In 2011, the Texas Legislature voted to remove $5.4 billion from the state's education budget. Vanessa Roth's intelligent and informative documentary, The Texas Promise, examines some of the reasons behind this decision as well as various effects it had on Texas public schools.
The film opens with a series of hopeful young students talking about what they want to be when they grow up, but the narrative quickly moves into the nitty gritty of the matter at hand. Thanks to the people in charge at the governmental level, these students probably have a challenging path ahead of them for reasons that have more to do with money and politics than their own academic skills and goals.
Roth helps to explain the situation by relying on quite a bit of footage captured during the legislative debates leading up to the 2011 decision, and these moments help to provide a summary of the players...
The film opens with a series of hopeful young students talking about what they want to be when they grow up, but the narrative quickly moves into the nitty gritty of the matter at hand. Thanks to the people in charge at the governmental level, these students probably have a challenging path ahead of them for reasons that have more to do with money and politics than their own academic skills and goals.
Roth helps to explain the situation by relying on quite a bit of footage captured during the legislative debates leading up to the 2011 decision, and these moments help to provide a summary of the players...
- 11/5/2014
- by Caitlin Moore
- Slackerwood
Award-winning director Vanessa Roth tends to look deeply into social justice issues in her documentaries -- the effectiveness of the foster care system in Aging Out, the repurcussions of that film in No Tomorrow, equal rights for a lesbian couple in Freeheld (Roth produced), and schools and education in American Teacher and The Third Monday in October. Her most recent film, The Texas Promise, hits close to home as it peers into the state budget cuts to education in Texas. This new documentary from Roth will debut at Austin Film Festival later this week.
Roth answered a few of my questions via email about her work.
Slackerwood: Why is education a recurring theme in your works?
Vanessa Roth: I have so much to say about this that I don’t know where to begin... education as a theme is what all my work focuses on because it is the...
Roth answered a few of my questions via email about her work.
Slackerwood: Why is education a recurring theme in your works?
Vanessa Roth: I have so much to say about this that I don’t know where to begin... education as a theme is what all my work focuses on because it is the...
- 10/22/2014
- by Elizabeth Stoddard
- Slackerwood
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