Last Saturday night I was sifting through my Academy Screeners and nothing much caught my eye.  I had already watched, “The Social Network,” “The Fighter,” “127 Hours,” “True Grit,” and “Black Swan,” as well as a myriad of movies that nobody has heard of and nobody will ever hear of.  After much deliberating, I decided to watch a movie I had never heard of entitled “Waiting for Superman.”  Prior to my putting the DVD into the player, I did not even know whether this was a feature film or a documentary.

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The movie started and I immediately got the impression I was about to watch some typical Hollywood liberal documentary; in this instance the subject matter being education.  The movie started with the usual poverty stricken minority groups complaining about the education system and that America has failed its youth.  There was the obligatory mention of the failure of “No Child Left Behind” and how every president since Johnson has claimed they wanted to be the education president and remembered for it.  In the end, the movie implies they have all been failures in their presidential dream as standardized tests show American education at the bottom of the curve against most developed and some developing countries.

At that point, the movie took an unexpected turn.  When it came time to really start laying the blame, it did not blame conservatives at all.  The movie stated that over the past decades real spending per child after inflation had increased dramatically.  The problems within the education system were not just in the lower socio-economic areas, but in the elite upper middle class neighborhoods as well.   The film then put the blame almost entirely on “tenure” and the teachers’ unions.  Imagine my shock when I saw really this was where the movie was really going.  It was not going to blame “uncaring conservatives” for all of the evil in the world. (more…)

[Ed. Note: Please visit Big Journalism for the full "Cry Wolf" series.]

Patrick Courrielche’s kickoff article exposing major university faculty and graduate students’ Cry Wolf Project is alarming. Each installment in the series has only made it more so.

CWP’s solicitation for policy briefs designed to construct politically driven narratives is a confession of academic malpractice. As Kurt Schlichter has pointed out, its participants’ intentions are unethical, insubordinate, and potentially illegal.

The CWP email shows its players to be intolerant of varying viewpoints in the pursuit of their ideological ends. The fact that they are offering colleagues and grad students money to predetermine outcomes proves their intent: to tell partisan political stories:

Drier-Email –

What are they afraid of? (more…)

None of these Funny or Die videos are funny. They’re on-the nose, heavy-handed, and at times so awkwardly unfunny that you kinda hafta supply your own rim-shot in order to gut your way through the worst of it. You can’t say the people behind the videos aren’t talented. They are. But this stuff is just lazy. Really, “Terminator” music over the closing PSA?

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But isn’t all celebrity masturbation lazy? No one’s trying to do anything more than feel good about themselves. So because that’s the real goal no serious thought goes into the sketch and of course no thought goes into the issue at hand.

Schools aren’t working? Throw money at them! Wow, I feel so much better about myself, so self-gratified, and look at how easy it was to show how much I care about kids. (more…)

All over the United States taxpayer funded public schools are teaching this little lesson? It’s from a documentary, The Story of Stuff, and it’s about how the developed world, especially America, destroys everything it touches to make stuff no one needs and then dumps it and kills all the animals. 

We’ll start with extraction which is a fancy word for natural resource exploitation which is a fancy word for trashing the planet. What this looks like is we chop down trees, we blow up mountains to get the metals inside, we use up all the water and we wipe out the animals. — The Story of Stuff  

This and other ‘teachable moments’ are being brought to a classroom near you by The Story of Stuff. According to the New York Times it has been watched by over 7 million children in the US. Annie Leonard, the filmmaker, says she spent 10 years traveling the globe collecting the information contained in the 20-minute film.  (more…)

Last week, Howard Zinn passed away. It was only a few weeks after the History Channel had premiered the film “The People Speak” honoring his controversial book “A People’s History of the United States.”

Prof. Zinn never hid the fact that he wrote “A People’s History” not as a reference book to collect dust on the shelf but as a field guide for the re-making of our society.  In a 1988 interview with the University of Georgia, he summed up the legacy of his work better than anyone.

A quiet revolution is a good way of putting it. From the bottom up. Not a revolution in the classical sense of a seizure of power, but rather from people beginning to take power from within the institutions. In the workplace, the workers would take power to control the conditions of their lives. It would be a democratic socialism.

In the wake of his death, conservative commentators who had been critical of Zinn’s lifework were accused of “spitting on his grave” when responding to interview requests about Zinn’s legacy.  At Big Hollywood we have less interest in trashing Howard Zinn, the man, as we have in shining a light on what his actual beliefs and agenda were, and still are. (more…)

Now if you’re like me, you know children are evil. They’re thieving, selfish creatures whose primary agenda includes spreading germs and smearing mucous on your belongings. So naturally you’d think I`d be in favor of President Obama`s plan for longer school days and shorter summer vacations. After all, that means less brats on the streets, defacing my tree fort made from discarded copies of Oui.

But on the contrary – I think Obama is off base, for three reasons:

First: When it comes to education, more doesn’t mean better. When something blows – ordering more of it doesn`t solve the problem. Fact is, we don`t need more school, we need better schools. Sadly, teachers unions have created a lock on jobs for even the most moronically incompetent – and the only way for a teacher to lose a job these days is if she gives one to a student. Worse – for a lot of kids, sending them back for three more hours of daily schooling in places like Chicago or Baltimore is like an academic version of stop-loss. They learn more about running for their lives than reading for enjoyment. (more…)

This week I had the honor of participating in a panel discussion on Civil Rights in the Age of Obama sponsored by the Milken Institute. Appearing with me on the panel were Ben Jealous, current President of the NAACP, Wade Henderson, President of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and Myrlie Evers-Williams, Civil Rights Icon and former President of the NAACP. The panel was moderated by Dr. Beverly Tatum, President of Spelman College. I was, as my father used to say, “Steppin’ in some pretty high cotton.”

I can think of no better proof of the victory of the traditional civil rights movement than that these distinguished individuals (and myself) were gathered together under the auspices of the Milken Institute to ponder what to do next. The battles of the civil rights movement so hard fought have been won. To those heroes, on whose shoulders my generation stands I say, “job well-done.” That is not to say that we need not be jealous of our civil rights. It is to say that it is time to shift our focus toward those things that will best guard our victories and secure those blessings for future generations. (more…)

How did they do it? 

Let’s face it, liberals didn’t take over our schools, the entire American education system by protesting. Sure, they made a lot of noise with their complaining, their picketing, but did that do the trick? Did that turn the tide? Did that transform what was once a learning environment that inspired inquisitiveness and curiosity, into a showplace for materialism – where we once taught respect for our men and women in uniform, rather than offering extra credit for flag burning – where teachers once encouraged independence, rather than reliance – where we once taught the lessons of history, rather than condemning it – where we once instilled responsibility, rather than simply handing out condoms?  How did they change what was once a morally conservative, patriotic institution, proud and respectful of our military, our flag, our constitution, our history and our culture into something that can only be described as Liberals gone wild?  (more…)