International Cinema Festival of India

The education method in this country is working, although simply for some — and those few definitely aren’t the students. In his education docudrama “The Cartel,” Bowdon, a TV news reporter in New Jersey, paints a potent ugly scene of the institutional corruption that has resulted in more or less incredible wastes of taxpayer money. The numbers recite the tale: $17,000 exhausted per pupil, and at hand’s only a 39% reading proficiency rate, it’s tough to reason that there’s a crisis underway, but harder to agree on a resolution.

On the one side is the monolithic Jersey teachers union and umbrageous school officials, who make certain that, as Bowdon points out in his film, 90 cents of every tax dollar go for other expenses, including six figure incomes for school administrators and, in a shocking example, a school board secretary who makes $180,000. On the other side are the supporters of charter schools — private schools which can operate outside the control of what Bowdon calls The Cartel. Bowdon makes much of the fact that it’s practically unimaginable for a teacher to be fired Thus giving them a safety net that does little to encourage hard work in those teachers who acknowledge they hold a career regardless of how many of the three Rs they teach — if any.

“‘The Cartel’ examines lots of diverse aspects of public education, tenure, funding, support drops, subversion –meaning theft — vouchers and charter schools,” says Bowdon. “And as such it sort of serves as a rapid-moving primer on all of the blistering topics within the education-reform front.”

“The Cartel” started fashioning the round of the festivals in summer 2009, and made its theatrical debut virtually a year later, in spring 2010. It consequently proceeds the more-recently released, though higher profile, education docudrama “Waiting for Superman,” directed by Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth”). Bowdon sees the two documentaries as taking alternative approaches to the similar quandary, “The Cartel” by examining public policy and “Superman” centering on the human-interest aspects. “My picture is the left-brained variation, more analytical,” Bowdon says, “‘Waiting for Superman’ is more the right-brained treatment.”

The left-brained method means arguments that follow the economics — money misspent, opportunities wasted. Although he calls it left-brained, still “The Cartel” reaches some heartbreaking moments of emotion. The weeping face of a youthful girl who learns she was not selected for a place at a charter school makes its own intense debate for the unsatisfactory failure of a state’s education system.

It’s difficult to watch a movie about corruption in Jersey and not think of the mob, but it’s also evident that this is a national predicament seen through a tight lens. Any watcher will recognize the failings of their own state’s education system and the battle for control. 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. However he also knows it’ll be an upward struggle to retrieve control from those who’ve worked so hard to make education very profitable for the very few.

Philadelphia Inquirer: The Cartel Movie, A failing grade for NJ schools, a film by Bob Bowdon.