Movie Review: The Lottery

The Lottery ***Directed By: Madeline Sackler.In a pure world, Charter Schools would not exist. But we exist in a far from perfect world, and if you experience in the interior city, you know even further away, especially if you need to make your youngster a right education. The Lottery makes the type that while inner city schools in New York are failing to make its students a sound education - Charter Schools in the sami country are producing great results.

Yes, the film is one sided - although it does give lip service to the former side - but you actually cannot reason with the results. No matter what Charter Schools - which are publicly funded but operate outside the strictures of public schools, most notably the teachers union - get results for their students. Instead of spending so much time attacking charter schools, opponents should be looking at what they are doing different - and better - than public schools to ameliorate them, instead demonizing the former side.Madline Sackler`s documentary The Drawing is the second documentary on this subject I have seen this year - although it did get out sooner than the much more high profile Waiting for Superman, which has become one of the hits of the objective world this year. The Lottery isn`t as well as Wait for Superman - but it does provide even more manifest to propose that public instruction in America`s inner cities are broken, and for many parents, Charter Schools are the sole answer. The job of flow is that there are thousands of more children who wish to go to Charter Schools than there are spaces for them. And this, undeniably, makes charter school unfair. Everyone pays for them as percentage of their tax dollars, but they are only accessible to some. The alternative unfortunately seems to be that every child in these areas would get a crappy education instead of only some. This is a lose-lose situation for all involved.The Lottery follows four families in the months leading up to the drawing to get in the Harlem Success Academy. Law dictates that if a charter school has more applicants than spaces available, then a lottery has to be done to see who gets in and who gets left out. The stories of these families is heartbreaking - especially at the last at the lottery itself where you can see the infliction on the parents faces when their children do not get in, and are therefore denied a good education.As I said, in an ideal world, charter schools wouldn`t exist. Instead, you could reform public schools so they can all get the results that Harlem Success Academy and other charter schools are having. But reform is made almost impossible by the bureaucratism of the Table of Instruction and the Teachers Union - who do not need to have anything up, and because they are among the biggest contributors to Democrats, have the political clout to support them up. As one City Councilor suggests, it would be best to not close Public Schools, but to reclaim them. But as father of Harlem Success, Eva Moskowitz points out, some of these schools have been failing for decades, and no meaningful reform has been done. What are you supposed to do with schools that take just a 30% graduation rate, or schools where only 10% of the students are reading and composition at the correct grad level? For many parents, the reforms are coming far too slowly.

And that is why, as The Lottery points out, Charter Schools are a requirement at this point. The Drawing is a little too one sided to be a really great documentary - it is firm on the side of the Charter Schools, and makes no substantial cause to try and hide that fact up. It is an advocacy documentary, and it wouldn`t be too difficult to imagine charter schools giving out copies of it to prospective parents and students. Yet having said all of that, the facts are the facts, and they are undeniable. Say whatever you need about Charter Schools - the rear note is that the kids who go there get a quality education. And shouldn`t that be the end of any school?