Why ‘Won’t Back Down’ Just Doesn’t Stack Up

A former teacher takes on the untruths at the heart of this anti-union film.

By Sabrina Stevens

A passion for teaching and a hunger for educational change are what drove me into the classroom a few years ago. That’s also how I ended up exhausted a few autumns later, when I dragged myself home to my apartment around 8:30 at night, slunk down into the nearest chair, reached for my laptop and Googled “downshifting + career.”

It was my second year as a classroom teacher in a so-called “failing” school, and I was feeling overwhelmed and depleted after yet another 12-hour day where I didn’t actually feel finished with my work. There were still projects to be graded, reading groups to be sorted, lessons to be planned, parents to be called… the list went on. Yet the first article I clicked on after my desperate Googling listed teaching as one of the top “family friendly” careers – because, it claimed, “you work the same hours as your kids!”
I wanted to scream. (In fact, I think I might have.)

I recalled this episode recently after watching the film Won’t Back Down, Hollywood’s engaging but controversial take on the latest corporate education policy trend, the Parent Trigger. The “day’s-done-at-3” myth it cultivates is just one tiny reason the movie has already proven almost as divisive and polarizing as the educational policy it promotes. That divisiveness does a disservice both to the issue and the communities that will be affected by it. Students and schools cannot succeed if the adults in the community don’t work together to make a high-quality public education for all kids a reality. And while Won’t Back Down purportedly supports such a goal, the stereotypes it promotes– and the agenda it hides– could threaten that effort if people don’t understand the reality beneath the Hollywood gloss.

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