The Cartel
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''The Cartel'' is a 2009
American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, p ...
documentary film A documentary film (often described simply as a documentary) is a nonfiction Film, motion picture intended to "document reality, primarily for instruction, education or maintaining a Recorded history, historical record". The American author and ...
by
New Jersey New Jersey is a U.S. state, state located in both the Mid-Atlantic States, Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States, Northeastern regions of the United States. Located at the geographic hub of the urban area, heavily urbanized Northeas ...
–based television producer, reporter and news anchor Bob Bowdon, that covers the failures of
public education A state school, public school, or government school is a primary school, primary or secondary school that educates all students without charge. They are funded in whole or in part by taxation and operated by the government of the state. State-f ...
in the United States by focusing on New Jersey, which has the highest level of per-student education spending in the U.S. According to The Internet Movie Database (IMDb), the film asks: "How has the richest and most innovative society on earth suddenly lost the ability to teach its children at a level that other modern countries consider 'basic'?" The film regards
teachers' union The following is an alphabetical list of education trade unions: __NOTOC__ A * NEA-Alaska * Alliance of Concerned Teachers (Philippines) * Alabama Education Association State Affiliate of the National Education Association. * American Associatio ...
s as the cause of the problems (they are "the cartel" of the title), due to, among other things, the obstacles they put in place to firing bad teachers, through
tenure Tenure is a type of academic appointment that protects its holder from being fired or laid off except for cause, or under extraordinary circumstances such as financial exigency or program discontinuation. Academic tenure originated in the United ...
. It also makes the case for
school voucher A school voucher, also called an education voucher in a voucher system, is a certificate of government funding for students at schools chosen by themselves or their parents. Funding is usually for a particular year, term, or semester. In some cou ...
s and
charter school A charter school is a school that receives government funding but operates independently of the established state school system in which it is located. It is independent in the sense that it operates according to the basic principle of autono ...
s, suggesting that the increased
competition Competition is a rivalry where two or more parties strive for a common goal which cannot be shared: where one's gain is the other's loss (an example of which is a zero-sum game). Competition can arise between entities such as organisms, indi ...
will revitalize the school system, leading to improved efficiency and performance in all schools, both district and charter. The film debuted at the
Hoboken International Film Festival The Hoboken International Film Festival is an annual festival that promotes domestic and international television pilots, screenplays, non-studio films. Awards, with cash prizes, are given for the best submissions. It is held at the Thomas Morahan ...
on May 30, 2009, and was awarded "Best of the Festival (Audience Award)". It opened in New York City and Los Angeles on April 16, 2010, Houston on April 23 and in Denver, Minneapolis, Boston, Washington D.C., St. Louis, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Chicago on April 30. ''The Cartel'' is Bowdon's first film; he left
Bloomberg Television Bloomberg Television (on-air as Bloomberg) is an American-based pay television network focusing on business and capital market programming, owned by diversified information and media private company Bloomberg L.P. It is distributed globally, re ...
to focus on the project, and spent two years on it. The film's post production was aided by the
Moving Picture Institute The Moving Picture Institute (MPI) is an American non-profit organization and film production company founded in 2005 by Thor Halvorssen. MPI's films focus on human freedoms. The organization's president is Rob Pfaltzgraff. Mission and purpose ...
.


Film content

Bowdon interviewed "school administrators, teachers, parents, students and education advocates" for the film. Among the interviews are State Education Commissioner Lucille Davy,
Clint Bolick Clint Bolick (born December 26, 1957) is a justice of the Arizona Supreme Court. Previously, he served as Vice President of Litigation at the conservative/libertarian Goldwater Institute. He co-founded the libertarian Institute for Justice, where ...
(former president of Alliance for School Choice), Gerard Robinson (president of Black Alliance for Educational Options), and Chester Finn (president of the
Thomas B. Fordham Institute The Thomas B. Fordham Institute is an ideologically conservative American nonprofit education policy think tank, with offices in Washington, D.C., Columbus, Ohio, and Dayton, Ohio. The institute supports and publishes research on education polic ...
).


Administrative waste

The film highlights the problem of waste and corruption in the New Jersey public school system that Bowdon claims is rampant in districts throughout the country. He chooses the New Jersey area as it serves as an example of what can happen when problems are addressed by allocating more budget money to a problem rather than attempting to find and correct the problem directly. The administrative inefficiency present in New Jersey is highlighted by Bowden's comparison of the state's educational system to that of another state that Bowden explains is chosen because it is nearby and similarly populated,
Maryland Maryland ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It borders the states of Virginia to its south, West Virginia to its west, Pennsylvania to its north, and Delaware to its east ...
. On average, Maryland has one school district for 35,000 students, whereas New Jersey has 15 school districts for the same number of students. During 2008 budget crisis, while many other departments were "on the chopping block" (proposed budget had 4B in cuts), the teachers' union successfully lobbied for a 5% increase in education spending. Construction costs and related corruption also represent a major cost according to Bowden. The New Jersey School Construction Corporation (SCC), now known as the
New Jersey Schools Development Authority The New Jersey Schools Development Authority (commonly referred to as NJSDA or SDA) is the State agency responsible for fully funding and managing the new construction, modernization and renovation of school facilities projects in 31 New Jersey s ...
(NJSDA), which was responsible for the managing of construction of schools and educational infrastructure in the state allegedly didn't have any set budget, and was not monitored effectively by any other body; as a result, it is alleged that the organization "lost" between $500 million and $1 billion without a trace to poor accounting. Bowden points out
Malcolm X Shabazz High School Malcolm X Shabazz High School is a four-year comprehensive public high school in Newark in Essex County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey, as part of the Newark Public Schools. Founded as South Side High School in 1912, the school was renam ...
, which he describes as one of the many under-performing schools in the state, which spent 6 million dollars on constructing a brand new "state of the art" football field, rather than spending the same money to improve academics.


Inability to remove poor-performing teachers

Another major problem with the public school system according to Bowden is the difficulty with firing tenured teachers, seemingly no matter how bad they are. Rules originally put in place by the teacher's unions to protect teachers, he argues, have come to hinder fairness and accountability and actually hurt good teachers by keeping bad ones in place. He cites as one example an
illiterate Literacy is the ability to read and write, while illiteracy refers to an inability to read and write. Some researchers suggest that the study of "literacy" as a concept can be divided into two periods: the period before 1950, when literacy was ...
high school teacher in California who taught for seventeen years, relying upon the help of "student aides" to do the necessary in-class reading and writing for him. During her interview, the head of the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) Joyce Powell responded to criticisms of the tenure process: when presented with a statistic that only 0.03% of tenured teachers are removed from the classroom, she suggested that this was true because 99.97% are "doing a good job," saying "I think 99.97% should be celebrated."


Performance of charter schools

As a counterpoint to all of these types of problems, Bowden suggests that the increased prevalence of
charter school A charter school is a school that receives government funding but operates independently of the established state school system in which it is located. It is independent in the sense that it operates according to the basic principle of autono ...
s which compete for students and government funding with public schools will have the effect of improving quality and efficiency across the board. Students at charter schools have been shown to frequently perform better than their counterparts in the same areas; some assume that this is the case because they admit better-performing students to begin with, but many, like the North Star Academy Charter School, select students by random lottery, often with incoming students who perform slightly lower than the district average. North Star, as an example, spends 25% less per student, even without the large
economies of scale In microeconomics, economies of scale are the cost advantages that enterprises obtain due to their scale of operation, and are typically measured by the amount of Productivity, output produced per unit of cost (production cost). A decrease in ...
of the large district. 8th graders of the Robert Treat Academy Charter School achieved far higher proficiency rates than students in the Newark District school on the 2007 GEPA at a far lower cost per student: 88.4% to 49.9% in language arts; 93.0% to 35.3% in math; with $10,994 versus $17,237 of spending per student, respectively. Bowden also notes examples of charters that don't outperform district schools in their same area, like the Hope Academy, which scored far lower in language arts and math proficiency (27.8 to 21.4% in language arts, 19.6 to 14.3% in math), but says that parents will often still prefer charters, simply to get their children out of dangerous situations that exist in the public schools. One Hope Academy student describes his old school as being "just like" the school in the film '' Lean on Me'', "before
Joe Clark Charles Joseph Clark (born June 5, 1939) is a Canadian businessman, writer, and retired politician who served as the 16th prime minister of Canada from 1979 to 1980. He also served as Leader of the Official Opposition (Canada), leader of the ...
came in." Perhaps the most major hindrance to the creation of charter schools, he suggests, is that the
New Jersey Department of Education The New Jersey Department of Education (NJ DOE) administers state and federal aid programs affecting more than 1.4 million public and non-public elementary and secondary school children in the state of New Jersey. The department is headquartered ...
(NJ DOE) has the sole power to approve or deny charter school applicants, and in 2008, approved just one out of 22. They are not required to give applicants any reasons for denial, but applicants interviewed in the film allege that they were denied on seemingly trivial mistakes in their lengthy applications. The street interviews Bowden conducted indicate that people invariably support the increased funding of schools under the understanding that increased funding will improve the quality of education in the United States; Bowden, on the other hand, argues that efficiency and quality is best achieved through competition of resources which demands that efficiency and quality be achieved in order to thrive and attract "customers". While people commonly cite the concern that charter schools will take away funding to the detriment of the public school system, Bowden argues that they will benefit as much as anyone else from the competition and perhaps, smaller classroom sizes. The film credits include the reminder, "There are good teachers in the worst schools. There are good administrators in the worst districts. Support them! (While you fight The Cartel).


Reception

Wesley Morris of ''
The Boston Globe ''The Boston Globe,'' also known locally as ''the Globe'', is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes. ''The Boston Globe'' is the oldest and largest daily new ...
'' wrote, "as is the wont of certain TV news reporting, his approach pre-chews every detail, lest we fail to understand it. He’s smart. We’re dumb. Let the animated inserts explain the facts." He added, "it’s a testament to how fascinatingly bad things are for our public schools that 'The Cartel' is as watchable as it is." Brian MacQuarrie of the ''Boston Globe'' says that in ''The Cartel'', "the causes and consequences of the failings of public education are chronicled in extraordinary detail." Amy Biancolli of the ''
San Francisco Chronicle The ''San Francisco Chronicle'' is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. It was founded in 1865 as ''The Daily Dramatic Chronicle'' by teenage brothers Charles de Young and M. H. de Young, Michael H. ...
'' wrote, "There's no history offered. Not a peep about
No Child Left Behind The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) was a 2002 United States Act of Congress promoted by the presidential administration of George W. Bush. It reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and included Title I provision ...
. What's more, there's no breakdown of urban Jersey's demographics—the percentage of kids on school lunch aid, perhaps?—or any attempt to link classroom woes with urban problems. Yet even these gaps wouldn't have doomed the movie if Bowdon had sexed it up with a bit of old-fashioned cinematic salesmanship. The film plays more like a 90-minute TV special than a feature release. It's all talking heads, clanging music, substandard graphics, long scans of Web-page headlines and Bowdon's heavily cadenced voiceovers." Matt Pais of the website
Metromix Metromix LLC was a Chicago entertainment website at Chicago.Metromix.com, owned by the ''Chicago Tribune'' division of Tribune Publishing. It served the Chicago metropolitan area The Chicago metropolitan area, also referred to as Chicagola ...
wrote, "Bowdon would have something if he scaled back the outrage and analyzed the causes of these practices and, ultimately, why so many children around the country aren’t being properly taught. Instead the filmmaker tries to position New Jersey as a microcosm of America and turns “The Cartel” into a local news report that goes on forever." The ''
Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' is an American Newspaper#Daily, daily newspaper that began publishing in Los Angeles, California, in 1881. Based in the Greater Los Angeles city of El Segundo, California, El Segundo since 2018, it is the List of new ...
'' Kevin Thomas calls the film a "brisk, incisive and mind-boggling—no other phrase will work—exposé of his native New Jersey's public education system," saying that "Bowdon moves beyond statistics to discover how the sorry condition of his state's public schools came to be."


Impact

New Jersey Governor
Chris Christie Christopher James Christie (born September 6, 1962) is an American politician and former United States Attorney, federal prosecutor who served as the 55th governor of New Jersey from 2010 to 2018. A member of the Republican Party (United States) ...
, who came into office in 2010, saw the movie before being elected, and said that it "helped to mold for me the final outlines of what I wanted to do if I were lucky enough to become governor." He praised that documentary, as well as ''
Waiting for "Superman" ''Waiting for "Superman"'' is a 2010 American documentary film written and directed by Davis Guggenheim and produced by Lesley Chilcott.
'', which came out after he was already governor. In another interview, he said that the film was "extraordinarily important" in that it tells a story about what is going on in the New Jersey public school system that "needs to be told."


References


External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Cartel 2009 films 2009 documentary films American documentary films Documentary films about education in the United States Education in New Jersey Education reform in the United States Films shot in New Jersey Films set in New Jersey 2000s English-language films 2000s American films English-language documentary films