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Tough Lessons Regarding The Failing Education System

Tough Lessons Regarding The Failing Education System

By Anthony Hawkins

There's money to be made in education, argues Bob Bowdon, therefore simply if you cut out the unprofitable bits, like terrific teachers. In his education docudrama "The Cartel," Bowdon, a TV news reporter in New Jersey, paints a remarkable ugly scene of the institutional putridness that has resulted in virtually unbelievable wastes of taxpayer money. It's not hard for Bowdon to illustrate that something's appallingly incorrect with a state that pays $17,000 per student but can only wield a 39% reading proficiency rate -- that there's a crisis is undeniable, how to deal with it is different question entirely.

Present are two major factions in Bowdon's picture -- the villains are reasonably clearly the Jersey teachers union and school board who funnel 90 cents of every dollar away from teachers' salaries and towards incidentals, including six-figure salaries for school administrators. The other cabal is the supporters of charter schools, the private schools that can evade the control of the public school system and would serve inner-city kids if their taxpayer money could be more cautiously used. In those impoverished public schools, Bowdon points out, it's pretty much unimaginable to fire an instructor -- so even a deficient one has a job for life.

"'The Cartel' examines lots of distinctive aspects of public teaching, tenure, financing, support drops, corruption --meaning thieving -- vouchers and charter schools," says Bowdon. "And as such it kind of serves as a rapid-moving primer on all of the blistering topics amongst the education-reform movement."

"The Cartel" started fashioning the round of the festivals in summer 2009, and made its theatrical debut very nearly a year later, in spring 2010. It therefore proceeds the more-recently released, while higher profile, education documental "Waiting for Superman," directed by Davis Guggenheim ("An Inconvenient Truth"). Bowdon sees the films as complementary, and hopes that "Superman," with its human-interest approach, draws more notice to his own, which focuses on public policy. "The two films reach equivalent conclusions," Bowdon says.

And Bowdon's movie is relentlessly acute, making a deep case for the notion that the amount of money spent is nowhere near as essential as how it is spent. Whilst he calls it left-brained, still "The Cartel" reaches some unhappy moments of emotion. One girl, crying after learning she wasn't selected in a lottery for a charter school, tells the story of What Went Wrong as well as Bowdon's arguments.

It's difficult to see a movie about corruption in Jersey and not think of the mob, but it's also clear that this is a national dilemma seen through a tight lens. Any watcher will recognize the failings of their own state's education system and the battle for control. Bowdon puts his faith in the charter schools, where the taxpayer has influence over the kind and quality of education. However he also knows it'll be an upward battle to retrieve control from those who've worked so intense to make education very profitable for the very few.