‘Bad Education:’ Is HBO’s New Movie Based on a True Story?

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Bad Education, airing on HBO tonight at 8 p.m. ET.

Bad Education on HBO is a very good movie based on a true story, and like any very good movie based on a true story, changes were made to ensure the whole “good” part. Still, there are still quite a few truths to the whole “true story” part, which is the story of how a superintendent of a Long Island school district, Dr. Frank A. Tassone, was at the center of a scandal that robbed Roslyn public schools of millions of dollars. Hugh Jackman stars as Tassone in one of the best roles of his career, while the always-excellent Allison Janney stars as his assistant superintendent who was also involved in the embezzlement.

Bad Education is directed by Cory Finley—his second film after 2017’s Thoroughbreds—and was written by Mike Makowsky, who was a middle school student at Roslyn when Tassone was arrested in 2004. So though changes were made to make Bad Education the slick, compelling movie that it is, trust that those changes were made intentionally, and not out of ignorance. The script is based on writer Robert Kolker’s gripping New York Magazine feature, “The Bad Superintendent,” which is definitely worth a read. But if you’re looking for the cliff notes version of how this real-life scandal went down, let’s get into the Bad Education true story, from where Frank Tassone is now, to how accurate Bad Education really is.

Is Bad Education a true story?

Yes. Bad Education is based on the true story of Dr. Frank A. Tassone and a scandal he was involved in the early 2000s.

Who is Frank Tassone? Who is Hugh Jackman’s character in Bad Education?

Frank Tassone was the superintendent of the Roslyn, Long Island, school district for 12 years. In 2006, he was sentenced to 4 to 12 years in prison for stealing at least $2 million from his public school district—aka stealing from the tax payer’s money.

After the scandal was exposed, members of the Roslyn community learned of Tassone’s double life—he always spoke of a dead wife, and kept her picture on his desk, but, as it turned out he lived in a Manhattan apartment with another man and also owned a house in Las Vegas with a 32-year-old male exotic dancer. (Tassone was 60 when he was sentenced for his crimes.) Though he never came out as gay, many residents had already assumed he was.

But it should be noted, as Bad Education demonstrates, Tassone was respected, admired, and even beloved as Roslyn’s superintendent before the scandal broke. He listened to concerns of parents carefully and remembered the birthdays and anniversaries of his faculty. He lived like a CEO of a private business, with sharp suits and nice car, and didn’t hide the fact that he felt other school administrators should be treated with Wall Street-levels of respect.

Who is Pam Gluckin? Is Allison Janney’s character in Bad Education a real person?

Yes. Pam Gluckin was Tassone’s assistant superintendent. In 2002, she was caught stealing $250,000 from the school. As we see in the film, she really did rack up charges at hardware stores (ACE in the movie, Home Depot in real life), though according to the New York Magazine article, she mostly wrote school checks to pay off her credit card bills, rather than using a school-issued credit card.

Like Tassone, she was well-liked. And Allison Janney’s vanity license plate, “DUNENUTN?” You better believe that’s a real detail from the real Pam Gluckin’s life. Gluckin and Tassone were very close. It’s not clear whether or not she knew of Tassone’s double-life, though the film implies that she did, when Janney mentions a woman who hits on the superintendent is “not his type.”

What is the true story of Frank Tassone at Roslyn High School?

As we see in the film, the scandal began when Tassone helped cover-up Gluckin’s embezzlement in 2002. According to Kolker’s reporting, Tassone told the Roslyn school board that she was unstable, that she was mentally ill, and that she would pay back the money and resign quietly. He told the school board it would actually save the school money to have her resign immediately, rather than to keep receiving her salary for the years it would take go through the court if they pressed charges. He also, as we see Jackman do, warned that a scandal like this would hurt Roslyn’s students’ chances of getting into good colleges and bring down Roslyn property values.

But Tassone had another reason for covering up the scandal: he was stealing money, too. In early 2004, he accidentally received an anonymous letter that was a tip-off that he was embezzling money, which allowed him to launch a pre-emptive defense. When news of Gluckin’s embezzlement got out, he tried to get accountant Andrew Miller and lawyer Tom Hession to take the blame. They wouldn’t do it. Board president Bill Costigan—who was renamed Bob Spicer and played by Ray Romano in the movie—began to suspect Tassone was involved. He was right.

Throughout the film the school roof is leaking, and, as we see in a quick scene near the end, it literally falls in. That’s all true. The Roslyn High roof fell in, while Tassone was buying himself $1,800-a-night hotel rooms in London with the tax-payer money. He went to Vegas with the Roslyn High School principal and used the tax-payer money to gamble. He spent tax-payer money dry-cleaning the crisp, slick suits he was always known for wearing. Before he was arrested, he transferred $300,000 to bank accounts for his sisters.

The grand total of money stolen from Roslyn school district was estimated at $11.2 million. Tassone and Gluckin were two of six people believed to be involved in the larceny scandal, which stretched over six years and involved friends and relatives of the school administrators. Tassone was convicted of stealing only $2.2 million, and as of 2006 when he was sentenced, he had paid $1.9 million back.

Where is Frank Tassone now?

After first professing his innocence, Tassone pled guilty to to grand larceny and was sentenced to 4 to 12 years in prison in 2006. According to Newsday, he was released from Hale Creek Correctional Facility early thanks to good behavior completing rehabilitative programs while incarcerated, in January 2010. That’s eight months shy of a four-year sentence. He is now in his 70s, and still receives an annual state pension of $173,495.04.

Roslyn teachers’ union president, Eleanor Russell, protested his release. “We really don’t understand the system of justice that would let Frank Tassone out after all the damage he has done to the Roslyn public schools, including the teachers and the community,” she told Newsday.

Who is Rachel Bhargava?

Rachel Bhargava (played by Blockers star Geraldine Viswanathan) is a fictional character based on Rebekah Rombom, who was one of two editors in chief at Roslyn’s student paper, The Hilltop Beacon, who broke the news of the embezzlement scandal. The other editor was a girl named Sam Floam, who was replaced by a new fictional character named Nick Fleischman, played by Alex Wolff. Her storyline and character is the one that deviates from real life the most.

How accurate is Bad Education on HBO?

Like any good movie based on a true story, things were changed either for length or narrative effect. Names were changed: Ray Romano’s character, Bob Spicer, is Bill Costigan in real life. Rachel Bhargava is really Rebekah Rombom. Kyle Contreras (played by Rafael Casal) is really Jason Daugherty. Tom Tuggiero (played by Stephen Spinella) is really Steve Signorelli.

The timeline of events was shortened to fit the film’s two-hour runtime. In reality, it took months of reporting for Tassone’s crimes to come to light, during which Tassone spent much of his time on vacation in Las Vegas, California, Florida, and elsewhere. Some key players were cut, and others were combined, creating characters who were fictional conglomerates of real people, such as the real-life auditor Al Razzetti, and the real-life accountant Arthur Miller, who is a fictional character named Phil Metzger, played by Jeremy Shamos.

The major story change made for the film was the character of Rachel Bhargava, the student journalist. Bad Education implies that the young journalist found out about Tassone’s involvement before anyone else by visiting his secret Manhattan apartment and that she blew the story wide open, essentially bringing down Tassone immediately after publishing her story. In real life, it wasn’t nearly so narratively satisfying.

In an essay penned for The New York Times, the real Rombom told her account of how she worked together with her co-editor Sam, a girl who was cut from the film and replaced by a new character named Nick Fleischman, played by Alex Wolff in the movie. Both young reporters had heard from sources that Tassone had received an anonymous letter accusing him and other administrators of theft. Tassone had said the allegations were false. The reporters consulted their faculty advisor, unsure whether they should publish a story with so few details. The advisor said they should, so Rombom wrote the story and published it.

It is true that, as the end credits titles say, The Hilltop Beacon was the first to report on the scandal. However, that story in The Beacon was not nearly as in-depth as Bad Education implies. The real Rombom did not dig into the public records, as Bhargava does in the film. The real Rombom was also pressured by the administration to omit Gluckin’s name from her story, which she did. After the story published—after the principal reviewed it first—Rombom expected a big reaction from the student body, but none came. The students didn’t care. However, in the following weeks, Newsday and other publications reported on the story extensively. There’s no doubt Rombom engaged in some excellent reporting for a high school journalist—it just wasn’t quite as prodigy-like as the HBO film implies.

However, though details were changed to make a better movie, a former Roslyn teacher attested to the feeling of the film ringing true. “Though I interacted only a few times with Tassone himself, and never, to my memory, with Gluckin, their movie versions felt eerily spot on,” Holly Ojalvo wrote in a review for Quartz.