"The Cartel" Documentary: Education + Politics = $
A feature-length documentary about our urgent national need for school choice, "The Cartel" shows us our failing educational system like we've never seen it before.
In this hard-hitting film by reporter and news anchor Bob Bowdon, "The Cartel" exposes the corruption, waste, and intimidation in our nation's public schools. Arguing that our public school system wastes billions of dollars each year, while our children learn less and less, "The Cartel" makes a compelling case for far-reaching and immediate reform centered on school choice.
Upcoming: "The Cartel" Premieres in 11 Major Cities in April 2010.
17 Comments:
O.K., so what's new?
I've been hearing these sorts of complaints about the public school system since the late sixties...
A couple of people in the trailer asked, what did you they do with the money? Well, taxpayers are starting to wake up to the corrupt deals that politicians have struck with the unions, and the internet is empowering them like never before. Here's a video put together by an Illinois taxpayer group exposing the compensation scheme of the unionized eduaction monopoly:
VIDEO
Here's the spreadsheet they put together of the top 100 highest education pensions in Illinois:
LINK
Americans are finally waking up. Here's HOPING for CHANGE.
Who underwrote the film?
Another Hillary the Movie?
Here are some excerpts from a New Jersey review:
But Bowdon (who got post-production support from a couple of partisan groups, including a pro-voucher organization) takes a more political approach, blaming it all on unions and Democrats.
“School choice,” he insists, would solve everything, but that involves more than just charter schools. What if the vouchers didn’t cover the tuition at the prep you wanted, or the school didn’t want your child? Oh, and how about that whole pesky church-state thing — do you want your tax dollars going to help fund madrassas? These are questions Bowdon doesn’t really explore.
Nor does he address whether charter schools are truly any better. He suggests that, even if they aren’t, it doesn’t matter, because they’re safer. But doesn’t their self-selecting nature — only truly involved parents are going to jump through those enrollment hoops — guarantee that?
Logic doesn’t really matter because movies like “The Cartel,” which trumpets its slant, from its title to its “Godfather”-inspired typography, aren’t interested in exploring questions. They just want to trot out the conclusions they’ve already drawn.
As long and as loud as they shout, only the already converted ever listen
@anonymous 6:22pm
I thought you were going to ask how much pension Mark was getting as an educator.
What surprises me is how much public college professors make--I'm in private practice and teach as an adjunct in graduate and lawschool. I used to take these guys out to lunch, thinking they were poor. My wife went to a state website for another reason, and found out that the full time tenured prof I sometimes team teach with makes nearly $300,000 in the business school! And, he complains about taxes!
Hey anon @ 2/25/2010 6:22 PM, the links, they're just killer!
Thanks...
juandos said...
O.K., so what's new?
I've been hearing these sorts of complaints about the public school system since the late sixties...
One can only hope that with the states literally going broke, it is different this time. People aren't able to vote for tax increases on someone else anymore, they literally will have to vote for taxes on themselves.
Actually complaints about the public school system go back at least to Dewey in the 1890s. Education has always had complaints. Clearly there was a lot of unhappniess with the schools in the 1950s or you would not have had the money spent on NDEA after sputnik. (Clearly we needed to fix the schools to keep up with the Soviet Union). So once again as in many things problems never get solved they just keep going and going like the energizer bunny.
Yes, we here it all of the time: we spend more per student then any developed country in the world on education. Yet, is school choice really the answer? Why can't we learn what's been proven to work for other developed nations with good education systems - Japan, South Korea, the Scandinavian countries? I think that makes a lot more sense, converting a school system to a methodologies proven to work, rather than try another system we're not sure of whether it may or may not work.
I don't mind a film like this, and elements are probably true.
But how about a similarly jaundiced look at USDA or the Department of Defense?
Aside from that, schools are run locally. If you honk about state's rights and local control, what can you say?
It is up to each locality to run schools as they see fit.
But we are all ripped off by federal agencies.
its really very nice and informative article. thanks for sharing this with us...
I'm so comforted to see most of the clips are from my home state of NJ. Camden and Newark are esp a mess, in and out of State takeovers, spending like crazy etc and the kids are intellectual zombies. Make no mistake, this is the black mafia at work. same in DC. highest per student in the country, whale shit performance.
The next civil war won't be between geographies as much as between those on the dole (that includes most teachers) and those not but who pay through the nose.
This is a friggin' racket between politicians and educators (loosely speaking). They try all sorts of new techniques but scores go down. Those to blame also include the parents whose kids are so ill served. But they are either drunk, drugged, dead, incarcerated, or whatever. AND, they don't pay any taxes anyway. so who's really getting screwed here? The kids who don't know any better and the taxpayers who keep this mess afloat.
Privatize the whole lot! Make a teaching institution earn its existence and if they do it well let them get rich rather than the slugs that inhabit America's teaching class.
Yes, this post is intended to be mean spirited, incendiary, a bit overstated and a slur. But its true.
I'm for whatever can unleash the private sector on education. We've seen both sides of education with our children -- public and private -- and the private schools produce an incredible student, hands-down.
It slays me that we don't get a credit for our child going to private school. We reduce the burden on the public school system, yet are forced to pay 100% of our tuition.
The public school system has become a (highly lucrative) JOBS PROGRAM for the otherwise unemployable.
Home school. Private school. Parochial school. Charter school. No school. ANYTHING but public school.
(And, yes: I have put my money where my mouth is...)
Microsoft Certifications said...
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When I saw this, I couldn't help but think of the Terminator movies and Skynet becoming self aware.
"I'm for whatever can unleash the private sector on education. We've seen both sides of education with our children -- public and private -- and the private schools produce an incredible student, hands-down."
Public education works fine in Japan, Sweden and South Korea. They're obviously doing something right that we're not; let's learn from their proven methods rather then try an experiment that may, nor may not work out.
I'm late to this topic, but Anon should do a bit more homework before making claims about other countries. First, the link:
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3786
Now, the quote:
"In the Netherlands, nearly 76 percent of school-age children attend private schools with state money going to the chosen school. Sweden and Denmark also have liberal school choice policies with school funding following children whose parents choose private schools. In all three countries, student performance is higher than in the United States, where 15-year-olds scored twenty-first on mathematics literacy and twelfth in science, according to international performance audits."
And what about Japan? Link:
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ek20020913ag.html
Quote: "In many countries, parents have a choice of public schools. Not Japan. Here, you get just one choice: Send your child to the closest public school, or pay a lot of money for private school. But this is changing. School choice is coming to Japan."
It's not nation-wide, based on the article (which is eight years old), but it's more than we have in the U.S.
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