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School Reform Hits the Big Screen: Why 2010 Is a Banner Year for the Education Documentary

Waiting for Superman. The Cartel. Teached. The Lottery. Welcome to the latest genre in documentary film: education reform. Even to the casual observer, this sudden celluloid absorption with schools seems less than serendipitous. Surely, there's a master strategy at work? A clique of wealthy funders who have decided that reaching the masses through film is the next arrow in the school reform quiver? Clear evidence from other documentary successes, like Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, that the movies are a great way to change public opinion? So this intrepid analyst surmised, until I started digging into the back stories of these documentaries and found that what drove their development wasn't a strategic plan but something much simpler: the creative impulses of the filmmakers themselves. Take Kelly Amis, the writer, director, producer, and sometimes videographer of Teached, a forthcoming film about inequities in education. A former Teach For America corps member, Amis has spent most of her career in the education reform world, including a stint overseeing policy and research at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (one of the sponsors of Education Next and my employer). She wrote her documentary six years ago, "just had it on the shelf," she told me. "Just over a year ago, the stars aligned." What motivated her was a fervent belief that film could reach new audiences beyond the policy elite--and with emotional storytelling that would be much more powerful than anything written on the printed page. "The information we know in the education policy world gets stuck in ivory towers. Even the way we discuss it keeps it in ivory towers." A similar sentiment drove Bob Bowdon, the writer, director, producer, and financier of The Cartel, an expose of the teachers unions and other special interests in education. A television reporter-turned-filmmaker, he relayed moviegoers' reactions to his film. "People all the time come to screenings and thank me. They tell me that everyone is afraid to say these things. 'I had no idea that a janitor could make six figures. That superintendents could make 470K. Thirty-million-dollar football fields.' Or, 'really, there's a teacher that reads on a 4th-grade level but worked for 17 years? I had no idea this could happen!' It feels like I'm changing minds." Yet convincing reform-oriented foundations that moviemaking is a worthy investment has been a tough nut to crack. Bowdon shot his whole film, entered a festival, and even won an award before getting a dime of outside help. Amis managed to raise a modest amount to help cover her direct expenses, but has volunteered her own time for the better part of a year. But the reason that these funding woes haven't been deal breakers is because the cost of shooting a documentary has plummeted in recent years. "The quality of high-def video cameras has gone up as fast as the prices have gone down," Bowdon said. But that's not all. "When I first got into TV, people would rent these editing rooms with big leather couches and fancy equipment. …