HBO movie Bad Education stars Hugh Jackman as Frank Tassone, the Roslyn school district superintendent who was caught embezzling millions of dollars in school funding - but how does the dramatization compare to the true story? Directed by Cory Finley, the film delves into the stolen money scandal that rocked the community of Roslyn, Long Island in 2004.
Bad Education begins with Frank Tassone being hailed as a hero to the parents of kids in the Roslyn school district, given a glowing introduction at a PTA meeting by school board chairman Bob Spicer (Ray Romano). Frank's assistant superintendent, Pam Gluckin (Allison Janney), also seems to be a hard-working and upstanding civil service worker. However, some careless DIY purchases by Pam's son lead to an investigation that initially turns up $250,000 in embezzled funds that Pam has been directing away from schools and into her own lifestyle - as well as that of her family.
Pam's discreet dismissal marks the first pull on a thread that unravels Frank's own misdeeds and eventually lands both of them in prison, which what happened to Tassone and Gluckin in real life. However, Bad Education also has a number of departures from the true story. Here are some of the details that were changed for the movie.
The Hilltop Beacon's Reporting Is Exaggerated In Bad Education
While it's certainly true that the embezzlement story was first broken by Roslyn High School's own newspaper, the Hilltop Beacon, the depth of investigative reporting that Rachel (Geraldine Viswanathan) does in Bad Education is exaggerated. Rebekah Rombom, the student journalist who broke the story in real life, told The Island Now that while she "took the endeavor pretty seriously and tried hard to do a good job," her original scoop only involved Pam Gluckin and the missing $250,000. Moreover, she didn't dive quite as deep as Rachel is able to in Bad Education.
"Rachel does a little more investigative reporting than I did. I had tried to do a Freedom of Information Act request to dig a little bit deeper on some of the documents that I thought revealed more detail about what was going on, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it in time, so I reported the facts that I had from interviews that I was able to do before we published."
After the Hilltop Beacon broke the story, the bulk of the investigative reporting into the embezzlement scandal - including the discovery that the address of the supposed word processing company WordPower was the same as Tassone's home address - was done by Newsday. That being said, one element of Bad Education that is very true to life is the conflict that Rachel feels over seeing the consequences of her reporting. "The fallout was difficult for the community, and I certainly felt very conflicted about that," Rombom recalled. "I had great experiences at those schools."
Frank's Boyfriend Wasn't A Former Student
In Bad Education, Frank strikes up a romantic relationship with Kyle Contreras (Rafael Casal), a Las Vegas bartender and exotic dancer whom Frank taught in his English class 16 years previously. Kyle is based on a real person, Jason Daugherty, and Frank really did end up buying a house with him. However, in reality Daughtery wasn't Tassone's former student. Instead, it seems that the two simply met and hit it off during one of Tassone's gambling trips to Las Vegas. The embellishment of Frank becoming romantically involved with someone whom he used to teach was likely added to Bad Education for the sake of demonstrating Tassone's complicated relationship with the students in his care.
How Frank Tassone & Pam Gluckin Spent Their Stolen Money
Bad Education covers just some of the ways in which Frank Tassone and Pam Gluckin spent the money they siphoned away from the school district's budget, including Tassone's sharp clothing and first-class flights (not to mention the house he bought with his second partner in Las Vegas), and Gluckin's multiple houses and vanity-plated Jaguar. As depicted in the movie, Tassone had money paid to his primary partner under the heading of WordPower that was later siphoned back into his own accounts, and also put many expensive vacations on his work credit card, including regular gambling trips to Las Vegas. Among his larger expenditures was $56,645 in payments to a Manhattan weight loss doctor. Meanwhile, Gluckin used her access to school funding to support not only herself, but several members of her family.
Was Frank Tassone A Good Superintendent (Embezzling Aside)?
One of the strengths of Bad Education is that it's not just a simple story of an outright villain. Frank's final fantasy before the credits roll is of getting Roslyn High School to the #1 spot in the country (though this fantasy seems to be tangled up with his own ego). While he may have stolen millions of dollars in taxpayer money, Frank Tassone did indeed oversee Roslyn's rise to become one of the top school districts in the country. Moreover, he was widely well-liked and appeared to genuinely care about students in his district. He is said to have made a point of personally meeting every new student and even ran a book club for local parents, as depicted in the movie. Bad Education's screenwriter, Mike Makowsky, was a middle school student in Roslyn when the scandal broke, and first met Tassone when he was six years old. Speaking to Vanity Fair, Makowsky recalled:
"He had been in the Roslyn school district for 10 or 12 years - and in that time, he had grown the school district to this point of national prominence... which meant that the town itself was doing well because the regard of a school district is directly tethered to things like property values. The administrators were asking for more and more money, and, because they were doing an incredible job, the tax payers were happy to oblige. All their kids were getting into amazing schools and doing great on their SATs, and property values in the town were going up. So it was a really sort of complicated, awful thing."
Speaking to New York Magazine when the story broke, Tassone's assistant superintendent Charlie Piemont said that "Frank was really the master. I mean, this guy was loved. He walked on water." Andrew Miller, the school auditor who had to try and untangle Roslyn's accounts after the embezzlement scandal broke, had a different take. "Frank is a tremendous manipulator of people," Miller said. "Which is probably why some people thought he was a great superintendent." As highlighted in the movie, Tassone was living out his lavish lifestyle while the ceilings in Roslyn High School were leaking - symbolic of the cracks underneath the school's outwardly shining reputation, and Tassone's own.
Regardless of whether Tassone genuinely cared for his students or was simply the "sociopath" that Pam calls him in the movie, Bad Education's story is complicated by the fact that he seemed to have had a genuinely positive impact during his time as superintendent. “I know the film is called Bad Education,” Makowsky told Vanity Fair. “But it’s a bit of a misnomer in that regard... I had an incredible education there." Were these results worth the cost that Tassone had to the local taxpayers, and the underhanded way in which he acquired his wealth? Bad Education leaves it up to the audience to judge.