The real beef Weingarten has with Won't Back Down is that its story doesn't jibe with her diagnosis of our ailing schools--and how to fix them. If the AFT is so sensitive to stereotypes, why has it been quiet about other school movies that advance the worst stereotypes about high-poverty neighborhoods and the students who live in them? Perhaps it's because stories of teachers working hard in dangerous ghettos reinforce union talking points about underpaid teachers in terrible working conditions. In those stories, a chosen few teachers might help students overcome their life circumstances, but when the credits roll, we know that poverty is the villain will only return stronger in the sequel. In Won't Back Down, what we don't see is as important as what's on the screen. No gang shootings. No kids going home to empty fridges and drug-addicted family members. No excuses. Some may say that makes this movie a candy-coated Oscar vehicle, but at least this film forces us to look at a new set of problems.

That's not to say that Won't Back Down doesn't suffer from its own share of oversimplifications. Turning around a school takes years of relentless effort. Gyllenhaal and company follow an easy three-step recipe: 1.) Print-up some flyers 2.) Knock on a few doors. 3.) Throw back cold beers with the reinvigorated faculty. Another scene shows an almost laughably utopian charter school that feels like a Nickelodeon music video set at an International Baccalaureate School parents' night. And Weingarten is correct that the storyline wastes no opportunity to criticize teachers unions, with casual references to "crazy teachers" and "checked out zombie" teachers and "scumbag" union reps. Maggie Gyllenhaal is as likeable and one-dimensional as the Karate Kid, and the teachers' union is the Cobra Kai Dojo, complete with matching evil attire during the climactic final scene.

Yet in just two hours, Won't Back Down dramatizes the vast failure of government imagination that is our public school system, providing glimpses of the most critical issues in the education debate. It hints at wonky topics like tenure, layoff and compensation policies. It addresses macro issues like the school-to-prison pipeline that dumps so many at-risk students directly into the criminal justice system. It juxtaposes a posh private school computer lab with the blighted classrooms of Adams Elementary. It introduces us to teachers flying blind without the leadership they deserve, parents desperate to help their children learn to read, and a soul-sucking, Kafkaesque bureaucracy where idealists turn to booze.

Weingarten's letter only cites those scenes that support her position, which makes me wonder if she took strategically timed bathroom breaks during her screening. Won't Back Down offers parents a false choice," she writes, "you're either for students or for teachers..." Never mind that multiple characters in the movie speak to the valuable protections that unions have won for teachers over the years, or that the entire dramatic arc is founded on parents and teachers building a coalition.