Los Angeles Education Films and the Rhetoric of Nation at Risk, No Child Left Behind, and Race to the Top

Los Angeles Education Films and the Rhetoric of Nation at Risk, No Child Left Behind, and Race To The Top Bernie Sapir The perception of Los Angeles’s public school system reflects the predominant way our populace views public schools—negatively. Urban schools, such as the Los Angeles Unified School District, acknowledge that public education is struggling with key problems: high dropout rates, overworked teachers, and underperforming students. At the same time, public school teachers and administrators are attempting to accomplish more and more with less and less resources. While public school representatives—such as the Los Angeles public school teachers—would argue for reform efforts that would garner greater funds being allocated to the school system, others—including Republican George Bush and Democrat Barack Obama—argue that the increase of charter schools and a voucher system is a better resolution. I argue that part of this debate has been shaped on the federal level, and this federal rhetoric has influenced not only the public, but also popular culture. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education, Terrel H. Bell, alarmed the American public with the Nation at Risk Report (NAR), putting our educational system under scrutiny and adopting rhetoric critical of the public education system. Subsequent federal educational policies have adopted its ideology, beginning with President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Law (NCLB) followed by President Obama’s Race To The Top Program (RTTT). This paper argues that these federal educational policies influence Americans’ perspectives of public education, and these presidential mandates’ impact is acutely evident in the Los Angeles Greater Metropolis’s school system, where the UTLA—the United Teachers of Los Angeles— has been the target of the public’s angst. Furthermore, this paper illustrates how two Los Angeles education films, Stand and Deliver (1988) and Freedom Writers (2007), and the educational documentary, Waiting for Superman (2010), are emblematic of this Los Angeles Education Films 261 perspective and, in fact, effectively feed into the zeitgeist generated from these reports’ rhetoric and ideologies. The Rhetoric of Presidential Mandates Ironically, President Reagan’s purpose for generating the Nation at Risk was to reduce federal spending on education by downsizing the Department of Education; however, it created just the opposite effect: the federal government has since become even more involved. Holly G. McIntush, in her 2000 article “Defining Education: The Rhetorical Enactment of Ideology in a Nation at Risk,” underscores this irony in relating Terrel H. Bell’s revelation that the report’s findings—that our educational system was in serious decline—was contrary to the optimistic results of the report he had anticipated (420). Americans have continued to perceive the state of education in the U.S. pessimistically ever since. The salient message of these reports argue that our school system is in trouble, our teachers lack pedagogic direction, and our students are losing to the competition abroad; consequently, the reports call for more standardized testing for students in order to measure and evaluate teachers and for much more choice for privatization, vouchers, and charter schools, with those federal funds displacing hitherto funds for public schools. Accordingly, President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, signed into law by President Bush in 2002, and President Barack Obama’s Race To The Top, enacted in 2009, have perpetuated the federal government’s increasing involvement in what used to be primarily the states’ domain regarding educational polices. They have reacted to the NAR commission’s statement “that America’s schools were in crisis, and that reform was absolutely essential” (McIntush 420) with a number of changes. The NAR has had far-reaching impact and would eventually become the catalyst creating legislation to increase the number of private schools and voucher systems. Thus, the federal government has since increased their top-down involvement with the states’ educational systems, influencing their testing, standards, and pedagogy. Diane Ravitch, a noted education scholar and former Assistant Secretary of Education for President George H.W. Bush (Ravitch 5), outlines her thesis for her 2013 262 Bernie Sapir seminal book on education, Reign of Error, by commenting, “In this book, I show that schools are in crisis because of persistent orchestrated attacks on them and their teachers and principals, and attacks on the very principle of public responsibility for the public education. These attacks create a false sense of crisis and serve the interests of those who want to privatize the public schools” (x). Explaining her statement, she writes, “The transfer of public funds to private management and the creation of thousands of deregulated, unsupervised, and unaccountable schools have opened the public coffers to profiteering, fraud, and exploitation by large and small entrepreneurs” (4). The public’s angst concerning public schools, in fact, can be traced back to the very rhetoric enacted in the presidential mandates. The NAR Report uses crisis-laden language infused with the Cold War rhetoric of its time. The Cold War priority and ideology of “national preparedness” is deeply embedded throughout the report, which draws upon a pathos-driven argument, appealing to the public’s fears and anxieties. For instance, shortly after the NAR’s Introduction, the report warns, “Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world.” To put this in the context of its time, other industrialized nations, such as Japan, were emerging as having a technological edge over the United States, manifested, for example, by their manufacturing of gasoline efficient automobiles and their advances in electronics. Thus, the NAR Report emphasizes the importance of education in the context of the strength of our national economy. Further, our Cold War adversary, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R), still loomed large in our foreign policy and military defense policies—as the U.S. still regarded them as our main rival, especially under President Reagan’s administration at the time (it was not until 1991 that the U.S.S.R. would dissolve). Thus invoking patriotic rhetoric, the NAR declares that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people” and states that “if an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” This heightened rhetorical style, drawing from the metaphor of war, unsettled Americans, and our media Los Angeles Education Films 263 responded accordingly by plastering it on “the front page of almost every major newspaper. Similarly, the evening news of the three major networks featured the release of the Report as the lead story” (McIntush 420). Appealing to national fear, the report warns, “We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge.” For Americans who lived during the height of the Cold War tensions during the 1950s and 1960s, the successful Russian launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 sent shockwaves through the American populace because the U.S. had not accomplished that feat yet, and the government urgently demanded increased efforts in the aerospace industry in a rush to compete in the space age. Departing from heretofore public satisfaction with public education, NAR advocates school choice and market competition, which “will result in schools either improving or shutting down. [T]he good schools will indeed get better; however, many of the poor (in both senses of the word) schools will just get poorer” (McIntush 437). Three decades later the NAR Report continues to reverberate. Case in point: Chicago and Washington D.C.’s former education chancellors, Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee, respectively, have gone the “New Reformist” route, closing dozens of public schools and firing their employees, including their teachers and principals. Insightfully, Paige Hermansen points out because of the nature of the rhetoric and the sentiment evoked in the presidential report, not to embrace the NAR is virtually unpatriotic, even now, three decades later. Hence, she points out that the “authors argue, the United States is jeopardizing its economic and political dominance in the global economy, ‘committing an act of unthinking unilateral educational disarmament”’ (527-28). In this vein of thought the NAR successfully sends the message that “a poor education system is literally imperiling national security” (527-528). Hermansen further expounds, “This strategy helped charter school advocates establish moral exigency for their agenda of freeing education from oppressive bureaucratic oversight” (528), thus affecting perceptions of public schools and consequently funding. One of the examples of the federal rhetoric influencing the public’s perception of the public schools has been the reshaping of the depiction of its representatives: public school teachers. When the LAUSD governing board sought to abolish teachers’ tenure 264 Bernie Sapir and take away seniority rights, public sentiment overwhelmingly supported the governing board. On the front page of the April 11, 2015 edition

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