International Cinema Festival of India

There’s money to be made in education, argues Bob Bowdon, however exclusively when you snip out the unprofitable bits, like respectable teachers. In his documentary “The Cartel,” Bowdon, a New Jersey TV news reporter, turns the camera on the massive degeneracy and misdirection that has led his state to expend more than any other on its students nevertheless with abysmal results. The numbers express the tale: $17,000 spent per student, and at hand’s but a 39% reading proficiency rate, it’s difficult to contend that there’s a crisis underway, but harder to concur on a solution.

Present are two major factions in Bowdon’s film — the villains are pretty clearly the Jersey teachers union and school board who funnel 90 cents of every dollar away from teachers’ salaries and toward incidentals, including six-figure salaries for school administrators. On the other side are the supporters of a charter school system, private schools in which parents can use tax vouchers to pay tuition and elude the public nightmare. In those broken public schools, Bowdon points out, it’s almost inconceivable to fire a teacher — so even a mediocre one has a job for life.

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

“The Cartel” first appeared on the festival circuit in summer 2009, appearing in theaters nationally a year later. Hopefully it will get a rise, and not be overshadowed, by the more recently released docudrama “Waiting for Superman,” by “An Inconvenient Truth” director Davis Guggenheim. Bowdon sees the two documentaries as taking alternative approaches to the similar problem, “The Cartel” by examining public policy and “Superman” centering on the human-interest aspects. “The two films make parallel conclusions,” Bowdon says.

The left-brained method means arguments that follow the economics — money misspent, opportunities wasted. He follows the money to extract conclusions about how crooked the Jersey school system is, but his picture features moments of high emotion and broken heartedness. The weeping face of an adolescent girl who learns she was not selected for a place at a charter school makes its own deep controversy for the dissatisfactory failure of a state’s education system.

And though there’s an irony in this kind of public depravation happening in a state renowned for its organized crime, it’s obvious that this is not an isolated collapse. Bowdon’s film illustrates a local quandary, but any viewer will spot 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. But he also knows it’ll be an upward battle to get back control from those who’ve worked so intense to make education very profitable for the very few.

The Cartel Movie, a documentary by Bob Bowdon.