I was looking forward to seeing Detachment, the new teacher film starring Adrien Brody and directed by Tony Kaye. With a very strong supporting cast (Marcia Gay Harden, Tim Blake Nelson, Christina Hendricks, Bryan Cranston, James Caan) and a compelling trailer featuring Brody as a tortured soul struggling to connect with his students, the movie seemed right up my alley. As a 31-year-old teacher and movie fanatic, I am Detachment's target audience; this should have gone well.

Detachment arrives in theaters on March 16, but it's already available on demand so I ponied up my $9.99. This movie has all of the trappings of an intelligent indie flick--- stellar cast, relevant social issues, and a notoriously egomaniacal director heralded by some as a genius.

It's hard to know where to begin to explain what a mess this film is. With its contrived story, one-dimensional characters, and in-your-face stylized visuals, Detachment takes edu-hand-wringing to new, blood-and-tear-soaked depths.

As a film major at NYU, I watched many crappy student films; in fact I made a few myself. Aside from experimental visuals that don’t pay off, the crappiness was most often epitomized by a lack of authenticity in the script. For example, students made police procedurals without having a clue about detectives’ reality— they took shortcuts by guessing or basing their stories on other inauthentic sources. The results, intended to play as dramatic, came out flat or even silly. Detachment suffers from the same syndrome; the script feels as if the writer (Carl Lund) dreamed up the worst things that could happen in public schools, put them on steroids, populated the scenes with the miserable characters, then let it run wild. In Detachment, suicides (there are 2 in the movie) aren’t “shocking”— they are a naked ploy for manufactured emotion.

Kaye leans on his audience’s vague, negative prejudices against the public school system. There’s no solid story here; just a bunch of lost/evil souls and a sense of decay. Many details will ring false to anyone who has spent time in a classroom. On his first day as a sub, Adrien Brody’s character enters his English 11 class to find all of the students quietly sitting at their desks waiting for him. Then, after he makes a brief introductory speech, the kids suddenly morph into profane hooligans. Two curse him out and one assaults him, chucking his briefcase across the room.

The movie avoids the very real issue of de facto racial segregation in urban schools. In Detachment, classes are racially diverse and pretty much everyone acts like a deadbeat. The movie takes the easy way out of facing any root causes of public education’s struggles other than lambasting absentee parents— and in this community all of the parents are either absent or over-the-top abusive.

As the film’s centerpiece, Adrien Brody emanates handsome ennui. He plays Henry Barthes, a glazed out guy with no friends and trauma in his past who comes to a nameless urban high school as a recommended substitute teacher. He doesn’t get mad when kids curse him out and he says a few things about how everyone is in pain and that literature is needed to defend and preserve our minds. All of that would be fine— Brody’s charisma manages to blunt some of the dialogue’s preachiness— except most of Detachment’s 98-minute running time is eaten by a miscellany of misery that ventures freely into exploitation.

In the world of Detachment, students are mean-spirited, profanity-addicted nihilists. (The one nice girl, played by the director’s daughter, publicly commits suicide.) Teachers are sadsacks or menaces: Tim Blake Nelson plays a teacher who can’t get anyone to listen to him at school or at home, so he hangs daily on the schoolyard chain-link fence in the crucifixion pose, wallowing in his invisibility. As an overwhelmed guidance counselor, Lucy Liu screams at and ejects an obnoxious student from her office— then weeps about it. William Petersen is a scary, borderline nonverbal teacher who in class shows Nazi images and glowers. Marcia Gay Harden, on the verge of losing her job as principal, delivers a public address announcement while curled in the fetal position on the floor of her office.

Outside of school, Barthes engages in various acts of sadness. He cries on a public bus, takes in and rehabilitates a teenage prostitute (a major storyline that reeks of cliches), role-plays with his dementia-addled grandfather, and screams in the face of a night-shift nurse.

The words “in your face” never left my mind during this film. Visually, director Tony Kaye, who regretfully doubles as director of photography, relies enormously on close-ups, often with point-of-view shots awkwardly placing the subject in the center of the frame. The effect is not arresting, but claustrophobic. Mixed in at tense moments are bits of crude chalk-on-blackboard animation that distract from rather than support the narrative. Worst of all, the film is peppered with cutaways to Adrien Brody being interviewed in tight close-up, his hair distractingly much longer than in the action of the film, philosophizing vaguely about lack of fulfillment and generational decline. These seemingly improvised clips carry the intellectual weight of a freshman dorm bull session. (“We’re failing… we’re failing.”) It’s never entirely clear whether Brody is in character as Barthes or if he’s just spitballing.

It all ends with Barthes visiting the teenage prostitute Erica at the “Guardian Angels Foster Care Facility,” a verdant resort-like institution where they share a sunny embrace. Then he goes to school and reads an excerpt from Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher to a classroom that has literally transforms into a ravaged wasteland.

My fear is that non-educator audiences will be tricked by the gravitas of Brody (“I’m a hollow man. You see me, but I’m not here.”) and the overall grimness of the story into thinking that this is a valuable portrait of American education.  One viewer from the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival probably cribbed Detachment’s PR copy by describing it a “gritty, edgy, shocking, and ultimately important film.” Hollywood.com praised its “unflinching realism.” Don’t believe the hype. This is a meandering mosaic of unfocused bitterness, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Around this time last year, Waiting For Superman was everywhere. If you hadn’t seen it, you were left behind. Practically every conversation about education began with where you stood on the movie. Even though WFS didn’t get the box office returns or Oscar nominations it was hoping for, it did leave a lasting imprint on the discourse— hardening into the mainstream the idea that public education reform was in the throes of an epic good (charter schools) vs. evil (teachers’ unions) battle for the soul of our country.

My reflections on Waiting for Superman are extensively detailed on the Huffington Post, Washington Post Answer Sheet blog and here and here on teacherleaders.org. I felt desperately I needed to rebut a film that opined with such certitude about teachers, but didn’t actually include teachers’ voices. It’s true— the closest in WFS you get to hearing a teacher’s thoughts is Jason Kamras, a former teacher turned Michelle Rhee aide.

Playing defense against broad attacks of complacency and incompetence is exhausting. How I wanted a film that put out the truth about teachers’ real experiences! And while I was dreaming, maybe that film could show how real, actionable, tested solutions on how to improve education for students…

It is here. The movie has been made. It’s called Mitchell 20.

Teachers and non-teachers need to see it. With its approximately 70-minute running time, Mitchell 20 is probably not suited for theatrical distribution. But however it gets out there— on TV, online, with neighborhood screenings— it has to happen.

This is a documentary about an elementary school (Mitchell) in the high-poverty Isaac School District in Arizona where the hardworking staff engaged in an unprecedented push for 20 of its teachers to pursue National Board Certification.

Daniela Robles, the teacher who inspires and recruits her colleagues to make the rigorous push for excellence, is the de facto star of the film and she ought to become a leading voice in the teaching quality debate. Unassuming but iron strong, Daniela’s passion teaching her students supplies the film’s jumping-off point.

With narration by ultra-gravelly Edward James Olmos, we watch the Mitchell 20’s road to National Board Certification morph into an instructive and often surprising illustration of what it takes to be an excellent public school educator. (Hint: it includes intense persistence and collaboration in the face of staggering obstacles.) The teachers’ voices are front and center, but they are supplemented with running commentary from edu-luminaries including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Linda Darling-Hammond, and CTQ’s own Barnett Berry.

I found the second half of the film, where the story takes a sinister turn involving sudden transfers and administrative ousters, even more compelling than the first.  The story isn’t neatly sewn up like a Hollywood movie, and this provides a wealth of material for discussion. 

Mitchell 20 lacks the technical polish of Waiting for Superman. Flashy editing, overloaded graphics, and on-the-nose pop music cues (ex. “Everyday People” and “Get Ready”) attempt to intensify what is largely a talking heads documentary. But talking heads are okay if they’re saying fascinating things, which the teachers in Mitchell 20 are. Two cinematic scenes involving teachers discovering out their National Board scores are real winners, though.

National Board Certification is a worthy endeavor and collaboration among colleagues is essential for a school to succeed. How can a school break the inertia and become dramatically better? Mitchell did it and the answers are in the film.

See Mitchell 20. (Here is where you can go to find out how.) This is a movie that, unlike Waiting for Superman, can tangibly improve education across the country.

Teachers are getting more media attention this season but most of it is pretty vitriolic. In my previous post I wrote that if I wasn’t a teacher, and only received my information about public education from the media and Arne Duncan, I’d probably think an epidemic of lazy and incompetent teachers are a main reason many American students are struggling. Many voices would seek to convince me that implementing performance pay, or merit pay, for teachers is essential to whipping our school system into shape.

The implication is that with the chance to earn a bonus for higher student test scores, would-be competent teachers would try harder and incompetent teachers would be identified and weeded out. That’s cynical and wrong on the first count and betrays a misplaced faith in the accuracy of state test data on the second.

Teacher evaluations do need to be overhauled; I don’t think anyone— unions included— would defend the current ad hoc system. However, business models imported from the private sector emphasizing year-to-year high-stakes test score changes just aren’t a constructive way to do it. Paying (or withholding payment) for year-to-year test scores is an unhealthy, priority-distorting enterprise.

Many have an entrenched interest (Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Presidents Obama and Bush) in pressing a reductive high-stakes testing regime that spits out easy-to-understand data. They want to trumpet gains on the graph this news cycle, this election cycle. They have the biggest microphones on their side. (See Waiting for Superman, No Child Left Behind, and the Obama Administation’s Race to the Top criteria as examples where “state test scores” and “student achievement” are conflated by design.)

Who can speak out— to a significant audience— for solutions that work in living classrooms? Teachers are too busy grinding it out in their classrooms to cultivate mainstream media clout. And it’s not like the media has displayed great interest in amplifying on-the-ground voices in education.

This is where Diane Ravitch comes in. Yesterday, the widely read Daily Beast put her essay titled “Stop Trashing Teachers!” as the top story on their top ten “Cheat Sheet: Must Reads From All Over” list.

 I’ve excerpted below some of Ravitch’s comments on merit pay. How I wish that every stakeholder in education would read this and nod in understanding. Life in a classroom is a messy, human endeavor that requires multiple forms of personal, on-the-ground observation and assessment. Merit pay is no silver bullet; on the contrary it may be a self-inflicted wound to our long term goal of a better-educated citizenry. I know if my ability to provide for my family was determined by my students’ test scores, my curriculum would be drastically altered (and not for the richer) and my stress would be through the ceiling.

Here is Diane Ravitch:

 …The claim that merit pay will improve student performance has been disproven again and again. Whenever businessmen decide to "reform" education, they insist on merit pay. But it doesn't work. The latest study, released only a week ago by the National Center on Performance Incentives, was the most rigorous evaluation of merit pay ever conducted. One group of teachers in Nashville was offered bonuses up to $15,000 if they raised students' math scores; another, the control group, was offered nothing. The average teacher pay is about $50,000, so this was a significant incentive to get higher scores. Over the three years of the study, both groups produced the same results. The economists, who were scrupulously nonpartisan, concluded that performance pay had no effect on student performance. It turns out that teachers were working as hard as they knew how, with or without the bonus.

The claim that teachers can be accurately evaluated by student test scores has been refuted again and again by scholars. The Economic Policy Institute released a statement by many of the nation's leading testing experts warning that this method was riddled with error and instability. A study released days ago by Sean Corcoran of New York University showed that a teacher who was ranked at the 43rd percentile, using student test scores, might actually be at the 15th percentile or the 71st percentile because the margin of error in this methodology is so large.

Tests that assess what students have learned are not intended to be, nor are they, measures of teacher quality. It is easier for teachers to get higher test scores if they teach advantaged students. If they teach children who are poor or children who are English language learners, or homeless children, or children with disabilities, they will not get big score gains. So, the result of this approach—judging teachers by the score gains of their students—will incentivize teachers to avoid students with the greatest needs. This is just plain stupid as a matter of policy.