Winning the Education Lottery

In New York, a public school system that once was the envy of the world has become an international laughingstock. The laugh track is not likely to die out anytime soon.

“Virtually the entire New York press corps do not read the state test,” Harvard professor Daniel Koretz alleged at The Atlantic K-12 Education Forum. “Last year, the chancellor’s office, in a press conference, admitted that they did not read the state tests.”

Maybe they should see The Lottery instead. The heart-wrenching documentary tells the tale of two families applying to the Harlem Success Academy (HSA). Five thousand applicants participated in a lottery for 475 spots in the charter school.

Twenty-seven-year old filmmaker Madeleine Sackler, who directed The Lottery, claims that HSA “is one of the best performing schools in New York and one of the most protested.” ACORN has made it a particular target, Sackler said at The Atlantic forum on November 10, 2010.

Interestingly, Sackler says that “We weren’t allowed to film in traditional public schools” in New York. The Atlantic Forum was held at the Washington, D. C. offices of the Gallup Organization, which partially underwrote the conference.

For the families participating in the contest Sackler relates the story of, the stakes are, if anything, higher than those vied for in the other New York State Lottery. “Fifty-eight percent of black fourth-graders are functionally illiterate,” the script of The Lottery notes.

A couple of the notables interviewed in The Lottery allege that “to figure out how many prisons they will need in New York, they find out what the pass rate is for black kids on fourth grade tests.” The father of the son of one of the mothers who Sackler focuses on is indeed a guest of the state.

In a filmed interview for The Lottery, he wholly supports his wife’s application for an HSA slot for their son, to put it mildly. Their son eventually achieved this goal, from a waiting list, after not getting called in the original lottery. His mother, Laurie Brown-Goodwine, appeared at The Atlantic forum. Her son, Gregory, was with her.

Sackler, a 2005 graduate of Duke University, previously worked on Shine a Light, legendary director Martin Scorsese’s chronicle of a Rolling Stones tour. She has also worked as either editor or director of one documentary on coming of age in Israel another on aging women in America.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

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