Film Review: The Lottery

Madeleine Sackler's "The Lottery" was shown as a one day event last night around the country. The film follows four Harlem families trying to win a lottery in order to gain admission to Harlem Success Academy, a high-achieving charter school in New York.

First-time film director Madeleine Sackler’s The Lottery documents four Harlem children and their families in their quest to be picked in a random lottery to attend New York City’s high-achieving charter school, Harlem Success Academy. The movie starts with facts about the overall depressing performance of kids in struggling neighborhoods. But how are we to change these dismal statistics? On one side of the debate, there’s Eva Moskowitz, founder of the Harlem Success Academy and devoted education reformer. On the other, the local teachers’ union. Moskowitz, a Harlem native and resident, runs her schools with the belief that “time should be the variable, with success as the constant” and not the other way around. The teachers’ unions, however, see charter schools as draining money and kids from the zoned public schools – a claim thoroughly refuted in the film.

If there’s one message The Lottery wants to convey, it’s that the only thing standing between these kids and a bright future is the teachers’ union. Paying ACORN half a million dollars to protest outside charter schools, preventing the firing of inadequate teachers, and halting any sort of innovation to the education process, the unions are convincingly portrayed in The Lottery as focusing only on themselves and never the kids. Meanwhile, Harlem Success Academy has engaging and inspirational teachers that go above and beyond to make sure the kids succeed and develop a taste for learning. It’s hard not to be sympathetic to the parents – all struggling in their own way yet deeply committed to giving their children the best opportunities possible. Still, the teachers’ union maintains that charters undermine the overall quality of the education system, taking resources away from the public schools that only fail because of inadequate funding.

Towards the film’s end, thousands of charter hopefuls are inside a gymnasium waiting to see if they’ll be picked as one of the lucky hundreds to attend Harlem Success Academy. I couldn’t help but think that everyone in that gym and watching the movie had the same thing running through their heads: all of us want to send our children to a school like this, many more of these schools want to open up, are there any good reasons to stop this from happening? The apparent answer is a resounding “no.”
Click here for The Lottery‘s website or check out the trailer below: