Now that the government has tackled heath insurance, a new documentary comes along with the bad news: There’s another enormous, intractable problem in need of the country’s attention.
According to Bob Bowdon’s “The Cartel,” our education system is shamefully ineffective, wasteful, even corrupt, and needs immediate reform. Using only one state as his microcosm, with little detail about the larger national problem, the former broadcast news reporter does it all: He directs, produces, writes, performs the soundtrack’s original music and even has a credit as a camera operator on an expose that is obviously a personal crusade.
Maybe a little too personal. He might have benefited from more objective input on the well-intended project.
The filmmaker alerts us to some important realities on a crucial issue. But he then hammers his ideas home with redundancy in an 89-minute feature release that would have been better suited to a more condensed TV format. With cheap graphics, low tech-style interview and background footage, and a sometimes dry/wonky presentation of statistics and policy, you could more easily imagine “The Cartel” airing on PBS or one of the 24-hour news channels. The presentation is not even polished enough to seem right for “60 Minutes.”
But it does offer some interesting evidence for Bowdon’s thesis, which can be summed up much more succinctly than he does: Teachers unions, public boards of education and school administrators are mostly bad. Voucher systems, charter schools and private competition in this arena are mostly good.
He conducts his investigation in New Jersey, which looks even more like the tawdry motherland of Snooki and Tony Soprano in this context. Bowdon finds unreasonable teacher tenure without merit, board nepotism and patronage, budget-busting no-show jobs, election manipulation, and de facto extortion used to maintain the status quo. Through interviews with the state’s teachers union head, various academics and whistleblowers, he posits that greed and self-interest have become more important to authorities than the mission to educate our children.
Bowdon doesn’t just establish the problems; he also offers solutions. He demonstrates how some well-run charter schools offer exemplary services for less money. He then suggests that if parents and students could control the public funds allotted for them and shop for schools, the schools would have to earn that business.
It’s not a new argument, but it is a compelling one. If only the presentation of it in “The Cartel” held our attention better.
