Is “The Cartel” for or against traditional public schools?Hard to argue with. Unless you're the NJEA, which has posted a screed (no author attached) that attacks Bowdon and the film’s producer, Moving Picture Institute (MPI). Here’s a few choice excerpts:
This very question is out of date.
We're for schools that are effective and efficient, whether they be public district schools, charter schools or private schools. We're critical of schools that are dysfunctional, no matter what kind. Supporting all of any type of school, without regard to how different ones perform, is a way of picking one category of adults over another, at the childrens' expense.
MPI is “the AV department for the vast libertarian conspiracy.”You get the idea. Just to test this, uh, fact sheet, we found one of those “news accounts,” a 2007 New York Times piece on Thor Halvorssen, a founder of MPI. It’s true: the Times does say that he’s backed “pro-business, anti-Communist, and even anti-environmentalist” films, though the context is that Halvorssen seems to eschew labels: “He’s uncategorizable,” Nat Hentoff, the journalist and First Amendment advocate, said [in the article]. “Thor’s the embodiment of the nonpolitically correct person.”
“News accounts” note that MPI has backed films that are “pro-business, anti-Communist, and even anti-environmentalist.”
MPI “relies on some of the Right’s biggest contributors, major givers to the national voucher movement, Far Right think tanks and anti-NEA organizations – and New Jersey’s Excellent Education for Everyone.”
“One MPI board member is Elizabeth Koch, though it’s not immediately clear if she is related to the prominent Far-Right family with the same name.”
Labels: NJEA