International Cinema Festival of India

The school system might be made to be remarkably profitable, says Bob Bowdon, but at the expense of things equivalent to teachers and students. In his docudrama “The Cartel,” New Jersey television news reporter Bowdon shines a light on the depravity and rapacity that has resulted in the disappearance of so much taxpayer money in that state. It’s not troublesome for Bowdon to illustrate that something’s awfully amiss with a state that pays $17,000 per student but can only manage a 39% reading proficiency rate — that there’s a crisis is undeniable, how to deal with it is another question entirely.

At hand are two major factions in Bowdon’s film — 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. On the other side are the supporters of charter schools — private schools that can function outside the control of what Bowdon calls The Cartel. Bowdon makes much of the fact that it’s practically impossible for a teacher to be fired, a safety net that does little to court hard work in those teachers who comprehend they have a career regardless of how many of the three Rs they teach — if any.

“‘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.

And whilst there’s a satire in this variety of public corruption happening in a state renowned for its organized crime, it’s evident that this is not an isolated collapse. Bowdon’s film illustrates a local problem, but any viewer will acknowledge the systems of system failure in their own state’s schools. 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 he also knows it’ll be an uphill conflict to recover control from those who’ve worked so intense to make education very profitable for the very few.

Nights and Weekends.com: The Cartel documentary. A film by Bob Bowdon.