Product Description
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In a country where 58% of African American 4th graders
are functionally illiterate, The Lottery uncovers the failures of
the traditional public school system and reveals that hundreds of
thousands of parents attempt to flee the system every year. The
Lottery follows four of these families from Harlem and the Bronx
who have entered their children in a charter school lottery. Out
of thousands of hopefuls, only a small minority will win the
chance of a better future. Directed by Madeleine Sackler and
by award-winning cinematographer Wolfgang Held, The Lottery
uncovers a ferocious debate surrounding the education reform
movement. Interviews with politicians and educators explain not
only the crisis in public education, but also why it is fixable.
A call to action to avert a catastrophe in the education of
American children, The Lottery makes the case that any child can
succeed.
Review
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The ginger stepchild of President Obama's election
platform, it seems that this country's broke-ass education system
is finally stepping up for its media moment. On the heels of a
recent 60 Minutes piece on Washington, D.C.'s SEED school and New
York Times Magazine cover story focused on education reform comes
The Lottery, a precise, impassioned look at the battle between
zone and charter schools in Harlem. Director Madeleine Sackler
interweaves the stories of four charter hopefuls and their
families with an exploration of an issue whose politics have
grown so complex that they squiggle even partisan lines. Sackler
finds personal, persuasive points of entry for key factors in the
debate: Statistics contrasting the annual as spent on a
child's education and a prisoner's housing are followed by the
account of a school lottery entrant's incarcerated her, who
laments his lack of choice as much as the choices he made. An
electrifying community meeting finds Harlem Success president Eva
Moskowitz both vilified and heralded as "our Obama"; by local
parents, as the unions depend on such poorly understood class and
neighborhood tensions to maintain the status quo. Sackler
reframes education reform as a moral issue, and it's impossible
to look at the fallen faces of kids turned away from a school of
all things and disagree. --The Village Voice
'What's funny," says Madeleine Sackler, "is that I'm not really a
political person." Yet the petite 27-year-old is the force behind
"The Lottery" an explosive new documentary about the battle over
the future of public education opening nationwide this Tuesday.
In the spring of 2008, Ms. Sackler, then a freelance film editor,
caught a segment on the local news about New York's biggest
lottery. It wasn't the Powerball. It was a chance for 475 lucky
kids to get into one of the city's best charter schools (publicly
funded schools that aren't subject to union rules). "I was blown
away by the number of parents that were there," Ms. Sackler tells
me over coffee on Manhattan's Upper West Side, recalling the
thousands of people packed into the Harlem Armory that day for
the drawing. "I wanted to know why so many parents were entering
their kids into the lottery and what it would mean for them." And
so Ms. Sackler did what any aspiring filmmaker would do: She
grabbed her camera. Her initial was simple. "Going into the
film I was excited just to tell a story,"; she says. "A vérité
film, a really beautiful, independent story about four families
that you wouldn't know otherwise" in the months leading up to the
lottery for the Harlem Success Academy. But on the way to making
the film she imagined, she "stumbled on this political mayhem
really like a turf war about the future of public education." Or
more accurately, she happened upon a raucous protest outside of a
failing public school in which Harlem Success, already filled to
capacity, had requested space. "We drove by that protest," Ms.
Sackler recalls. "We were on our way to another interview and we
jumped out of the van and started filming." There she discovered
that the majority of those protesting the proliferation of
charter schools were not even from the neighborhood. They'd come
from the Bronx and Queens. "They all said 'We're not allowed to
talk to you. We're just here to support the parents." But there
were only two parents there, says Ms. Sackler, and both were
members of Acorn. And so, "after not a lot of digging," she
discovered that the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) had paid
Acorn, the controversial community organizing group, "half a
million dollars for the year." (It cost less to make the film.)
Finding out that the teachers union had hired a rent-a-mob to
protest on its behalf was "the turn for us in the process." That
story of self-interested adults trying to deny poor parents
choice for their children provided an answer to Ms. Sackler's
fundamental question: "If there are these high-performing schools
that are closing the achievement gap, why aren't there more of
them?" The reason is what Eva Moskowitz, founder of the Harlem
Success Academy network and a key character in the film, calls
the "union-political-educational complex." That's a fancy term
for the web of unions and politicians who defend the status quo
in order to protect their jobs. In the course of making "The
Lottery," Ms. Sackler got to know the nature of that coalition
ly. "On day one, of course, I was very interested in all
sides. I was in no way affiliated." From the beginning, she
requested meetings with then UFT President Randi Weingarten, or
anyone representing the union position. They refused. Harlem's
public schools weren't much more accessible. "It was easier to
film in a maximum security prison," something Ms. Sackler did to
interview a parent "than it was to film in a traditional public
school." Viewers still get a sense of the union's position, but
it comes from the mouths of some unsavory New York pols. Take,
for example, a scene from the film featuring a City Council
hearing... --The Wall Street Journal
"The Lottery" is one of the more persuasive documentaries of
recent months. It deals with the issue of charter schools in New
York City's Harlem, about their great success and about the
families that wait in hope of the annual lottery, by which
children gain admittance. Three thousand apply for fewer than 500
openings. They're called "charter" schools because they operate
according to a five-year charter with the city or state, and if
they don't get results at the end of that period, they're closed.
Though funded by government money, they operate outside the
teachers unions. The school year and the class days are longer,
and teachers who are underperforming are fired. According to the
documentary, it's almost impossible to get rid of a bad teacher
under the union system, and even when it happens, the process
costs the city approximately $250,000. From a distance, this
might seem like a dry subject for a documentary, but as filmmaker
Madeleine Sackler makes clear, this is a matter of life and death
to the parents. Aside from the charter schools, the public
education system in Harlem is a disaster. Out of the 23
non-charter schools, 19 have fewer than half the students reading
at grade level. Thus the lottery could very well determine the
entire course of a child's life - even its length. The schools
under the regular system are factories of failure and incubators
of crime. So you'd think that the successful model established by
Eva Moskowitz, a mother of three who founded the first charter
schools in Harlem, should be the educational road for the
city of New York. But no. The documentary shows the stranglehold
that the teachers union has on politicians, particularly
Democratic politicians. The arrogance and ignorance of some of
these politicians is galling, particularly in the scene in which
Moskovitz testified before an education panel. Fortunately, some
Democratic politicians, such as Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker,
are bucking the trend. By the time the lottery takes place,
viewers understand all that's riding on it. You look at all these
beautiful kids, with all the potential in the world, and every
expectation for a great life, and you know that at most one-sixth
of them will come out of the room with a fighting chance. That
shouldn't be. --The San Francisco Chronicle
