There's money to be made in education, argues Bob Bowdon, henceforth merely if you cut away the unprofitable bits, like practiced teachers. In his documentary "The Cartel," Bowdon, a New Jersey TV news reporter, turns the camera on the monumental corruption and mismanagement that has led his state to spend more than any other on its students but with shoddy results. As $400,000 is spent per classroom, but reading proficiency is just 39% (and math at 40%), the crisis is clear, which doesn't mean it's not controversial.
The two sides of this struggle meet head-on in interviews throughout Bowdon's film: there are the teachers union and school board members who have managed to allocate 90 cents of every taxpayer buck into everything but teachers' salaries -- although a selection of school administrators make upwards of $100,000. On the other slope are the supporters of a charter school system, private schools in which parents can use tax vouchers to pay tuition and shake off the public nightmare. In those disordered public schools, Bowdon points out, it's practically unimaginable to fire an instructor -- so even a shoddy one has a trade for life.
"'The Cartel' examines lots of individual aspects of public teaching, tenure, financing, patronage drops, subversion --meaning thieving -- vouchers and charter schools," says Bowdon. "The idiom education documentary might sound to some like dull squared, but in fact the movie itself betrays an ardent passion for the predicament of particularly inner-city children."
"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. The movie has started a lot of talk, which ought no doubt go on with the more-recent release of "An Inconvenient Truth" director Davis Guggenheim's own education expose, "Waiting for Superman." Bowdon sees the films as complementary, and hopes that "Superman," with its human-interest approach, draws more interest to his own, which focuses on public policy. "My movie is the left-brained edition, more analytical," Bowdon says, "'Waiting for Superman' is more the right-brained treatment."
And Bowdon's film is relentlessly critical, making a intense case for the concept that the amount of money spent is nowhere near as relevant as how it is spent. He follows the money to describe conclusions around how shameless the Jersey school system is, but his picture features moments of soaring emotion and heartbreak. The weeping face of a youthful girl who learns she was not selected for a place at a charter school makes its own powerful debate for the unsatisfying failure of a state's education system.
And although it may be easy to assume the presence of corruption in a state so associated with organized crime, the uncomfortable fact of the matter is that this is an exceedingly familiar situation. Bowdon's film illustrates a local dilemma, but any viewer will realize the systems of system failure in their own state's schools. Bowdon comes out in favor of the charter school plan, of taxpayers being able to choose their own schools, to get out from under the state's control. Nevertheless he also knows it'll be an upward conflict to retrieve control from those who've worked so hard to make education very profitable for the very few. - 40732
The two sides of this struggle meet head-on in interviews throughout Bowdon's film: there are the teachers union and school board members who have managed to allocate 90 cents of every taxpayer buck into everything but teachers' salaries -- although a selection of school administrators make upwards of $100,000. On the other slope are the supporters of a charter school system, private schools in which parents can use tax vouchers to pay tuition and shake off the public nightmare. In those disordered public schools, Bowdon points out, it's practically unimaginable to fire an instructor -- so even a shoddy one has a trade for life.
"'The Cartel' examines lots of individual aspects of public teaching, tenure, financing, patronage drops, subversion --meaning thieving -- vouchers and charter schools," says Bowdon. "The idiom education documentary might sound to some like dull squared, but in fact the movie itself betrays an ardent passion for the predicament of particularly inner-city children."
"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. The movie has started a lot of talk, which ought no doubt go on with the more-recent release of "An Inconvenient Truth" director Davis Guggenheim's own education expose, "Waiting for Superman." Bowdon sees the films as complementary, and hopes that "Superman," with its human-interest approach, draws more interest to his own, which focuses on public policy. "My movie is the left-brained edition, more analytical," Bowdon says, "'Waiting for Superman' is more the right-brained treatment."
And Bowdon's film is relentlessly critical, making a intense case for the concept that the amount of money spent is nowhere near as relevant as how it is spent. He follows the money to describe conclusions around how shameless the Jersey school system is, but his picture features moments of soaring emotion and heartbreak. The weeping face of a youthful girl who learns she was not selected for a place at a charter school makes its own powerful debate for the unsatisfying failure of a state's education system.
And although it may be easy to assume the presence of corruption in a state so associated with organized crime, the uncomfortable fact of the matter is that this is an exceedingly familiar situation. Bowdon's film illustrates a local dilemma, but any viewer will realize the systems of system failure in their own state's schools. Bowdon comes out in favor of the charter school plan, of taxpayers being able to choose their own schools, to get out from under the state's control. Nevertheless he also knows it'll be an upward conflict to retrieve control from those who've worked so hard to make education very profitable for the very few. - 40732
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