The Cartel will be showing FREE at the Washington DC Indie Film Festival tomorrow Sunday, March 7 at 12 noon (Navy Memorial Museum/Heritage House).
Even though the website indicates 'buy tickets', the tickets are free. The filmmaker Bob Bowdon will be in attendance at this showing.
If you miss the free show, you can catch it locally again Friday, April 30 until the following Thursday at the E Street Cinema in DC.
Other major city national screenings in April can be found here
DVD release will be after the screenings are complete, most likely May 2010.
Here's the trailer:
Before you go out and protest to "fully fund the budget", watch this film and ask where MCPS spent your $2.0 BILLION.
UPDATE 3/26/10: The Cartel Wins Two 2010 Washington DC Independent Film Festival Awards:
*** Visionary Award
*** Audience Award, Best Documentary
A review of concerns about this movie can be found at:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nj.com/entertainment/tv/index.ssf/2009/10/the_cartel_movie_review_docume.html
A lively back-and-forth follows in the comments and reviews the concerns I have with the film's premise that public schools should be dismantled then everything will be just ducky.
Mr. Jacobs,
ReplyDeleteDid you see the movie?
I did and that wasn't the premise of the movie.
At yesterday's screening the public was also able to meet and talk with the film maker. He spoke at length after the movie.
The movie will be in DC Theaters the end of April.
Hope to see it soon. In the meantime, what level of wasted money are we willing to accept in MCPS? Over a million dollars wasted on buying the "Encore" system, when MCPS could have used the state's IEP system for free...and now MCPS has abandoned it. I'd call that "big waste."
ReplyDeleteThen there is the little, everyday "waste:" the lunches and dinners and catered meals provided by the handy American Express cards, for which there doesn't seem to be any accountability or control.
Isn't it possible to OPPOSE wastes like these, and still be a supporter of public education?
I haven't seen it. It's in special screenings only in terribly inconvenient locations. I went to reserve it on NetFlix but it is not yet available.
ReplyDeleteI invite people to see the commentary of people who HAVE seen it in the web page I provided. Being made aware of possible bias before seeing a documentary is helpful in virtually any instance.
The reviewer acknowledges the filmmaker's passing acknowledgment that a few/some/many schools DO deliver fine educations to our kids, but it spends the bulk on three inner city schools rife with corruption they can afford far less than Montgomery. It can skew perspective.
This is not to say such waste is not repugnant. Certainly it is. This very web site does a superb job of shedding light on illegitimate expenditures, many of which I have shared with my interest groups.
There is a YouTube clip showing reactions to the film and the comments section is littered with commentary about scrapping public education in general. My concerns that this film will be used as evidence of the superiority of private school are not unfounded.
If there is to be debate about the merits of voucher systems, that should probably get it's own thread, because it will become enormous.
Well... I am the filmmaker and neither I, nor the film advocates "dismantling" anything. As we say repeatedly in the film, there are some great public/district schools and some great teachers in them.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, my mother was a public school teacher. And I went to public school and had lots of good teachers. (Some bad ones too. Probably like you.)
Too often, this issue in the past has been clouded with what I call a toxic oversimplification -- you either believe throwing more money at dysfunctional schools is the answer and tenured teachers should be guaranteed jobs for life -- or you're accused of hating all teachers and all public schools.
On the contrary... taking either of those positions requires a absolute denial of common sense, and I reject this false duality.
Quite simply, I believe parents should be empowered, rather than top-down bureaucracies. That means the more school choice in all its forms the better -- charters, vouchers, home school collectives, etc. If parents are happy with a public/district school: great. If they're not: give them an alternative -- rather than what we have now in so many places.
Clearly, education can be demagogued by entrenched interests -- but it's all really very simple. There's a line in "The Cartel" where a former statewide teacher of the year says that if she had a child in a chronically failing school, (frequently a euphemism for "hellhole"), and she could get them into a better school with a voucher, she would do that.
So my question is: Would you?
If a voucher could get your child out of a dangerous, drug-infested school with gangs, and guns, and knives, and fights happening every day -- would you use it for your own kid?
Or would you leave him/her there, getting into fist fights with regularity, all for the purposes of a grand social experiment, (one, by the way, that's demonstrably failed)?
So all we're saying is if you'd save your own kid from a dropout-factory, hellhole school -- and maybe even do it like tomorrow -- please try to imagine that you love these other kids whom you don't know, as if they were your own. And then you'll want them out of there tomorrow too... and perhaps not squander another generation of inner-city kids to the politically correct mirage of monopoly-run, one-size-fits-all education, that's instead currently producing dropout rates of more than 50% in many American cities.
The "throw more money at the problem" crowd has had their day. They've simply lost this argument.
And anyone who gets more agitated about kids attending a school they like with vouchers than about sky high dropout rates, clearly isn't worried about children. I've met these people. Vouchers make them mad; you can even hear it in the tenor of their voices; their objections to vouchers become visceral and animated. But somehow, gigantic dropout rates, sometimes over 50%, just don't seem to bother them in nearly the same way.
What does it mean? To them, a kid getting no education at all is apparently better than if he/she went to a private school with a government scholarship. The latter certainly makes them angrier.
They may be advocating for something, but it's not children. They should be ashamed of themselves.
Please people. Just pretend their *your* kids, and you'll want them out of the horrible schools tomorrow too. Frequently, there's a better school right down the street.
And the good or excellent public/district schools -- won't have a thing to worry about, because parents & kids will want to stay there.
Thanks!
-- Bob Bowdon
http://www.TheCartelMovie.com