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Video Interview with Producer/Director Sarah Mondale
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Transcript:
Well, the saga of school began in the early nineties. We were reading many articles in the paper at that time and seeing a lot of information in the press about the education crisis and about schools being in trouble… American schools not measuring up and so on. And, many politicians and reformers were suggesting that maybe we should get rid of the public school system and go completely towards a market-based system or a private school system for everybody. And we began to ask the question; my co-producer and partner, Sarah Patton and I began to wonder, well, what were schools set up to do in the first place? Why have public schools? We were both graduates of the public school system ourselves, and we were wondering what were schools set up to do besides teach kids to read and write? How did this whole experiment of public education get started? That was in 1992… now here we are, almost ten years later, at the end of this odyssey that has taken us to all over the country, to crowded urban schools in Los Angeles, very hard-hit urban schools in Gary, IN, rural schools in Crystal City, TX, suburban schools; we filmed in my children’s school, in fact. And, at the end of this odyssey…it kind of…of gathering all the footage, we ended up in the editing room trying to tell the story of American schools, which turned out to be a very complicated story.
The whole process of editing and writing was really the hardest thing that we had to do… to winnow this down into a clear story that people could understand and that people could use as a context to consider all these questions that are swirling around parents these days and just ordinary citizens also. I think everybody has a stake in public education.
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