The Truth About The Collapsing Of The Education System

The education mode in America is working swell, says Bob Bowdon, although just 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 powerful ugly scene of the institutional putridness that has resulted in virtually incredible wastes of taxpayer money. It’s not laborious for Bowdon to exemplify that something’s appallingly incorrect 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 different question altogether.

The two sides of this conflict meet head-on in interviews throughout Bowdon’s film: there are the teachers union and school board members who have managed to set aside 90 cents of every taxpayer dollar into everything but teachers’ salaries — although a quantity of school administrators bring in upwards of $100,000. On the other side are the supporters of charter schools — private schools which can work beyond the influence of what Bowdon calls The Cartel. In those impoverished public schools, Bowdon points out, it’s virtually unacceptable to fire an instructor — so even a meager one has a career for life.

“‘The Cartel’ examines lots of various aspects of public teaching, tenure, funding, patronage drops, subversion –meaning larceny — vouchers and charter schools,” says Bowdon. “And as such it sort of serves as a rapid-moving primer on all of the red-hot topics inside the education-reform drive.”

“The Cartel” started fashioning the round of the festivals in summer 2009, and made its theatrical debut nearly a year later, in spring 2010. The movie has started a lot of discussion, which should no doubt persist 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 ideology, draws more notice to his own, which focuses on public policy. “The two films attain parallel conclusions,” Bowdon says.

It is definitely analytical, couching its arguments in an assessment of how the money is being spent, or misspent. He follows the money to describe conclusions around how dirty the Jersey school system is, but his picture features moments of soaring emotion and heartache. One girl, crying after discovering 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 an irony in this kind of public corruption happening in a state renowned for its organized crime, it’s evident that this is not an isolated collapse. Any spectator will realize the failings of their own state’s education system and the fight 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. But he also makes it comprehensible that those in power are going to be unwilling to give it up without a struggle.

LA Times: The Cartel, examines a state falling down on the job educating its children, a film by Bob Bowdon.