The school system may be made to be a great deal profitable, says Bob Bowdon, however entirely at the expense of things comparable to teachers and students. In his documentary "The Cartel," Bowdon, a New Jersey television news newsperson, turns the camera on the massive degeneracy and misdirection that has led his state to squander more than any other on its students just with substandard results. The numbers express the tale: $17,000 exhausted per student, and there's simply a 39% reading proficiency rate, it's tough to argue that there's a crisis afoot, but harder to concur on a solution.
On the one side is the massive Jersey teachers union and umbrageous school officials, who see to it that that, as Bowdon points out in his picture, 90 cents of every tax dollar go for other expenses, including six figure incomes for school administrators and, in a astonishing example, a school board secretary who makes $180,000. The other faction are the supporters of charter schools, the private schools that can evade the authority of the public school system and would aid inner-city kids if their taxpayer money could be more carefully used. One of Bowdon's principal criticisms is that a teacher, even a shoddy one, basically can't be fired -- which provides zero effort to do much genuine instruction.
"The documentary examines lots of out of the ordinary aspects of public education, tenure, backing, support drops, corruption --meaning theft -- vouchers and charter schools," says Bowdon. "And as such it kind of serves as a rapid-moving primer on all of the raging topics between the education-reform crusade."
Bowdon's docudrama started touring the festival circuit in summer of 2009 and made its theatrical debut in April 2010. Hopefully it will get a rise, and not be overshadowed, by the more recently released documentary "Waiting for Superman," by "An Inconvenient Truth" director Davis Guggenheim. Bowdon sees the films as complementary, and hopes that "Superman," with its human-interest position, draws more interest to his own, which focuses on public policy. "The two films make exchangeable conclusions," Bowdon says.
The left-brained approach means arguments that watch the economics -- money misspent, opportunities wasted. He follows the money to extract conclusions about how shameless the Jersey school system is, but his picture features moments of elevated emotion and grief. A girl's weeping upon hearing that she wasn't selected to attend a charter school, that she's stuck in her public school, exemplify the failure of a system as well as Bowdon's charts and interviews.
And though it may be simple to accept the presence of corruption in a state so associated with organized crime, the uncomfortable fact of the subject is that this is a very familiar situation. Any watcher will acknowledge the failings of their own state's education system and the struggle for control. The one he seems to be most behind is the charter schools, which take the reins from the unions and give them back to the taxpayer. But "The Cartel" also shows us how laborious it's going to be to get that control back from those who've found it so profitable. - 40732
On the one side is the massive Jersey teachers union and umbrageous school officials, who see to it that that, as Bowdon points out in his picture, 90 cents of every tax dollar go for other expenses, including six figure incomes for school administrators and, in a astonishing example, a school board secretary who makes $180,000. The other faction are the supporters of charter schools, the private schools that can evade the authority of the public school system and would aid inner-city kids if their taxpayer money could be more carefully used. One of Bowdon's principal criticisms is that a teacher, even a shoddy one, basically can't be fired -- which provides zero effort to do much genuine instruction.
"The documentary examines lots of out of the ordinary aspects of public education, tenure, backing, support drops, corruption --meaning theft -- vouchers and charter schools," says Bowdon. "And as such it kind of serves as a rapid-moving primer on all of the raging topics between the education-reform crusade."
Bowdon's docudrama started touring the festival circuit in summer of 2009 and made its theatrical debut in April 2010. Hopefully it will get a rise, and not be overshadowed, by the more recently released documentary "Waiting for Superman," by "An Inconvenient Truth" director Davis Guggenheim. Bowdon sees the films as complementary, and hopes that "Superman," with its human-interest position, draws more interest to his own, which focuses on public policy. "The two films make exchangeable conclusions," Bowdon says.
The left-brained approach means arguments that watch the economics -- money misspent, opportunities wasted. He follows the money to extract conclusions about how shameless the Jersey school system is, but his picture features moments of elevated emotion and grief. A girl's weeping upon hearing that she wasn't selected to attend a charter school, that she's stuck in her public school, exemplify the failure of a system as well as Bowdon's charts and interviews.
And though it may be simple to accept the presence of corruption in a state so associated with organized crime, the uncomfortable fact of the subject is that this is a very familiar situation. Any watcher will acknowledge the failings of their own state's education system and the struggle for control. The one he seems to be most behind is the charter schools, which take the reins from the unions and give them back to the taxpayer. But "The Cartel" also shows us how laborious it's going to be to get that control back from those who've found it so profitable. - 40732
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