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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
THE LOTTERY The polemical The Lottery plays on the heartstrings to bang the drum for charter schools to replace low-performing public schools turning out minority graduates with abysmal skills. Director Madeleine Sackler follows four cute inner-city kids over several months as their very concerned parents apply for kindergarten admission into one of the four privately run Harlem Success Academies and then wait for the results of the climactic lottery. Ameenah is so perspicacious she translates her deaf mother’s sign language. George Jr. lives with his mother while his imprisoned father hopes he will not follow in his footsteps. Christian’s African immigrant father struggles with health problems but believes his son will have better opportunities in America. Eric Jr. is currently home-schooled by a mother who studies for an education degree while her husband works full-time. Talking directly in polished paragraphs to the camera against the same plain background are politicians (Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, who was similarly interviewed about charter school lotteries for Bob Bowdon’s The Cartel); administrators (Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City’s Department of Education); and community organizers (Geoffrey Canada, head of the Harlem Children’s Zone). However, how the academies are different from the failed local public school aren’t really made clear, other than some vague talk about higher expectations, personalized attention, and parental involvement. But the controversy over the chancellor’s efforts to close a neighborhood elementary school and allow the charter school to expand into its building provides for drama in the film’s second half, with the teachers’ union painted, fairly viciously, as the enemy. While one of the dads is “a union man” at his government job and a union defender is given screen time (Betsy Gotbaum, the former public advocate and the wife of the former head of the city’s largest public employee union), a very vocal demonstration against the expansion is revealed as being led by outside agitators-for-hire from the discredited ACORN organization. Only through a very charged City Council hearing does the general audience learn that the Academies’ founder, Eva Moskowitz, is a former councilmember and ex-chair of the Education Committee. (We’re not told that she blames the union for her election defeat or about her higher political aspirations). While her former colleagues antagonistically ask her questions dripping with racism, pro-union sympathies, and accusations of gentrification, she helpfully provides information about how her schools that were not clarified earlier in interviews with the principal and teachers. There is no
criticism, unfortunately, of the Education Department bureaucracy, and
no comparison is made with alternative and magnet schools that have
succeeded by being granted flexibility within the system. Ironically,
the angry protests against the charter school have a déjà vu spirit of the
bitter anti-union, 1968 fight in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood
of Brooklyn, which tore the city apart. That dispute was over community
control, then seen as the solution to failing inner-city schools, which
makes one wonder if charter schools aren’t just the latest gimmick.
Nora Lee Mandel
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