The Cartel makes up for a lack of style and structure with stone cold facts

A union-busting doc with an adamant — if not quite apolitical — focus on the children slipping through the cracks, The Cartel uses New Jersey as Exhibit A in its case against this country's crooked education system. Though it is first in education spending, New Jersey has an abysmal dropout rate and equally dire testing scores; director Bob Bowdon cites what a former school superintendent calls "rampant, pervasive, institutionalized" budgetary corruption and a deeply entrenched, self-interested teachers' union as the culprits. Bowdon, a former local television reporter and anchorman, pulls together a familiar repertoire of talking heads, man-on-the-street interviews, remedial graphics and stilted B-roll, and this information-packed indictment ultimately plays like a feature-length "in-depth" news segment. Moving loosely from angle to angle — the tenure system, the plot against voucher programs, the stonewalling of charter schools — The Cartel makes up for what it lacks in style and structure with selective but stone-cold facts. Although a school-district president rolling up to a budgetary hearing in a white limo and an administration parking lot clogged with luxury cars are undeniably good gets, Bowdon's strength as a documentarian is more evident in the patience and logic with which he makes an argument for a state and a system in desperate need of reform.