StickWithANose

Since I’ve been rather obsessed with the framing [or killing] of public discourse as of late, I would like to continue on that theme. Education Week is pimping a new documentary film, Two Million Minutes, by entrepreneur Robert Compton detailing a successful charter school. The film is a follow-up to a previous film by Mr. Compton of the same title that focuses on the growing disparities between American students and their international counterparts.

There is nothing terribly new here. It is the same tactic “reformers” have been using since “A Nation at Risk.” Besides its attempt to use anecdotal evidence to erase empirical reality, what I find of interest with “Two Million Minutes” is its properties as a cultural artifact.

The film is obviously adovcating the political position of the education lobby and philanthropic groups hell-bent on the privatization of public schooling, such as the Kaufman Foundation of which Mr. Compton was once chair.

The filmmaker said he hopes the new “Two Million Minutes” documentary will draw public attention to charter schools as “laboratories of innovation,” and persuade policymakers to lift restrictions on their growth. He also wants the film to make the point that effective, inspirational teachers with strong subject-matter expertise—like those at the charter school in the film—are not always the product of traditional schools of education, but also go through alternative routes.

It is obvious that there has been a considerable expenditure of resources in the production of this film, but trying to track that down where those resources came from appears to be beyond my time constraints. The film’s official website states that TMM is a division of Broken Pencil Productions. However, Broken Pencil’s website [www.brokenpencilproductions.com] is a dead link, and its facebook page hasn’t been updated in a year.

Ultimately, all that I can do is name this film for what it is. It is an attempt to manufacture “common sense.” It is a sleekly packaged piece of ‘knowledge production’ conceived and created with political goals in mind that masquerades beneath the cloak of detached scientific objectivity, and it has a very narrow targeted audience.

The new documentary… debuts in Washington on Thursday…

I’ll keep an eye out for evidence that the pundit class has consumed the knowledge for sale here and will report back.