the federal government spends $600 billion a year on education.

A few corporations already control the $20 billion to $30 billion a year textbook and standardized-testing industry, writes Paton.

He offers examples: In Michigan, charter schools cut instruction money, raised administration costs and came out ahead by $366 per student. In Ohio, charter school teachers make 59 percent of what public schoolteachers make.

And are the charter schools making a significant difference? A Stanford University study showed that in reading, 25 percent showed better results, while 75 percent showed no improvement or “significantly worse” results. In math, the numbers were 29 and 71 percent.

Many factors affect education. One of the biggest is poverty. In another article in the Yes! issue, Lennon Flowers writes that “in many high-poverty schools, up to 60 percent of children experience stress levels that can impair functioning.”

Education is a huge, important issue with no easy answers. But there are encouraging signs that changes are happening.