I’m glad that there are more movies and, specifically, documentaries coming out about what’s going on in the inner cities with respect to education. One of the better movies to come out is The Cartel. And while I understand that there are two sides to every story, my gut reaction to the entire education reform and the school choice movement is that one option works and one option fails. Put all of the phony baloney math and statistics aside and look at the results – the overwhelmingly vast majority of charter schools in inner city school districts (and the suburbs for that matter) are tremendous successes while the traditional public schools are failures.

The Cartel tries to give us some reasons why this phenomenon occurs. Here is some information that director Bob Bowdon posted on The Huffington Post regarding his movie and education reform:

Education status quo defenders routinely call school choice “simplistic,” and they mean it in the bad way.

Their bullet points go like this:

The problems of American education are dizzyingly complex. There are issues of absentee parents, bad nutrition, and cultural breakdown. There’s an entertainment culture beckoning our kids to hours of videos games, television shows and gross out YouTube videos. Throw in a diminished economy where even some of the best students can’t find work after graduation, and you get a whiff of the enormous complexity. Why on earth do these reformers believe that (Insert: school choice, charter schools, vouchers, scholarships) would be some magic pill to cure this swirling array of ills? These fixes are simplistic.

Indeed, for many of these people, the very concept of “complexity” is comforting. They believe the best solutions to social problems strike ornate compromises between a wide variety of stakeholders, each of which need carefully designed provisions to preserve their interests.

If they hear news of a 2,000 page health care bill passed by the House (that most Representatives don’t read), they shrug and say, “What’s the problem?” If the 9,400 page federal tax code has obvious loopholes, they want to add more pages to plug them. If a 165-page teachers’ contract spells out the Monday through Thursday workday as six hours, 57 minutes, and 30 seconds, and the rest of us say, “are you kidding me?” — they say, “so?”

Running deep in their psyches: “Complexity is for smart people.”

What they forget is that all the great causes in American history were based on simple questions. Should slavery be legal, or not? Should women have the right to vote, or not? Should we remove our troops from Vietnam, or not? Of course entire libraries of scholarship can be collected about intricacies of these issues; yes, we’re aware of that. The point is that the decisions can all be boiled down to elegantly uncomplicated questions.

Parental school choice, in fact, is a simple concept, and just like movements for abolition, suffrage or withdrawal from Vietnam, its simplicity doesn’t make it a bad idea.

I encourage you to read through Bowdon’s entire post over at the other website. And if you have the inclination, I encourage you to buy or rent The Cartel to see what’s going on in the school choice movement today!

Well, it turns out that I don’t like live bands in stores because it gets really loud, really quick! Yet, as I was browsing around the store and the band was playing, I really began to enjoy the music. In fact, at one point I found myself trying to figure out if there were any posters or signs indicating the band’s name because I wanted to look them up and see what the deal was with these guys.

After I left the store, some of the music that the band was singing was stuck in my head. When I got home I Googled some of their lyrics and found out that the band was named Cartel – a group that had some notoriety with some big time hits in the last few years and who had been on some MTV show. After finding that out, I was pretty impressed that a band with a national audience and a clear abundance of talent was playing in the local Best Buy. That’s pretty cool.

After doing some YouTubing to hear some more of the band’s songs, I wound up downloading their new album, Cycles, and I’m glad that I did because it is a great album. First things first with this album – there is something to be said for the lost art of track planning on an album. It used to be that you could pop in an album and listen to the whole thing without coming across a bad song or a poorly produced song. In recent years, I think that art has gone to the wayside and been replaced with poorly produced songs or songs that are essentially “filler” in between the commercial hits.

Cartel’s Cycles doesn’t have that problem at all. It was very enjoyable to listen to the entire album all the way through. In fact, the first four songs are very upbeat in their tempo with lyrics that are easy to understand and performances that are crystal clear and fun for the listener.

Granted, the style of Cartel’s music isn’t for everyone; I understand that people have different tastes. I have a wide variety of tastes, too. Cartel’s style can be defined as part alternative rock and part power pop (I don’t really know what power pop is, but that’s what the interwebs call this style). Take a listen to one of the songs from the album below and I think you’ll get at what type of music these guys sing.

While I enjoy all of the songs on this album, my favorite songs are the first four – Let’s Go, The Perfect Mistake, Faster Ride, and Deep South. In fact, I liked these songs so much that I went and got the two other albums that this band has put out and there’s pretty good, too.

This album, much like Owl City’s Ocean Eyes, are fun for me to listen to while I do web design and while I’m working on my computer for other reasons. Anyway, listen to that song embedded above and maybe some of their other stuff on YouTube and I’m sure that you’ll begin to like their stuff. Cycles by Cartel gets a high recommendation from JerseySmarts.com and yours truly. Check it out!