I wrote yesterday about how Lewis Black, on Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" on Tuesday night, missed a great opportunity to use humor to skewer the nonsense that is today's school reform movement. Stephen Colbert did the same thing on his "The Colbert Report" last night.
Black did a bit on school reform, referring to the new education film "Waiting for Superman" uncritically and actually mischaracterizing charter schools.
Then, last night, Colbert had as a guest Davis Guggenheim, the man behind "Waiting for Superman," which portrays a false image of the crisis in public schools.
Instead of challenging Guggenheim's assumptions, which would have made for a really funny bit, Colbert accepted them as truth.
He also allowed Guggenheim to present himself as more even-handed in assessing blame for public school woes than he does in his movie, which bashes teachers and blames teachers unions. On Colbert, Guggenheim blamed "all of us" for the crisis in public education. In the movie, Guggenheim leaves the impression that charter schools are the way out of the crisis; on Colbert, he concedes that charters can't be the answer.
As I wrote yesterday, I don't get why Stewart and Colbert, who relish exposing hypocrisy and nuttiness in other arenas, haven't taken a real shot at education reform.
They'd be doing a real public service, but more important for them, they'd get a lot of laughs.
CORRECTION: The first version of this post misspelled Colbert's first name. It is correct above.
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