The structures shaping US society are fundamentally broken. The conventional wisdom says that to get a good job, one must attend a good college; to attend a good college, one must attend a good high school that will offer AP courses and SAT prep; to attend a good high school, one must live in a good school district; and, to live in a good school district one must be lucky enough to have rich, white parents. Those are cataclysmically shattered structures and they do not make any sense, except to virulent racists. They also open up the possibility for all sorts of graft and corruption, which is what the film Bad Education takes as its subject.
Frank Tassone (Hugh Jackman) is the genius school superintendent who has made the Roslyn school system on Long Island the fourth-highest-rated public school district in the country. This has all kinds of spillover effects, both expected—higher rates of admission into Ivy League colleges for Roslyn graduates—and less expected, such as skyrocketing property values as New Yorkers with children outbid each other in an effort to live in the district. Tassone is making the population of Roslyn piles of cash and his single-minded ambition is to get Roslyn to the number one spot on the rankings.
All of this is abstract—ratings, property values, education quality—but on a material level the cracks, literally, are showing. The high school has a leaky ceiling. The assistant superintendent, Pam Gluckin (Allison Janney) drives a Corvette and owns multiple beach houses across two states. Tassone himself is a vain man with expensive suits and what he thinks are discrete plastic surgeries on his face are being noticed by his co-workers. Yet, no one does anything to investigate, because they are getting richer and their kids are getting into Yale.
That is, until Gluckin’s moronic son buys thousands of dollars of construction materials for a remodel of Gluckin’s home and uses the school credit card. No one would have noticed, even then, except a helpful hardware store clerk offered to have the materials delivered next time. He was so shocked that Gluckin’s son offered a residential address after using the school credit card that he reported it to his boss, who knew the head of the local school board.
Gluckin was forced to resign and had her administrator’s license seized, but, even still, no one dug deeper. No one had the time to be curious or diligent, because the Roslyn schools were superb and property values were rising. It took a high school sophomore writing for the school newspaper to go line by line through the school purchase records and find millions of dollars that were embezzled from the school district by Gluckin…and by golden boy Tassone, before the graft was caught and the corruption made public.
Bad Education is a straightforward, based-on-a-true-story film and is well worth a watch. It is a parable on the house-of-cards nature of late capitalism. What thousands of people relied upon—their wealth as guaranteed by their expensive house, that the child is bound to, deserves to, even, get into Harvard and that their tax dollars taken from their hard-earned pay were their way of contributing to those things—vanished overnight. It was all illusory: their wealth, their privilege, their assumed predestination to a life of success, fulfillment and comfort. A couple of dolts running the schools who were so brazen that they were buying first-class airline tickets, including one for their lover, for school-related business trips took it all away. Poof! and it was gone. Or as one famous keen observer of capitalism once put it, “All that is solid melts into air.”
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