The bartender Jamie is played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, a working class type who is very passionate about getting the necessary education for her dyslexic daughter. Although her daughter was in a private school once, Jamie could no longer get scholarships so had to revert to going to the bad public school. Jamie is frustrated she cannot afford to move to a better school district, nor afford a better school on her working class wages, as well as the fact that her daughter’s teacher is an uncaring monster.
Viola Davis is Nonah, a teacher at that school. She too is slipping into apathy with her class, although she has a son who is developmentally challenged, so she can see the parental side of this issue. She pushes him perhaps too hard in his schoolwork, believing he is smart, but frustrated he just cannot do better. This divides her and her husband and they separate.
Jamie challenges Nonah to do what is best for her son, as well as convince the cute music teacher Michael (Oscar Isaacs) to join and help her rally parents and teachers alike to break from this school to form their own non-unionized school. It seems there is a law that any parent can create a new school with the proper amount of backers and the right plan. But the school board and teachers' union both do not want this, nor do teachers who fear losing union jobs or jobs altogether if the new school fails. The two women have a lot of people fighting them both passively and aggressively, and work very hard to get people to have the faith in their plan, which is ultimately "for the children."
Supporting cast includes Holly Hunter as a union official, a former teacher herself, who is leaned on to get Jamie and Nonah to toe the line, and although she spouts the party line, by the end of the film she is on their side. Rosie Perez is another teacher although her role is small and largely in the beginning of the film. Ving Rhames has a small part as a principal at a progressive school who successfully turned his school around, and Marianne Jean-Baptiste is pivotal as a soon-to-retire and jaded school board president who has a last minute change of heart and helps the teachers/parents.
The plot and characters are very mainstreamed, such as almost all the people against Jamie's plan are white and the ones on her side are of more mixed races and classes. The daughter’s teacher, as the film portrays her at least, is a tenured teacher so has no incentive to do a good job—that is the crux of the movie, that unions and bureaucrats are ruining the school to the detriment of the students. Her character is put up as a pretty blatant example of what (I guess) the filmmakers are showing what the schools are like. She and other characters who were against the new school idea needed to be more humanized rather than caricatured or stereotyped as villains with one view who resort to petty bureaucracy, bribery or strongarm tactics to get their way.
The story also heavily verbalizes an “it’s for the kids” mantra and shows how idiotic it is that some teachers even have lost the drive to help students. The plot goes as one would expect, with setbacks then the last minute triumph when the parents win their case. Casting is as what I expected for the main characters.
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