Long before director Davis Guggenheim jumped out of a phone booth in his Superman costume, I spent three decades as a high school teacher in Paterson, one of New Jersey’s poorest cities. Paterson had its own 15 minutes of school reform fame in the 1980s, thanks to Principal Joe Clark, whose bullhorn and baseball bat were featured in another superhero school movie, Lean on Me, a sanitized version of Clark’s reign of error at Eastside High School.

 

Watching this year’s rise to fame of Michelle Rhee, the former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor who is one of the heroes of Guggenheim’s Waiting for “Superman,” I was struck by how the targets had changed. Clark’s baseball bat was aimed at the young black males who were demonized as a criminal element in the schoolyard. Rhee’s weapon was a broom to sweep away all those lousy teachers and their unions. 1

 

But what hasn’t changed is the use of emotionally charged images and simplistic rhetoric to frame complicated issues about public education in ways that promote elite agendas.

 

Across the country, Waiting for “Superman” has mobilized celebrity star power and high-profile political support for an education “reform” campaign that is destabilizing even relatively successful schools and districts while generating tremendous upheaval in struggling ones.

 

The now-familiar buzzwords are charter schools, merit pay, choice, and accountability. But the larger goal, to borrow a phrase from the Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a political lobby financed by hedge fund millionaires that is a chief architect of the campaign, is to “burst the dam” that has historically protected public education and its $600 billion annual expenditures from unchecked commercial exploitation and privatization. 2

 

The larger goal is to “burst the dam” that has historically protected public education and its $600 billion annual expenditures from unchecked commercial exploitation and privatization.

 

In New Jersey, an odd alliance of Oprah, Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, Republican Gov. Chris Christie, and “rock star mayor” Cory Booker have put Newark in the forefront of this effort to impose business model ed reform. But the campaign is headed for a district near you, if it hasn’t arrived already, and the stakes are high. “I don’t think it will kill public education,” the dean of Seton Hall University’s College of Education told a New Jersey columnist. “But it already has maimed it.” 3

 

Superman Lands in New Jersey

 

Superman landed in New Jersey last September during a two-week media circus that included the premiere of the film; two over-the-top Oprah episodes filled with self-congratulatory hype from Rhee, Guggenheim, and Bill Gates; and an appearance by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who tried (and failed) to explain why the release of the film was “a Rosa Parks moment.” 4 This all led up to the bizarre spectacle of Oprah announcing from Chicago on national TV a $100 million donation from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to fund a “takeover” of the Newark public schools by Mayor Corey Booker.

 

Booker, a longtime proponent of private school vouchers and a member of the DFER national advisory board who has been instrumental in moving the Democrats to the right on education issues, 5 was on hand to accept the gift along with Chris Christie, the most anti-public education governor New Jersey has ever had. In less than a year, Christie, a Karl Rove protégé and rising star in the Republ

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