Comment by cratermoon
Comment by cratermoon 3 days ago
If you like watching right-wing educational propaganda, sure.
Comment by cratermoon 3 days ago
If you like watching right-wing educational propaganda, sure.
Agreed, commentator is confused. My sibling comment to yours pointed it out. It's important to keep clear what is straight up a propaganda effort and what has been embraced by the propagandists as supporting them despite it not being a propaganda effort. Muddied waters helps no one.
It's a pro-school-choice anti-teachers union film. Make what you will of that.
Bill Gates and Oprah are both billionaires. Billionaires in general want solutions that defend capital. Privately run schools that receive government funding, in addition to tuition, while also being able to set their own curriculum free from the state is certainly within their collective class interest.
Many seem to make the mistake of assuming that one’s allegiance to the US Democratic Party means that the individual is a leftist, that cannot be further from the truth. The most recent presidential election I hope would have dispelled such myths however I am not certain if that is the case. That said, the US Democratic Party is a right centrist party. I fail to see how a film with endorsements from Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey is convincing evidence to show that this film is not rightwing propaganda. All conversations within the Overton Window of acceptability within the US are going to be right of center inherently, including films like this one.
His calibration is perfectly fine. There is no left left in the US, as is obvious from the crack down of unions and welfare and the privatization of all aspects of society. At best, you get center-right representation in Congress (who represent the elite, not the working class.)
These days, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_and_Deliver would be considered right wing propaganda.
It's based on the true story of a mathematics teacher in east L.A.
It wasn't received as right-wing propaganda at the time. Endorsed by Bill Gates and others less-informed to education research with leanings towards the left.
But it is definitely anti-education and proposes solutions that aren't justified, like the right-wing-aligned push for chartered schools (which tend to be religious in nature, hence the wholesale gobbling for it by the rightwing).
Stanford studies in 2009 & 2013 put the fork in superior performance claims -- no better and no worse than public schools on average. So the charter school miracle is really just cherrypicking with a side of encouraging (or, if malicious, enforcing) segregation (since poorer people both tend to be minorities and tend to not have capacity/time to jump through lottery hoops). With careful planning and policy structure, perhaps good charter schools could overcome their entrance bias (RIP college entrance for either economic class or historically disparaged category), but good luck getting anything like that from the political minds that brought you DOGE and the nonsensical trade war.
> segregation (since poorer people both tend to be minorities and tend to not have capacity/time to jump through lottery hoops)
charter schools tend to have _more_ minority students than public schools. eg in philadelphia, charter schools are 80% black/hispanic versus 71% for the public schools. nationwide they are 60% black/hispanic vs 42% for public schools (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/06/06/us-public...). they're also generally lower income than public schools.
this is not super surprising because families with money already get school selection within public systems by virtue of spending more to live in better catchments.
i don't really have an opinion on charter schools being good or bad, but at least from what i've seen their primary audience is lower income families (often minorities) who look at their local public school and decide it's not good enough.
So wait, so you've decided a film by the director of An Inconvenient Truth, that was praised by everybody from Bill Gates to Oprah, has won awards and gotten a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes is "right wing propaganda"?
You may want to recalibrate you sense of where the center is.