Sarah Mondale directed a wonderful new film called BACKPACK FULL OF CASH, narrated by Matt Damon.
Ten years ago, Sarah and her partners Sarah Patton and Vera Aronow made a four-part series called SCHOOL, a history of the American public school; it was shown on PBS and won rave reviews.
Why did the team reassemble now to tell a new story about our public schools?
Sarah Mondale explains in her post why she cares so passionately about public schools.
She writes:
“My dad, Pete Mondale, was a lifelong teacher who spent most of his career as a professor of American Studies. His mother was a music teacher who taught for a while in a one-room schoolhouse. He went to public schools in the tiny farming town of Elmore, Minnesota, and thanks to the government-funded GI Bill, he was able to go to college. He later earned his doctorate at the University of Minnesota, a great public institution. He reached the pinnacle of his career in the 1960s when he founded the Department of American Studies at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa where he inspired a very special group of students. He also made a difference in the lives of students at George Washington University where he taught for many years. A number of them became family friends, and growing up, I saw how much they respected him. After he retired, his Alabama students invited him back for a celebration in his honor. They came from all over the country to tell him how he had changed their lives, a type of recognition that is rare in the life of a teacher.”
Her father taught her that the public schools were the bedrock of our democracy.
“My dad would often talk about how his parents’ generation, the sons and daughters of poor immigrants, got their start in this country thanks to public schools. His father-in-law, my grandfather, came to America from Italy as a teenager, and talked about public schools as one of the greatest institutions this country had to offer. My mother, became a teacher of English to adult immigrants in the public schools of Washington, DC.”
When Sarah discovered a few years ago that our public schools and their teachers were under assault by powerful forces, she knew she had to do something. She was teaching high school at the time. She thought about what she could do. And she decided to tell the story in a way that a large public would understand. A film.
I have seen it. It is gripping. It should be shown in every community across the nation. Now, more than ever, we need this film to inform the American public about the unconscionable effort to turn our public schools over to private control. We need the people to understand the theft of their public property, the stealth attack on the commons, the harm that occurs when public schools are defended and closed to underwrite privately managed charters.
Please read her story.
