bad education 2019

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‘Bad Education’ Review: Hugh Jackman Is Brilliant in Diabolically Smart American Crime Story

David ehrlich.

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One of the more beautiful things about being an American is that it’s easy to justify your own success — at least to yourself. This is the land of opportunity, and people are taught from an early age that they get what they deserve, and they deserve what they get; if they weren’t, the injustice of it all might spoil the fun. You don’t necessarily have to earn your good fortune, you just have to believe you’re entitled to it. Needless to say, we are up to that challenge! And we’ll do whatever it takes to keep everything in its right place.

With that in mind, it’s strange that, as Americans, we still tell ourselves that corruption is usually a symptom of greed, as opposed (or in addition) to something that happens when people can’t afford to question their own worth. It’s a red, white, and blue twist on a universal kind of perceptual asymmetry: When you do something wrong, you think of an excuse — when someone else does something wrong, you think of a motive. The incredible magic trick of Cory Finley ’s “ Bad Education ,” a diabolically smart true-life crime drama that stars Hugh Jackman in his best performance since “The Prestige,” is how it manages to balance that asymmetry in the most savage and softhearted of ways, inviting sympathy for the devil even after it convinces you why he should go to hell.

Heavy with poisoned humor and as panoramic as Finley’s “ Thoroughbreds ” was laser-focused, “Bad Education” is in no hurry to reveal the full picture; watching the first hour of the movie, it’s hard to imagine how this seemingly benign story of suburban malfeasance could possibly explode into the biggest embezzlement scandal in the history of the American school system. But the pieces are there from the moment the film starts, buried just under the sand. Screenwriter Mike Makowsky — whose script is a well-calculated masterclass in narrative economy — takes us back to the Long Island high school where he was a student in 2002.

From the looks of things, that seemed like a great time to go there. Facebook hasn’t been invented yet, college early-admission rates are soaring, and the cash-flush administration is about to pass a budget that allocates $7.5 million for a useless but presumably cool-looking “skybridge.” They’ve earned it. When “Bad Education” begins, Roslyn, New York, is the number-four school district in the entire country, and much of the credit for that belongs to the man, the myth, the legend — Dr. Frank Tassone (Jackman).

It’s rare to see people react to a superintendent like he’s — let’s go with a 2002-appropriate reference — one of the All-American Rejects, but it’s basically pandemonium whenever this guy appears before the PTA. And can you blame them? This is the guy who’s going to get their kids into Yale, even if he has to write all their recommendations himself (Frank never forgets a student). He’ll grant your son extra time on a test if you ask him nicely, he’ll join you for an extracurricular discussion about Dickens at an otherwise all-moms book club, and he won’t even embarrass you when you try to kiss him in the kitchen after everyone else has gone home. Besides, any man that handsome — he’s a dead ringer for P.T. Barnum! — is probably used to being flirted with by now, and there’s a tantalizing layer of sadness beneath that perfect head of slicked-back hair. Frank has been a widower for as long as anyone can remember, but he’s still never seen without his wedding ring.

This may not sound like a particularly engaging world, and “Bad Education” resists the temptation to sex it up for the sake of things, but Finley’s rigid compositions and Lyle Vincent’s gliding camera moves galvanize Frank’s administrative fiefdom with a sense of absolute purpose. The office is a well-oiled machine. Frank and assistant superintendent Pam Gluckin (an excellent Allison Janney , as if there’s any other kind) are a perfect twosome, even if she tantalizes him with the carbs she’s sworn off. Even the millionaire school board president (Ray Romano) is thrilled. God is in his heaven, and all is right with the world.

Except, it isn’t. And it’s not the leak in the high school’s hallway ceiling. Secret lives and brazen incongruities abound. In a film where even the most innocent scenes crackle with nervous energy and even frustrated erotic tension, a chance Las Vegas encounter between Frank and an old student (Rafael Casal) is electric with a where-else-could-this-be-going intensity. Your first inclination will probably be to pity Frank for feeling like he needs to live in the closet. Is this the mask that always seems like it’s about to slip off his face? Did his wife know when she was alive?

Meanwhile, back on the ranch, an intrepid student reporter (“Blockers” and “Hala” actress Geraldine Viswanathan , continuing to strike the right balance in every part she plays), is writing a story about the skybridge. That wouldn’t be a problem if Frank hadn’t encouraged her realize her full potential and not settle for a puff piece; it wouldn’t be a problem if Pam’s idiot son (hopelessly typecast “American Vandal” star Jimmy Tatro) hadn’t bought hardware supplies on the corporate card she’s been using to steal money from the school for years. Janney, who affects a hard Long Island accent that resists parody even during her funniest scenes, affects the part of a wounded lioness; survival is top priority, but it’s not that simple. Pam isn’t a sociopath, just someone with a warped perception of what’s best for everyone. And she’s about to be the victim of a generational reckoning that she never thought necessary.

She isn’t the only one. “Bad Education” always finds its way back to Frank, but Makowsky’s patient script has a knack for catching the superintendent unawares. Here is someone who doesn’t have the good sense to realize that he’s the main character of a movie; someone who thinks that he’s always just outside the eye of the storm. That misperception gives Jackman the space needed to be life-sized in a way that his “bigger” roles seldom have.

This is the most human performance he’s ever given, wrapped in translucent vanity and cut with finely sliced layers of doubt and denial. Whether locked in an oppressive close-up (the vibrating film stock reacting to even the most imperceptible muscle twitch) or trying to wrestle back control of Frank’s domain, Jackman always threads the needle between shock and showmanship. Through him, Frank seems both innocent and guilty at all times, and the actions he’s able to justify (good optics sometimes require bad choices!) steer him right into his blind spots. Early in the film, Frank tells a struggling lower schooler that he was also bad at math, and now look at him: He’s the guy who designs the math curriculum. The tragic thing about Frank — and the most brilliant thing about “Bad Education” — is that he honestly doesn’t understand why that might not add up.

“Bad Education” has some blind spots of its own, not least of which is a reluctance to dig into Frank’s stunted desire for upward mobility. He doesn’t want to be richer, but he still resents the fact that he makes a little bit more than a teacher’s salary while his boss is a multimillionaire; affluent local parents lean on Frank like every test their kids take is a matter of life and death, and they don’t even bother to say thank you once the college acceptance letters go out. “Bad Education” is appreciably embittered about teachers and on the school administrator’s behalf, but the film is doing so many different things — and juggling enough different tones to make Bong Joon-ho blush — that it has to squeeze the distance between its peaks and valleys. Michael Abels’ jangly, effective score sounds like a malfunctioning factory assembly line, and the disorder is such that Finley can’t spare the extra moment he needs to explore the relationship between the underpaid faculty and the wealthy community they serve.

However disappointing it might be that “Bad Education” is too delicate (and true) to really go wild and let Finley indulge in the flamboyance that made “Thoroughbreds” such a wicked treat, this is a young director who can see the whole chess game 20 moves in advance. Whatever compromises he makes are excused and then some by a remarkable third-act scene that defies every rule about conventional filmmaking — a wordless and shockingly moving dance number so human and desperate that it makes you take all your own judgments with a grain of salt. The “Nightshift” sequence from Claire Denis’ “35 Shots of Rum” may never be equalled, but Finley comes awfully close. Dr. Frank Tassone deserves what he gets, but — for at least one perfect moment — we’re all invited to wonder if he truly gets what he deserves.

“Bad Education” premiered at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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‘bad education’: film review | tiff 2019.

Hugh Jackman, Allison Janney and Ray Romano star in 'Thoroughbreds' director Cory Finley's second feature, 'Bad Education,' which was inspired by a school district scandal on Long Island.

By Jordan Mintzer

Jordan Mintzer

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An embezzlement scheme whose total take was $11.2 million seems like peanuts compared to Enron, Bernie Madoff or any other billion-dollar fraud of our epoch.

But in Cory Finley’s engagingly devious new dramedy Bad Education , it takes on the guise of a real-world morality play where the mighty fall from up high — even if up high means the superintendent seat of a public school district on Long Island.

The Bottom Line Gets a solid B+ without even cheating.

Based on a scandal that rocked the upmarket New York suburb of Roslyn over a decade ago, and adapted to the screen by a former student, Mike Makowsky, who witnessed the ordeal firsthand, the film marks something of a departure for Finley from his pitch-black comic debut Thoroughbreds , which drew more than one comparison to Heathers .

Here, the satire is softened to let reality sink in, with characters and plot points drawn from actual sources, resulting in a movie that plays like a slow-burn investigative thriller with comic touches and a major comeuppance in the last act. It’s perhaps less flamboyantly enjoyable than Finley’s first feature, but it also digs deeper into the souls of its characters, asking how a few people meant to ensure the pedagogy of hundreds of children could flunk out so badly.

The man behind all the monkey business was one Frank Tassone ( Hugh Jackman ), the beloved Roslyn School District superintendent who rules over his fiefdom like a lifelong educator, assuaging the fears of overzealous parents and encouraging his students with generous pep talks. He’s assisted by Pam Gluckin ( Allison Janney ), who minds the budget in the office next door, and flanked by school board president Bob Spicer ( Ray Romano ), who works as a local realtor and sees Frank’s success as his ticket to major bucks.

With his house-of-wax complexion, oversize suits and jet-black pompadour, Frank resembles a textbook New Yawk bureaucrat, even if he reads Dickens for fun and appears to be more refined. Jackman slips into such a role perfectly, staring beady-eyed at his interlocutors in the creepy way we all remember school officials used to look at us, and joining Janney, Queens boy Romano and the rest of the cast in a chorus of Long Island accents that could constitute its own Billy Joel fan club.

Initially the film’s plotting seems a bit subdued as we follow Frank on his mission to make Roslyn number one in the region — only in such a location-specific movie could the competing towns of Jericho and Syosset be referred to as “sons of bitches” — watching as he deals with the dull day-to-day duties of running his district. Things seem to be going fine, and Frank seems like a great guy, so why should anybody worry?

It’s at this point that the superintendent dishes out advice to an eager but somewhat inhibited student reporter, Rachel (the excellent Geraldine Viswanathan), telling her to take the puff piece she’s writing about a planned school renovation a little more seriously. Little does he know that Rachel will become the Woodward & Bernstein to his Richard Nixon, spinning her story into a full-blown inquiry that will open up a giant can of worms.

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Things slowly but surely unravel, and then completely fall apart, as we learn that the supposedly grieving widower Frank leads a double life both professionally, where he’s been generously serving himself from the district cash till for a good decade, and personally, when we see him start a fling with a former pupil, Kyle (Rafael Casal), now working as a bartender in Vegas. Meanwhile, right-hand gal Pam has been doing some unruly things with the official credit card, including making major improvements on a house in the Hamptons that seems way over her pay grade. This will get her fired, but it will also be the tip of the iceberg in a much bigger conspiracy.

If Finley eases us into the action during the first hour, teasing out lots of information with occasional jokes and digressions, his film snowballs into a tragic-comic tale of retribution in the second half as Frank’s glistening mask of Botox tumbles, taking down everyone else in the room. It’s at this point that emotions run high, especially during a rather moving montage and dance sequence — set to Moby’s “In This World,” which came out a few years before the actual scandal broke — where we see Frank experiencing one sad last hurrah before his number’s up.

While the filmmaking overall is less distinctive here than in Thoroughbreds , the characters seem more lifelike and the story itself is riddled with irony. Frank is not only undone by one of the very students he tried to motivate, but the movie ponders what his guilt means in a place where parents, many of them way wealthier than he is, are constantly pushing him for favors and then showing little gratitude for it: Didn’t the guy deserve a few million for helping so many of their kids get into Harvard?

Working once again with cinematographer Lyle Vincent, Finley captures this ethical shit show in cool colors and wide lenses that frame Jackman against some of L.I.’s finest schools, administrative offices and seven-figure homes. Production design by Meredith Lippincott and costumes by Alex Bovaird further add to the suburban authenticity, turning Bad Education into a paean to bad taste and even more questionable morals.

Production companies: Automatik, Sight Unseen, Slater Hall Cast: Hugh Jackman, Allison Janney, Geraldine Viswanathan, Ray Romano,  Alex Wolff Director: Cory Finley Screenwriter: Mike Makowsky Producers: Fred Berger, Eddie Vaisman, Julia Lebedev, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Oren Moverman, Mike Makowsky Executive producers: Leonid Lebedev, Caroline Jaczko Director of photography: Lyle Vincent Production designer: Meredith Lippincott Costume designer: Alex Bovaird Editors: Louise Ford Composer: Michael Abels Casting directors: Ellen Lewis, Kate Sprance Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Special Presentations) Sales: Endeavor Content (U.S. and international), CAA (U.S.)

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‘Bad Education’: Film Review

Hugh Jackman delivers an acting master class, trading on his charismatic star persona to reveal the rotten core of bad-apple superintendent Frank Tassone.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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Going forward, what will Hollywood do when it needs a Kevin Spacey type? The disgraced Oscar winner is precisely the actor a movie like “ Bad Education ” calls for: Cory Finley ’s audacious second feature centers on the true story of Frank Tassone, district superintendent of the Roslyn School District in Long Island, N.Y. — a hero to parents and students alike, responsible for turning Roslyn High into one of the state’s top-achieving public schools, while exploiting the trust the community put in him. It’s a tricky, two-faced role that calls for the kind of firm-handshake, direct-eye-contact duplicity Spacey brought to “House of Cards” and half a dozen movies before it. Go ahead, Google “Frank Tassone” and tell me that I’m wrong.

Now, Hugh Jackman isn’t the actor I would’ve expected to fill those shoes. He’s more movie star than character actor, and this role presents him in such an unflattering light — quite literally so, shooting its cast such that their skin looks like raw chicken and every wrinkle casts a shadow — that you’d think his agent would have advised him against it. (George Clooney’s probably did.) That’s what’s so courageous about Jackman’s decision, and one of several reasons that “Bad Education” is the best work he’s ever done.

Here’s a star at the height of his powers leveraging his own appeal to remind that even our heroes are fallible and that you can never really judge someone from the outside. And Finley — whose only prior feature credit is the ice-cold, Patricia Highsmith-worthy high-wire act “Thoroughbreds” — is every bit the director to bring it home, pairing Jackman with an equally astonishing Allison Janney as school business administrator Pam Gluckin, Tassone’s creative-accounting accomplice. Finley, who clearly thrives when dramatizing morally complicated situations, doesn’t do the first thing you’d expect from any telling of this national-headline-making story (one that was first exposed by the school paper, the Hilltop Beacon): He doesn’t sensationalize it. Not that it would have been wrong to do so.

It worked for Martin Scorsese in “The Wolf of Wall Street.” It worked for Steven Soderbergh in “The Informant.” Splash it up — that’s the obvious answer. Make the colors pop, the movie’s carotid artery bulge. That’s how such material is usually played. Look at this story on paper — a high school student exposes an $11 million embezzlement scheme perpetrated by the institution’s most admired figure — and you might expect a tongue-in-cheek cross between “Election” and “To Die For” (the Gus Van Sant-directed satire inspired by Pamela Smart, a high school employee locked up after enlisting her teenage lover to murder her hubby).

Written by Mike Makowsky (“I Think We’re Alone Now”), who was attending Roslyn Middle School when the Tassone scandal broke, “Bad Education” doesn’t shy away from the humor of the situation, but it doesn’t go for the cheap laughs either (unless you count some of the distractingly tacky decorating choices in Gluckin’s ready-for-remodeling home). With their strong accents and “Sopranos”-like way of dressing, the movie’s all-too-trusting Long Island residents would’ve been an easy target for parody, but that’s not the tone Finley’s going for. From the high-contrast, stark-widescreen look of things, he’s most interested in the way that people like Tassone and Gluckin could rationalize what they were doing.

That’s easy: Of all the careers in America, educators are by far the most undercompensated. In New York, where the cost of living is high and the real estate outrageous (the latter ironically exacerbated by the quality of the public schools), how are teachers supposed to afford being part of the community they serve? That doesn’t justify graft, mind you, but it suggests how people who’ve dedicated their lives to a low-earning field might find themselves bent toward skimming a little something extra for themselves out of the school budget.

“Bad Education” makes a point of showing how much Tassone meant to the community. Early on (the year is 2002, as signified by flip phones, compact discs and other period details), Tassone is seen tweezing his nose hairs before going onstage to take credit for turning the school into a success. Roslyn is ranked No. 4 in the country. Test scores are up. Seniors are getting into Ivy League schools in record numbers. And Roslyn is set to break ground on a $7.5 million “sky walk” that could give the community a massive boost.

Rachel, a sophomore played by “Blockers” standout Geraldine Viswanathan , has just joined the school paper, whose editor isn’t prepared for the deep dive into the school’s financial records that she has in mind. “We are an extracurricular designed to get us into good colleges,” he says. But Rachel (a fictional character based on an actual student journalist) has something to prove — to herself; to her father (Harid Hillon), who was canned in an insider-trading scandal; and to Tassone, who truly cares about the students, encouraging her to turn the puff-piece assignment into something meaningful.

At times, the story borders on the incredible, and it may spoil the surprise to read some of the details that follow. Through an imbecilic mistake — in which Gluckin’s son charges thousands of dollars of home renovation supplies to the school account — the school board gets wind of Gluckin’s financial misdeeds. When it happens, audiences don’t know whether or to what degree Tassone is involved, and it’s fascinating to watch Jackman in action: Like a master politician (or a brilliant actor), he sizes up the situation, assesses his audience and begins to spin things to best protect all involved. In other movies, scenes like these are played such that viewers can see the con man’s hand, but Jackman keeps a poker face, which protects the remaining surprises until such time that Rachel can reveal them.

True-crime movies so often serve to reinforce the notion that wrongdoers are eventually brought to justice in this country. But “Bad Education” refuses to get so reductively didactic. Yes, Tassone and Gluckin stole millions of dollars, but they also made Roslyn an extremely successful school (if you don’t dwell on the leaky ceilings and outdated equipment). When certain details of Tassone’s private life come to light — including a reunion with a former student (Rafael Casal of “Blindspotting”) and an unconventional arrangement with one of the school’s mysterious suppliers (Stephen Spinella) — one may be tempted to judge. But the real takeaway is how hard that can be.

Maybe Spacey isn’t the only one who can handle the ambiguity such a performance demands. The way Jackman plays it, Tassone was a villain who didn’t see himself as such. Finley finds creative ways to suggest the discrepancy between inner and outer selves. The hair-slicked, health-conscious superintendent is constantly watching his cholesterol, forgoing carbs in favor of charcoal smoothies — which amounts to nourishing his insides with what looks like black bile. Late in the game, before the jig is up, he goes in for a face-lift — another reminder of the mask Tassone wears (and an unexpected sight for a now-50-year-old movie star). Appearances can be deceiving. This we know. But how do young people cope with having their images of their heroes shattered? And is it really any easier for adults? “Bad Education” can be a hard lesson to accept, but a necessary one in how the world works.

Reviewed at Toronto Film Festival (Special Presentations), Sept. 8, 2019. Running time: 108 MIN.

• Production: An HBO release of an Automatik, Sight Unseen, Slater Hall production. (Int'l sales: Endeavor Content, Los Angeles.) Producers: Fred Berger, Eddie Vaisman, Julia Lebedev, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Oren Moverman, Mike Makowsky. Executive producers: Leonid Lebedev, Caroline Jaczko.
• Crew: Director: Cory Finley. Screenplay: Mike Makowsky, based on the New York Magazine article "Bad Superintendent" by Robert Kolker. Camera (color, widescreen): Lyle Vincent. Editor: Louise Ford. Music: Michael Abels.
• With: Hugh Jackman, Allison Janney, Ray Romano, Geraldine Viswanathan

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Bad Education (2019)

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Bad Education

  TV-MA | biographical dramas | 1 HR 49 MIN | 2019

A respected Long Island school superintendent (Hugh Jackman) and his assistant (Allison Janney) turn up in a massive embezzlement scheme.

• Home Box Office (HBO)

Summary Long Island school superintendent Frank Tassone (Hugh Jackman) and his assistant superintendent for business, Pam Gluckin (Allison Janney), are credited with bringing Roslyn School District unprecedented prestige. Frank, always immaculately groomed and tailored, is a master of positive messaging, whether before an audience of community l ... Read More

Directed By : Cory Finley

Written By : Mike Makowsky, Robert Kolker

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Hugh Jackman

Frank tassone.

Big Bob Spicer

Welker white.

Allison Janney

Pam gluckin.

Annaleigh Ashford

Jenny aquila, stephanie kurtzuba, carol schweitzer, calvin coakley, chad schweitzer.

Geraldine Viswanathan

Rachel bhargava, sung yun cho, joyce - first agent, justin swain, shawn - second agent, laura patinkin, irene - third agent.

Kathrine Narducci

Sharon katz, brent langdon, todhunter - first teacher, tia deshazor, maya - second teacher, victor verhaeghe, doug bressler.

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Joseph scalvo, brian sgambati, conference speaker.

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What ‘Bad Education’ Got Right — and Wrong — About the Real-Life Scandal

• By Ej Dickson

The only thing better than a fictionalized version of a real-life scandal is one that prominently features Long Island accents, and HBO ‘s Bad Education  ticks all those boxes and more. Based on a mid-2000s scandal in Roslyn, a well-off suburb of New York City, the movie tells the story of Superintendent Frank Tassone (a brilliantly creepy Hugh Jackman), a superficially charming and ambitious school superintendent who is arrested for embezzling millions from the school district. The case involved multiple arrests and millions of dollars, and would later become known as the largest school embezzlement scandal in U.S. history.

The film depicts how for years, Tassone and his second-in-command Pamela Gluckin (Allison Janney) brazenly used school funds to pay for their lavish lifestyles, which for Tassone included face lifts and first-class flights to London with his much younger boyfriend. Yet because the school has a high Ivy League admit rate, Tassone avoids the notice of authorities, until a dogged high school reporter (Geraldine Viswanathan) blows the lid off the scandal. Eventually, Tassone was sentenced to four to 10 years in prison, and was released on good behavior in 2010. Gluckin was sentenced to three to nine years in prison for stealing $4.9 million; she was released in 2011, and died in 2017.

Bad Education  is based on a  New York  magazine story by reporter Robert Kolker , and for the most part the film is relatively faithful to its source material. Yet there are a few key deviations, with the real-life Tassone taking umbrage with some details of Jackman’s portrayal of him. Here are just a few things the movie got right — and wrong — about the scandal.

1) Tassone did indeed throw Pamela Gluckin under the bus while concealing the extent of his own embezzlement. 

According to Bad Education,  Pamela Gluckin’s embezzlement is discovered when her son rings up a hefty tab from a hardware store, charging it to the school’s credit card; she is later confronted by members of the school board and Tassone, a longtime friend of hers, who refers to her as a “sociopath” before calling for her resignation. He then convinces the school board not to report the theft to the authorities, for fear of hurting Roslyn High School’s reputation and college acceptance numbers.

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Per Kolker’s article, this confrontation — and Tassone’s betrayal of Gluckin — is fairly close to what actually happened. Unlike in the film, however, it took a full two years after Gluckin was fired for Tassone to be investigated for his own misdeeds. Even after her firing came to light, Tassone continued to deflect blame, allowing angry parents to target their ire at the school board for covering it up, rather than at him. “[He] was seen by Roslynites as valiantly coming to the board’s defense, telling everyone who would listen how upset he was, how betrayed they all felt by Gluckin,” Kolker writes for New York  magazine.

2) Both Tassone and Gluckin were extremely brazen about their purchases.

The movie depicts both Tassone and Gluckin flagrantly flaunting their lavish lifestyles. Gluckin is depicted as particularly egregious, hosting guests in the Hamptons at one of her three homes, and blithely tossing around the school credit card to pay for her niece’s PlayStation. Indeed, it does appear that both Gluckin and Tassone were pretty blatant about their purchasing habits, with Gluckin driving around in a Jaguar with the vanity plate DUNENUTN (a detail that’s thankfully captured in the film) and Tassone using $56,645 of schools funds to pay for a Manhattan weight-loss doctor. His predilection for cosmetic surgery was also well noted by parents.

From Kolker’s New York  magazine article: “Says one parent: ‘Suddenly it’s not Frank in a Ford Taurus with his pants way up to here — it’s Frank with his hair slicked back and a face-lift.’ Parents and teachers couldn’t fail to notice long light scars behind his ears. A few years into his tenure, he showed up to a parents’ meeting with small bruises around both eyes. He said he had been boxing, but people in Roslyn know an eye tuck when they see one.”

3) The character of Rachel Bhagavra is a composite of the Hilltop Beacon ‘s staff. 

One of the most shocking aspects of the scandal, as depicted by Bad Education,  is that it was uncovered not by the mainstream press, but by a high school newspaper — specifically, one dogged student journalist (Viswanathan) at the  Hilltop Beacon,  who breaks the story despite being discouraged by the paper’s senior staff and by Tassone himself.

Watch Hugh Jackman Face Up to Corruption in 'Bad Education' Trailer

Why hugh jackman's wolverine isn't in 'dark phoenix'.

It’s absolutely true that the student newspaper the  Hilltop Beacon  broke the story, which was later picked up nationwide. But Bjahavra herself is not based on a real person, screenwriter Mike Magovsky told Slate , referring to her as “a part composite, part invention meant to be an audience surrogate who is finding out information with us.” She appears to be in part based on Rebekah Rombom, then-editor-in-chief of the  Beacon , who wrote an article for the  New York Times  discussing how the paper broke the story.

According to her account, her reporting didn’t arise from being assigned to another “puff piece,” as is depicted in the film; rather, she and her co-editor received a tip that an anonymous letter was floating around accusing a school district employee (later identified as Gluckin) of stealing money. The letter prompted the board of education to call for an emergency meeting, which was attended and reported on by Rombom. “I believe it was inevitable that this story would have surfaced eventually. All we did was push it there a little faster,” she wrote.

4) Tassone was not closeted, nor did he date a former student.

In the movie, Tassone is seen flirting with a Las Vegas bartender named Kyle (Rafael Casal), whom he recognizes as a former student of his. Tassone then has an affair with Kyle, jetting back and forth from New York to Vegas and flying him first-class to London, unbeknownst to his longtime partner Tom (as portrayed by Stephen Spinella, whose name was changed in the film from Steven).

Kyle is actually a fictionalized version of Tassone’s former boyfriend Jason Daughterty, a 32-year-old former exotic dancer with whom Tassone actually purchased a house. He was not Tassone’s former student, and in an interview with the Coach Mike podcast, Tassone seemed to take particular umbrage with that aspect of the film’s portrayal. He also took issue with the fact that the film portrayed him as closeted, going to great lengths to conceal his sexual orientation by keeping a photo of his deceased wife on his desk. (He also denies that his partner didn’t know about his boyfriend and that he had an open marriage.)

“I’m not ashamed of being a gay man, and again, they made it seem somewhat sordid,” Tassone said. “That bothered me and upset me when the detective questioned [husband] Steven, and he implied that Steven didn’t even know I was married. That was not the case. And I don’t understand why they had to bring my sexuality into the film.”

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Pushy parents basking in the reflected glory of driving their kids toward extreme excellence is not exactly a new phenomenon. Long before the college admissions scandal that brought down corporate executives and Hollywood stars alike, the pursuit of academic superiority—real or imagined—has inspired perfectly sensible people to go to insane lengths. The right neighborhood with the right schools, a packed schedule of the right kinds of activities and athletics—it’s all to achieve the greater goal of sending their children to the right Ivy League university which will prepare them for the right lucrative career.

The top administrators at the Roslyn, New York, school district seemed not only to understand this instinct but also to exploit it for their own personal gain. “ Bad Education ” explores their real-life embezzlement scheme, which came crashing down when the high-school newspaper broke the story in 2004. Spending nearly $8 million on a sky bridge to beautify a campus seems reasonable when you’re trying to exude an aura of success—when you’re the fourth-ranked district in the country, gunning for that No. 1 spot. With that much money flying around, skimming a little here and there for a bagel or jewelry or renovations on your beach house in the Hamptons is no biggie.

Director Cory Finley finds the dark humor within this scandal, which he depicts with wit, style and a terrific cast. Hugh Jackman does some of the best work of his long and varied career as the superintendent, Dr. Frank Tassone, whose charisma and polished image disguised a multitude of secrets. Jackman plays on his usual charm and looks to great effect. But there’s something sinister within the slickness that’s unsettling from the first time we see him, spritzing cologne and trimming nose hairs in the mirror of the boys’ bathroom in extreme close-up. Frank clearly cares deeply and works hard to recall names and personal details of students and parents alike throughout the district; we can still see glimmers of the calling that drew him to this challenging profession in the first place. Fundamentally, he’s a pleaser and he wants to be liked—yet increasingly, he savors the fame and power that come with being in a position of authority in an affluent community. And as Frank and his second-in-command (played brilliantly by a brash Allison Janney ) find themselves squirming to survive when their $11.2 million scheme comes to light, their flaws and follies become even more glaringly evident.

Finley’s follow-up to “ Thoroughbreds ,” one of my favorite films of 2018, doesn’t seek to dazzle with sleek, showy camerawork like that film did. But it’s similarly interested in mining the depths of out darkest impulses, and doing so with sharp satire. ( Mike Makowsky , who was a middle school student in Roslyn when the embezzlement scandal broke, wrote the script.) “Bad Education” also calls to mind the great Alexander Payne film “ Election ,” with its students who are smarter and savvier than you’d expect and teachers who aren’t as mature and responsible as you’d hope. Finley actually could have used a bit more of Payne’s sharp bite in tackling this material. Geraldine Viswanathan radiates a quiet but increasingly assertive confidence as the high school reporter whose tough questions and thorough document searches reveal the district’s financial irregularities. Just as compelling as what she finds is her internal debate over how to handle that information. She knows what’s the right thing to do—but what if that’s the wrong move for her future?

That’s the dilemma that also plagues the school board members—led by a vividly haggard Ray Romano —when they first learn of the administrators’ indiscretions. Going public would not only jeopardize the standing of the school district nationwide, it also would damage its reputation locally, which would make it harder for high-school seniors to gain acceptance at top universities, which would cause property values to plummet.

For a long time, Jackman keeps us guessing as to the amount of Frank’s knowledge and the depth of his involvement. Janney’s Pam Gluckin chats casually about flagrant misuse of her district credit card over the buzz of the blender as she mixes margaritas. (And the film’s costume and production design find just the right amount of Long Island tacky and flashy without diving over the top into parody.) Frank, on the other hand, contains myriad, fascinating multitudes. As Jackman gets older, he seems less interested in getting us to like him and more inclined to play complicated characters who make questionable decisions. Wildly violent as his Wolverine may be in the “ X-Men ” universe—particularly in the excellent, standalone “ Logan ”—he’s still essentially a hero. “Bad Education” gives him the chance to play someone who may be doing some truly bad things, and you can tell he’s really sinking his claws into the role this time.

Premieres on HBO on Saturday, 4/25.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film Credits

Bad Education (2020)

103 minutes

Hugh Jackman as Frank Tassone

Allison Janney as Pam Gluckin

Ray Romano as Bob Spicer

Alex Wolff as Nick Fleischman

Geraldine Viswanathan as Rachel Kellog

• Cory Finley
• Mike Makowsky

Cinematographer

• Lyle Vincent
• Louise Ford
• Michael Abels

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Bad Education

2004, Drama/Crime, 1h 44m

What to know

Critics Consensus

A layered, wonderfully-acted, and passionate drama. Read critic reviews

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Bad education   photos.

When an old friend brings filmmaker Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez) a semi-autobiographical script chronicling their adolescence, Enrique is forced to relive his youth spent at a Catholic boarding school. Weaving through past and present, the script follows a transvestite performer (Gael García Bernal) who reconnects with a grade school sweetheart. Spurred on by this chance encounter, the character reflects on her childhood sexual victimization and the trauma of closeting her sexual orientation.

Rating: NC-17 (Explicit Sexual Content)

Genre: Drama, Crime, Lgbtq+

Original Language: Spanish (Spain)

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Producer: Agustín Almodóvar , Pedro Almodóvar

Writer: Pedro Almodóvar

Release Date (Theaters): Mar 19, 2004  original

Release Date (Streaming): Jan 25, 2015

Box Office (Gross USA): $5.2M

Runtime: 1h 44m

Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics

Production Co: El Deseo S.A., Televisión Española (TVE), Canal+ España

Sound Mix: Surround, Dolby Digital

Cast & Crew

Fele Martínez

Enrique Goded

Gael García Bernal

Ángel , Juan , Zahara

Daniel Giménez Cacho

Padre Manolo

Lluís Homar

Sr. Manuel Berenguer

Javier Cámara

Paca , Paquito

Petra Martínez

Nacho Pérez

Raúl García Forneiro

Alberto Ferreiro

Enrique Serrano

Pedro Almodóvar

Agustín Almodóvar

Esther García

Executive Producer

Alberto Iglesias

Original Music

José Luis Alcaine

Cinematographer

José Salcedo

Film Editing

Joserra Cadiñanos

Antxón Gómez

Art Director

Paco Delgado

Costume Design

Jean-Paul Gaultier

News & Interviews for Bad Education

Alex Wolff’s Five Favorite Films

Cannes 2009: The Tomato Report – Almodovar’s Broken Embraces a Comfortable Favourite

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Critic Reviews for Bad Education

Audience reviews for bad education.

I havn't watched many Almodovar films but besides â~Talk to Herâ(TM) I always feel his aesthetic style takes centre stage from any of the emotion of his stories and I felt that this was the case in Bad Education. Still, I will watch more Almodovar hoping to find something that will match Talk to Her

A drag queen convinces a film director to shoot a film about his childhood molestation by a priest. As I'm exploring Almodovar's oeuvre, I'm seeing similar subjects. There is almost always an element of abnormal sexuality, and the several scenes of homosexual sex check that box. Drag queens? Also check. But these are surface elements. The reason I think I'm not diving into Almodovar is that many of his films try to do so much at once. <i>Bad Education</i> is a love story, a noir, a political statement against the clergy's sexual misconduct, and a melodrama, and I think all the "styles" and subject matters collide. What results is such a hodgepodge that I think people are able to attach themselves to elements of the film while ignoring the whole. Overall, <i>Bad Education</I> is for Almodovar fans, and that's about it.

A movie you have to watch if you like serious drama, it's so complicated than it seemed. The combination of different philosophical elements was blended really well

"La mala education" or bad education as we know it better, is the first almodovar film not centered over women. But since he can't get too far from them, he based this movie on dragqueens and gays :) Well this introduction may be quite harsh, because this is a very good movie, and like every almodovar film, it brilliantly succeeds on every aspect. The European genius is always on top of the viewer regarding the mysteries conceded deep within his plots, making all his films highly unpredictable, a characteristic essential for every critic and moviegoer, and for me, the essence of every deep picture. This is the nearest of Pedro almodovar doing an autobiographical portrait of himself, although the film was never commercialized that way. Gael Garcia bernal is not one of the actors I admire, but he succeeded in delivering a good performance in the three roles he's been handed. Not a film for all tastes, but if you're In deep European films, you might not wanna miss this.

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Based on a True Story

The perception of perfection, hugh jackman & allison janney: virtual conversation, rotten tomatoes® score.

Bad Education is a strong film overall, especially during a time in which we are bereft of theatrical releases and original ideas.

Frank Tassone isn’t a likeable character; in fact, he’s rather detestable. But that almost makes me love this film even more. It’s been a long journey towards real queer representation...

Bad Education is a criminally entertaining film.

This is one of those deadpan farces where we get to chortle as awful people are hoisted high on the petard of their own greed.

A deeply American tale about the drip-drop nature of morality in positions of power, and how easy it can be to excuse the wrong thing when it feels so right.

The film effectively sheds light on an ongoing problem in many school systems that quite frankly goes unnoticed. There is no denying that Bad Education is one of 2020s best films and a must-see for any cinephile.

This is a realistic, intelligent drama with a strong cast and a brilliantly flawed protagonist.

It's truly a small miracle to watch the way these two antisocial misfits con their way into people's trust, as Jackman and Janney make them all too human.

It dialogues with topics about hypocrisy and corruption in the American educational sphere, but even with the decent performances from Jackman and Janney cannot rekindle a flat narrative that stumbles along. [Full review in Spanish]

Lightweight as a drama, but the performances - especially from Janney and Jackman - are first rate.

Additional Info

• Genre : Drama, Comedy
• Release Date : September 8, 2019
• Languages : English
• Captions : English
• Audio Format : 5.1

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Bad Education

Cast & crew.

Hugh Jackman

Frank Tassone

Allison Janney

Pam Gluckin

Kathrine Narducci

Sharon Katz

Geraldine Viswanathan

Rachel Kellog

Excellent performances make tepid subject exciting.

• Average 7.7
• Reviews 155

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The True Story Behind HBO’s Bad Education

HBO’s Bad Education tells the wild tale of former Roslyn schools superintendent Frank Tassone (Hugh Jackman), a beloved educator who hoodwinked a tony Long Island town to the tune of $11.2 million over a dozen years. Based on a true story reported in New York Magazine and adapted by screenwriter Mike Makowsky, who was a Roslyn middle-schooler when the scandal broke, the film rollickingly details Tassone’s duplicitous double life.

While elevating the affluent North Shore enclave’s public school system into one of America’s best, Tassone and his larcenous accomplice, school business administrator Pamela Gluckin (Allison Janney), were embezzling millions — taking more than $1 million in cash withdrawals and buying homes, luxury vacations, high-end cars, boats, jewelry, and artwork. After Gluckin was caught, Tassone finessed her quiet firing to save his own face-lifted skin. It was only after a local student reporter began digging into the real reason for Gluckin’s dismissal that the town learned what had been going on.

But to what degree is the film’s story true? Using the original New York account plus subsequent reporting, including the New York State comptroller’s audit — which could only account for about $7 million of the missing money — here’s a character-by-character guide to instruct you.

Hugh Jackman as Frank Tassone

Like Hugh Jackman’s would-be widower, the real Tassone — a double master’s- and doctorate-degreed Bronx native — worked diligently for a community whose sense of entitlement is as inflated as the prices at the Kitchen Kabaret store we see as Bad Education opens. Deciding his worth was as high as those he served, Tassone helped himself to $2.2 million for rent on an Upper East Side apartment he shared with his longtime partner, Stephen Signorelli, a country home, trips, parking garages, and dry cleaning, among other expenses. He also owned a Las Vegas home that he shared with a second boyfriend, Jason Daugherty (who inspired the film’s Kyle Contreras character, played by Rafael Casal). As Bad Education notes, Tassone still draws a pension of $174,035 , even after pleading guilty to grand larceny and serving about three years of his four- to 12-year prison sentence. Tassone returned $1.9 million in 2006 and promised to repay the rest. He was released from jail in 2010.

Allison Janney as Pamela Gluckin

Like her real-life counterpart, Allison Janney’s affable school administrator earned about $160,000 annually and was brazen enough to drive a car with personalized “DUNENUTN” plates — a nod to the West Hampton beach house the district unknowingly paid for. As in the film, $223,000 of Gluckin’s bills, including for her son’s building supplies, led to her dismissal and relinquishing of her administrator’s license in 2002. Arrested in 2005, Gluckin admitted in 2006 to absconding with $4.3 million for a lavish lifestyle that included two more district-funded homes in Bellmore, New York, and Hobe Sound, Florida. She ultimately struck a plea deal, got a three- to nine-year sentence , and spent nearly five years behind bars while still drawing her annual $54,998 pension (half of it went to Roslyn’s restitution). According to HBO, Gluckin died in 2017.

Ray Romano as Bob Spicer

Spicer, a local real-estate agent and big Tassone booster, is a fictitious stand-in for the community at large. In a place where appearance is everything, Spicer is blinded by Roslyn students’ increased acceptance to top-tier colleges — and the soaring real-estate prices that benefitted the town’s bottom line, a.k.a. higher taxes! William Costigan, whom the New York Times described as “a close ally of Tassone’s,” was school board president in 2005, when a new assistant superintendent began discovering the true depths of Gluckin’s scamming.

Annaleigh Ashford as Jenny Aquila

Though Bad Education gives her a different name, Gluckin really did install her niece Debra Rigano as a district clerk — even bestowing a salary beyond what was budgeted. One of the younger Rigano’s responsibilities was arranging school board members’ trips to conferences, including Tassone’s boondoggles. Her freelance work as a travel agent garnered her commissions on the district trips she booked. Jenny’s petty video-game and Macy’s and Lord and Taylor purchases pale in comparison with the approximately $780,000 that Rigano ultimately admitted to stealing. After cooperating with prosecutors, she was sentenced to two to six years in jail.

Geraldine Viswanathan as Rachel Bhargava

Bhargava is a stand-in for real student-reporter Rebekah Rombom, one of two editors-in-chief of the high school paper The Hilltop Beacon. Rather than a puff piece evolving into the scoop we see in the film, a tip led to Rombom breaking the story about the real reason for Gluckin’s 2002 exit, though she wasn’t allowed to print her name. She likely obtained the information from a 2004 anonymous letter that began circulating and for which Tassone tried to do damage control. Once the Beacon story broke, Newsday and other newspapers began digging into the scandal that became the biggest school fraud case in the country .

Jeremy Shamos as Phil Metzger

Like Metzger in the film, a real Roslyn accountant named Andrew Miller conducted an audit and found about $250,000 went to Gluckin’s profligate spending. As with Metzger, the auditor let the crime go unreported and was brought back at Tassone’s urging years later after the D.A. got involved. Miller was ultimately charged with cooking the books to conceal millions of missing taxpayer money. He pleaded guilty to a felony and received a four-month sentence and 18 months probation.

Stephen Spinella as Thomas Tuggiero

The loyal Tuggiero hews closely to Tassone’s real domestic partner, Stephen Signorelli. The computer consultant was listed as the CEO of a company that submitted fake printing invoices for over $500,000, more than $200,000 of which he passed on to Tassone. Signorelli pleaded guilty to grand larceny in 2006 and was set to serve at least a year of his one- to three-year prison sentence.

Jimmy Tatro as Jimmy McCarden

The parallels between Jimmy Tatro’s construction contractor and Gluckin’s real son John McCormick are pretty accurate. McCormick’s home-center spending spree was indeed what led to the unraveling of his mother’s scamming in 2002. But rather than a tip from the cousin of the school board president’s wife as the film depicts, it was an eagle-eyed Home Depot salesperson who noticed McCormick was using a Roslyn district credit card. In 2006, McCormick was sentenced to five years of probation and 100 hours of community service for stealing $83,000. Were it not for that imprudent act, who knows how long Tassone’s and Gluckin’s greed could have continued undetected?

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Bad Education (2019)

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Bad Education is 10716 on the JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts today. The movie has moved up the charts by 7151 places since yesterday. In the United States, it is currently more popular than Dostana but less popular than The Book of Love.

A superintendent of a school district works for the betterment of the student’s education when an embezzlement scheme is discovered, threatening to destroy everything.

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Streaming Charts The JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts are calculated by user activity within the last 24 hours. This includes clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as 'seen'. This includes data from ~1.3 million movie & TV show fans per day.

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Bad Education is a 2019 film directed by Cory Finley.

It is a based-on-a-true-story dramatization of the Roslyn, NY school district embezzlement scandal. Roslyn school superintendent Frank Tassone ( Hugh Jackman ) is the popular leader of the district. In particular, he has built Roslyn High School up into the #4 school in the nation, a reliable supplier of students to Ivy League universities. He's handsome, well-dressed, and widely admired. He's about to start a big construction project, namely, a raised pedestrian walkway to connect the various buildings of Roslyn High.

He's so admired that when the district's business manager Pam Gluckin ( Allison Janney ) is caught embezzling $250,000 from school funds, Tassone is able to talk the school board into keeping the matter quiet and not going to the cops, but instead allowing Pam to resign quietly and pay back the money. Unfortunately for Tassone, however, high school junior Rachel Bhargava ( Geraldine Viswanathan ) is not as easy to placate. Rachel, a reporter for the Roslyn High paper, starts digging into the bids for the walkway and starts finding a lot of very fishy items in the district's expense reports, for much more money than the original $250K estimate. Those fishy items eventually implicate Tassone himself.

Ray Romano plays Bob Spicer, a member of the school board. Screenwriter Mike Makowsky was a middle school student in the Roslyn district when the scandal broke.

Not to be confused with BBC comedy Bad Education or Bad Education (2004) .

• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing : The film does an excellent job in the first act of making it look as if only Pam is stealing...but then you find out the truth about Frank as Rachel continues digging.
• Book Ends : Begins and ends with scenes where Frank's being cheered and applauded at a public meeting. The second one's an Imagine Spot .
• Closet Gay : Frank is depicted as having two boyfriends (one younger living in Vegas, and one longterm partner who helps with his fraud), which Rachel is shocked to discover. Frank is also shown repeatedly referring to his long-dead wife, whose picture he keeps on his desk, as a means of rejecting the advances of enthusiastic mothers. (In real life, Frank did have a wife who died young, and two boyfriends, but he was not closeted and he and his longterm partner had an open relationship.)
• The Dandy : Frank. He spends district money on fancy suits. He puts on makeup. (He's still putting on makeup in jail!) He's revealed to have spent thirty grand on dry cleaning. He spends district money on a facelift.
• Dramatic Drop : Not the drop, but the aftermath. Frank walks into the office to see a coffee cup lying unattended on the floor in the middle of a puddle of coffee. Everyone in the office is shocked because the school paper has just broken the story.
• Education Mama : Mrs. Schweitzer, who keeps trying to get her poor dim son Chad into an advanced education program despite the fact that Chad can't read the word "accelerate". First she complains that the teacher wouldn't let Chad take enough bathroom breaks for the test, then after Chad fails a second time she says the teacher made the test harder out of spite. This pisses a stressed-out Frank off and triggers his Motive Rant .
• Facecam : A camera is trained on Frank's face as he enters the school, and steadily grows more and more unnerved at the sight of all the students gaping at him. Then he comes into the office and discovers that the school newspaper has published its story about the embezzlement.
• Fatal Flaw : Greed and pride, in Frank and Pam's cases. Pam became overconfident from getting away with it for so long and a family member gets her caught. Frank's greed and pride about his position is what pushes Rachel into deciding to run the story after she learns the truth.
• Flipping the Bird : The last time Bob appears onscreen, he goes out to get the paper only to find fresh dog poop on his porch, and the owner of the dog giving him the finger as she and her dog walk away.
• Hero Antagonist : Rachel Bhargava is the one investigating the budget on the skywalk and discovers the fraud as a result.
• Historical Villain Upgrade : Real Life Frank did have a younger boyfriend in Vegas, but he had an open relationship and his partner was aware of the Vegas boyfriend - who also was not a former student. The real life Frank was actually quite offended by the assertion that he would cheat on his partner or date a former student .
• Imagine Spot : The film ends with Frank, in jail, imagining himself at a district public meeting where he's being cheered and applauded by the crowd.
• Intrepid Reporter : Rachel, who treats the student newspaper like an actual paper instead of a club designed to make her college application look good, which is what the editor calls it. She starts digging into district records and eventually uncovers massive fraud.
• The Lost Lenore : Frank keeps a picture of a woman in a wedding dress on his desk. He claims that it's his wife, who died young; he cites his Lost Lenore when a divorced mother makes a pass at him. It's later revealed that not only is Frank gay, he's been in a relationship for 33 years , calling into question whether the wife even existed. (In Real Life it seems that Frank was in fact once married to a woman who did in fact die young, but Real Life Frank was not closeted.)
• Motive Rant : Frank slips into his office after the scandal has broken, practically shaking with fear, only to find that annoying Education Mama already in the office, still trying to get her dumb kid into the gifted program. His control finally cracks and he lets loose on her. Frank : My problem? My problem is you. It’s the people who trot their poor children out like race horses at Belmont; who derive some perverse joy out of treating us like low-level service reps. Do you remember the teachers who sat with you, who held you by the hand, who taught you to add and subtract, or showed you Gatsby and Salinger , for the first time— Mockingbird even? Do their names escape you? Are their faces a blur?...You might forget, but we don’t. We never forget. Ever.
• Plastic Bitch : Rare Male Example ; one of the most selfish ways Frank spends the money he stole from the school is by getting plastic surgery.
• Reassigned to Antarctica : When Pam gets fired, her cousin Debra gets a demotion and is reassigned to a windowless, closet-sized office in the basement.
• Refuge in Audacity : Frank never really comes completely clean throughout the film, but the audience starts to understand how he and Pam stole $11.2 million dollars total between them after Frank mentions that they both (separately) came to the realization that there wasn't a real system of checks and balances in their office, so "no one noticed." It's basically the justification for how both of them decided to yoink that much cash from the district.
• Slowly Slipping Into Evil : The closest Frank ever comes to a confession is when he tells Bob that he once accidentally used a district credit card for lunch, and nobody cared, and then he used the card to get a drink, and nobody cared.
• Small Name, Big Ego : Frank, definitely. Not that getting the district to number four isn't impressive, but he seems to have developed a massive ego and narcissistic tendencies as a result of his success, even though no one outside of his office knows who he is until the scandal breaks.
• Stealing from the Till : Frank, Pam, and Pam's family relations stole $11.2 million from the school district.
• Stepford Smiler : Part of why Frank got away with everything for so long is that he has perfected his persona of the smiling, patient, devoted leader in his district.
• Suspicious Spending : Pam Gluckin and her family, who have three homes and live a high-flying lifestyle. Pam says it's because her husband's car dealership is doing very well. The scandal starts to unravel when a hardware store clerk catches Pam's son using a school credit card to pay for construction materials which are delivered to his home. Frank for his part is smarter, with a fancy apartment in New York City and a home in Vegas, both far away from folks in Roslyn.
• Tempting Fate : Rachel comes into Frank's office to write what she calls a "puff piece" about the overhead walkway. Frank, the educator, tells her that it doesn't have to be a puff piece and she can write a real story. So Rachel starts digging, and ruins Frank's life.
• Vanity Plate : Pam Gluckin, who has used the money she's stolen from the district to buy a fancy house on upscale Dune Street, has a vanity plate that says "DUNENUTN".
• Villain Protagonist : Frank Tassone, who masterminded a long-term conspiracy wherein $11.2 million was stolen from the school district.
• Visible Boom Mic : In the first hotel scene between Frank and Kyle in Las Vegas, the boom mic is subtly visible in the top of the bedroom mirror.
• What Happened to the Mouse? : Andrew Miller, the auditor, is first shown being deeply apologetic, saying that he took Pam at her word about a lot of things. Later he lets Frank browbeat him into not digging further. Still later he digs up the time when Frank bought first-class tickets to London for himself and his boyfriend, but again he backs down when Frank intimidates him. Near the end of the movie he's shown being led away in handcuffs, despite never doing anything criminal. In Real Life Miller altered records at Frank's behest in an effort to cover up the crime.
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What the Data Says About Pandemic School Closures, Four Years Later

The more time students spent in remote instruction, the further they fell behind. And, experts say, extended closures did little to stop the spread of Covid.

By Sarah Mervosh ,  Claire Cain Miller and Francesca Paris

Four years ago this month, schools nationwide began to shut down, igniting one of the most polarizing and partisan debates of the pandemic.

Some schools, often in Republican-led states and rural areas, reopened by fall 2020. Others, typically in large cities and states led by Democrats, would not fully reopen for another year.

A variety of data — about children’s academic outcomes and about the spread of Covid-19 — has accumulated in the time since. Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting.

While poverty and other factors also played a role, remote learning was a key driver of academic declines during the pandemic, research shows — a finding that held true across income levels.

Source: Fahle, Kane, Patterson, Reardon, Staiger and Stuart, “ School District and Community Factors Associated With Learning Loss During the COVID-19 Pandemic .” Score changes are measured from 2019 to 2022. In-person means a district offered traditional in-person learning, even if not all students were in-person.

“There’s fairly good consensus that, in general, as a society, we probably kept kids out of school longer than we should have,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, a pediatric infectious disease specialist who helped write guidance for the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommended in June 2020 that schools reopen with safety measures in place.

There were no easy decisions at the time. Officials had to weigh the risks of an emerging virus against the academic and mental health consequences of closing schools. And even schools that reopened quickly, by the fall of 2020, have seen lasting effects.

But as experts plan for the next public health emergency, whatever it may be, a growing body of research shows that pandemic school closures came at a steep cost to students.

The longer schools were closed, the more students fell behind.

At the state level, more time spent in remote or hybrid instruction in the 2020-21 school year was associated with larger drops in test scores, according to a New York Times analysis of school closure data and results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress , an authoritative exam administered to a national sample of fourth- and eighth-grade students.

At the school district level, that finding also holds, according to an analysis of test scores from third through eighth grade in thousands of U.S. districts, led by researchers at Stanford and Harvard. In districts where students spent most of the 2020-21 school year learning remotely, they fell more than half a grade behind in math on average, while in districts that spent most of the year in person they lost just over a third of a grade.

( A separate study of nearly 10,000 schools found similar results.)

Such losses can be hard to overcome, without significant interventions. The most recent test scores, from spring 2023, show that students, overall, are not caught up from their pandemic losses , with larger gaps remaining among students that lost the most ground to begin with. Students in districts that were remote or hybrid the longest — at least 90 percent of the 2020-21 school year — still had almost double the ground to make up compared with students in districts that allowed students back for most of the year.

Some time in person was better than no time.

As districts shifted toward in-person learning as the year went on, students that were offered a hybrid schedule (a few hours or days a week in person, with the rest online) did better, on average, than those in places where school was fully remote, but worse than those in places that had school fully in person.

Students in hybrid or remote learning, 2020-21

80% of students

Some schools return online, as Covid-19 cases surge. Vaccinations start for high-priority groups.

Teachers are eligible for the Covid vaccine in more than half of states.

Most districts end the year in-person or hybrid.

Source: Burbio audit of more than 1,200 school districts representing 47 percent of U.S. K-12 enrollment. Note: Learning mode was defined based on the most in-person option available to students.

Income and family background also made a big difference.

A second factor associated with academic declines during the pandemic was a community’s poverty level. Comparing districts with similar remote learning policies, poorer districts had steeper losses.

But in-person learning still mattered: Looking at districts with similar poverty levels, remote learning was associated with greater declines.

A community’s poverty rate and the length of school closures had a “roughly equal” effect on student outcomes, said Sean F. Reardon, a professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford, who led a district-level analysis with Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard.

Score changes are measured from 2019 to 2022. Poorest and richest are the top and bottom 20% of districts by percent of students on free/reduced lunch. Mostly in-person and mostly remote are districts that offered traditional in-person learning for more than 90 percent or less than 10 percent of the 2020-21 year.

But the combination — poverty and remote learning — was particularly harmful. For each week spent remote, students in poor districts experienced steeper losses in math than peers in richer districts.

That is notable, because poor districts were also more likely to stay remote for longer .

Some of the country’s largest poor districts are in Democratic-leaning cities that took a more cautious approach to the virus. Poor areas, and Black and Hispanic communities , also suffered higher Covid death rates, making many families and teachers in those districts hesitant to return.

“We wanted to survive,” said Sarah Carpenter, the executive director of Memphis Lift, a parent advocacy group in Memphis, where schools were closed until spring 2021 .

“But I also think, man, looking back, I wish our kids could have gone back to school much quicker,” she added, citing the academic effects.

Other things were also associated with worse student outcomes, including increased anxiety and depression among adults in children’s lives, and the overall restriction of social activity in a community, according to the Stanford and Harvard research .

Even short closures had long-term consequences for children.

While being in school was on average better for academic outcomes, it wasn’t a guarantee. Some districts that opened early, like those in Cherokee County, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, and Hanover County, Va., lost significant learning and remain behind.

At the same time, many schools are seeing more anxiety and behavioral outbursts among students. And chronic absenteeism from school has surged across demographic groups .

These are signs, experts say, that even short-term closures, and the pandemic more broadly, had lasting effects on the culture of education.

“There was almost, in the Covid era, a sense of, ‘We give up, we’re just trying to keep body and soul together,’ and I think that was corrosive to the higher expectations of schools,” said Margaret Spellings, an education secretary under President George W. Bush who is now chief executive of the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Closing schools did not appear to significantly slow Covid’s spread.

Perhaps the biggest question that hung over school reopenings: Was it safe?

That was largely unknown in the spring of 2020, when schools first shut down. But several experts said that had changed by the fall of 2020, when there were initial signs that children were less likely to become seriously ill, and growing evidence from Europe and parts of the United States that opening schools, with safety measures, did not lead to significantly more transmission.

“Infectious disease leaders have generally agreed that school closures were not an important strategy in stemming the spread of Covid,” said Dr. Jeanne Noble, who directed the Covid response at the U.C.S.F. Parnassus emergency department.

Politically, though, there remains some disagreement about when, exactly, it was safe to reopen school.

Republican governors who pushed to open schools sooner have claimed credit for their approach, while Democrats and teachers’ unions have emphasized their commitment to safety and their investment in helping students recover.

“I do believe it was the right decision,” said Jerry T. Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, which resisted returning to school in person over concerns about the availability of vaccines and poor ventilation in school buildings. Philadelphia schools waited to partially reopen until the spring of 2021 , a decision Mr. Jordan believes saved lives.

“It doesn’t matter what is going on in the building and how much people are learning if people are getting the virus and running the potential of dying,” he said.

Pandemic school closures offer lessons for the future.

Though the next health crisis may have different particulars, with different risk calculations, the consequences of closing schools are now well established, experts say.

In the future, infectious disease experts said, they hoped decisions would be guided more by epidemiological data as it emerged, taking into account the trade-offs.

“Could we have used data to better guide our decision making? Yes,” said Dr. Uzma N. Hasan, division chief of pediatric infectious diseases at RWJBarnabas Health in Livingston, N.J. “Fear should not guide our decision making.”

Source: Fahle, Kane, Patterson, Reardon, Staiger and Stuart, “ School District and Community Factors Associated With Learning Loss During the Covid-19 Pandemic. ”

The study used estimates of learning loss from the Stanford Education Data Archive . For closure lengths, the study averaged district-level estimates of time spent in remote and hybrid learning compiled by the Covid-19 School Data Hub (C.S.D.H.) and American Enterprise Institute (A.E.I.) . The A.E.I. data defines remote status by whether there was an in-person or hybrid option, even if some students chose to remain virtual. In the C.S.D.H. data set, districts are defined as remote if “all or most” students were virtual.

An earlier version of this article misstated a job description of Dr. Jeanne Noble. She directed the Covid response at the U.C.S.F. Parnassus emergency department. She did not direct the Covid response for the University of California, San Francisco health system.

How we handle corrections

Sarah Mervosh covers education for The Times, focusing on K-12 schools. More about Sarah Mervosh

Claire Cain Miller writes about gender, families and the future of work for The Upshot. She joined The Times in 2008 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. More about Claire Cain Miller

Francesca Paris is a Times reporter working with data and graphics for The Upshot. More about Francesca Paris