Bob Bowdon, Director of "The Cartel"

With the 2010 release of "Waiting for 'Superman,' " education reform is a hot topic in the documentary community. However, criticisms of "Waiting" were levied by critics, who thought the film merely scratched the surface, presenting case studies and criticisms without context or offering solutions to the problem.

Bob Bowdon, a longtime television reporter, looks to finish the job "Waiting" started (though, he notes, he actually began work on his film BEFORE it) with "The Cartel," a look at corruption in teachers' unions and how they often usurp the educational needs of the children they serve.

Bowdon will host a screening of his film Tuesday, March 22, at the Indiana Historical Center in Indianapolis (450 W. Ohio St.), and will conduct a post-screening Q&A.

"The Cartel" is also available to buy on DVD at www.thecartelmovie.com.

Bowdon spoke to The Yap about his film, how the American educational system is broken, and how to fix it.

How did you first become interested in this topic, to the point of making a film about it?

Well, the predicate was I had been a TV reporter covering education stories. I’ve been a reporter for 15 years, never as an education beat specifically, but on occasion I’d have a story that pertained to tenure, or seniority, these type of things, there was a distance learning story where the union had basically destroyed the distance learning program because it sent lessons out to too many kids at once. I had varying levels of outrage and was dumbfounded at what I had seen. Then I had a friend get a job as a high school English teacher, and I started hearing her stories on a daily basis, and I started to realize I don’t think a lot of people know what’s going on at public schools.

So once you started on the film, what did you find? Did you get any sense of what led things to this point?

Yeah, while the film is not about educational history, I did walk away with my own personal sense of how we got here. I think it was when teachers’ unions, which used to be worried about running little credit unions and professional development classes. When they became political, that’s when there was a change. When they started supporting with money, individual school board candidates, who would propose and defend the roles the unions wanted, that was the beginning of change. That’s when they started buying support with people with whom they were supposed to negotiate. They’re supposed to sit across from a superintendent, but more and more it became the case that the superintendent was selected school board candidates that the union itself supported.

So what then was the result of that?

Well the result was a system designed for adults instead of for kids. The adults in the system, meaning the establishment, ran it as a jobs program in many cases. It’s about hiring as many of your friends and keeping them in jobs and getting them raises, and it’s particularly weighted toward teachers who have been around a long time. The system is really set up with them as opposed to the newer teachers, who no matter how fantastic they are will be fired first no matter how hard they work or how successful they are. There’s also an enormous wage disparity, where people doing the exact same work make a tiny fraction of it if they’re new, and way, way more if they’ve been around a long time, even though the work is the same. So the system is designed for people who have been around a long time.

From a layperson’s perspective, then, how is that a bad thing?

Well, if it’s not designed for the children any more, it’s a bad thing if you care about the children. In other words, a system where a teacher is phoning it in…let’s even set aside the abhorrent teachers…these are the ones who are just coasting and not trying very hard any more. Is that good for the children? It’s clearly not, because they’re getting a substandard education. And we’re told that’s how it has to be, that we have to basically support a tenure system that will dismiss virtually anyone. Short of a felony, you really can’t lose your job for reasons related to merit in public schools. You can be laid off as a seniority-based layoff, but if you are just no good at teaching, the system doesn’t seem to care about eliminating those people. This is clearly bad for kids.

One thing in this vein that’s been in the news lately is about teachers who have been quietly fired for terrible things, up to and including sexual misconduct with their students, where sometimes they’re quietly shuffled to other districts. Did you deal with that in your film at all?

Oh yeah, that’s covered in the film. Even in the worst of the worst cases, like in one case, one county over a four-year period showed 0.03% of tenured teachers were let go, and in one case over the course of a decade, zero teachers were fired. Hundreds of schools, thousands of teachers, and not one firing in a decade. But if you’re not one of the worst of the worst, and you’re not one of those 0.03%, your records tend to be sealed, and there’s an agreement that, “okay, we’ll concede to let this one teacher go who was abusive to the kids and was an alcoholic, but even then we’ll fight for this amount of severance, and this amount of health-care coverage or whatever, then we’ll also fight for the records to be sealed, so no other district will hear about this person being fired.”

So does your film then go into solutions for this problem?

Yeah. I believe it should be school choice. Give the power to the parents, instead of a one-size-fits-all monopoly on schools. [Today] if the school works for your kid, great, if it doesn’t, too bad. Even if it’s not a good fit for your child, too bad. That’s the only school the taxpayers have authorized for your child. I don’t believe in that. That’s a way that failing schools can continue for years and decades and generations. It’s a way of saying that no matter how bad you are, we’ll never shut you down, never fire a teacher, anything. School choice means the money that taxpayers pay to educate that kid doesn’t belong to the bureaucracy. It’s designed for the kids to get educated. So if there’s a better option across the street, if a private school or a charter school can do the same job for the same price or even cheaper than that school, then the parents should have that option. The way it is now, there’s no incentive for the schools to get better. They’re guaranteed a supply of kids and a supply of money no matter how bad they are. That’s the solution. It’s not a choice between public schools and private schools, it’s about giving the parents power versus no power. That’s what school choice is all about.

How about charter schools? Are they a step in the right direction?

Yes. Anything that creates choices for parents is good. Anything that limits choices is bad. Charter schools aren’t all great, but some of them are fantastic. In all cases, though, they give alternatives to parents from maybe a failing school. In some cases there are some inner city schools that are horrible, that have terrible statistics with respect to proficiencies and academic achievement. Then a charter school opens up, and it might also be kind of lousy. The establishment loves to talk about that charter school and say “look at this school, it’s terrible.” They almost with delight point to a failing charter school, of which there are some, and trump it and promote and indulge in the failure of that school, because they’re trying to denigrate the validity of charter schools. But so often when that charter school closes, which it should, but the school the students get sent back to is actually worse, but no one talks about that, because it’s just a regular public school. When they’re bad, it’s often swept under the rug.

Well aren’t the criticisms for merit-based pay that is the way it works the teachers would be teaching for the test rather than just educating the children and encouraging them to branch out? What is your take on that criticism?

Right. What they often say is “we shouldn’t evaluate teachers, because evaluations can be done in a stupid way. So because they can be done in a stupid way, they should never be done. They are correct that they can be done in a stupid way, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do them. People intentionally oversimplify things. Let’s say you’re a 5th grade teacher , and at the end of the year your kids are only reading at a 4th grade level, but at the beginning of the year the kids were only reading at a 2nd-grade level. So you brought them up two grade levels in a single year, but people could look at that data and say that you’re a terrible teacher, because your kids are behind a grade level, then say they’re going to take away their funding. Or they could look at that data and say “you’re a great teacher, you brought kids two years of learning in one year.” The point is, there are sophisticated ways that the Rand Corporation has crunched numbers to do what’s called value-added teacher evaluations. Value-added means it looks specifically at the education you provided the kids during the time they were brought to you. It compares it to those same kids, what they learned the year before you and after you versus the year with you. And yet what does the other side say when all this is brought up? They say, “well, teachers are going to teach for the test, so it will destroy education.” You know, we have 30% of American high school kids not finishing high school Not even a high school degree. Look, there are places I wish they’d teach for the test, because they’d at least be teaching something. There are places we profiled in the movie, schools where 95% of the kids are not proficiently academically.

Let’s shift gears just a little bit, and speaking more generally about your movie, the other high-profile example of a movie like this is “Waiting for Superman.” How does your film compare to that one?

Well, first of all, we came out first {laughs} I wanted everyone to know that, so people don’t think we’re just following them. We were in development at the same time, but we actually came out first. The films stylistically different, though they reach similar conclusions. Our film is more of a public-policy film, while theirs is more of a human-interest approach to the same material.