Award Winning Documentary Filmmaker Bob Bowdon Director of The Cartel Applauds Largest Number of NJ Charter School Approvals Since 1999

Bowdon’s Film Uncovered How The State Department Of Education Was Unfairly Denying Charter School Applications In An Apparent Attempt To Curry Favor With The Powerful Teacher Union

New Jersey (September 23, 2009) Wednesday afternoon, NJ Governor Jon Corzine’s press release cited a “record” number of new charter schools approved for the year, in direct response to the documentary film The Cartel. The movie shows how Corzine’s state department of education has systematically rejected new charter school applications in the past, sometimes only on the basis of clerical errors, to protect jobs among the state’s teachers’ unions.

The Cartel has been making waves all around the state. In June, it won the audience award at the Hoboken International Film Festival, and in July it won both the Jury Award and Audience Choice Award as Best Feature Documentary at the Jersey Shore Film Festival. It is also an official selection of the New Jersey Film Festival and will be shown this Friday night as a part of that festival’s program at Rutgers University.

The Director of The Cartel, Bob Bowdon, said “First, it’s instructive to note that the grand total of 8 new charters schools, less than a third of the applicants, constitutes a ‘record.’ And while these 8 new charter schools will likely offer some excellent new options for parents & students in a few towns, it’s obviously barely a drop in the bucket. For anyone to believe there’s been real reform of the charter approval process, the Department of Education should have to publish its reasons for rejecting the 19 other applications. That would allow applicants, parents and voters to assess the decisions, and decide for themselves whether these rejected schools shouldn’t have even been offered to parents as options or alternatives to the existing district schools.”

Bowdon says, “Still, today’s news of eight new charter schools is at least better than the one new charter school that was approved in 2008. The Cartel documentary has clearly been putting pressure on the NJ Department of Education.”

“There are simply two approaches to these decisions, transparency or secrecy, and today’s announcement does nothing to change a charter school approval process that is mysterious by design.”

“What New Jersey really needs,” Bowdon says, “is multiple charter authorizers. In New York state, for example, a school can obtain its charter from the NY State Department of Education, a local school district, or SUNY. And New York isn’t unique; many states across the country allow different groups like universities or community groups to grant school charters. But in New Jersey, no such luck. In New Jersey, power has been consolidated to just one authorizer — the State Department of Education. That bureaucratic bottleneck, originally put in place to appease the teachers’ unions, must be broken.”

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