For this lottery, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
The nerve-racking bid by parents to land their 5-year-old kid a coveted seat in a high-performing Harlem charter school is detailed in a documentary set to screen tomorrow at the Tribeca Film Festival.
“The Lottery” tracks the lives of four families — including a deaf single mom and a family where the father is in jail — in the lead-up to the largest charter-school lottery in the city last year at Harlem Success Academy.
“I felt very stressed out,” said Laurie Goodwine, who entered her son Gregory Jr. into more than 10 charter-school lotteries. “If he wasn’t able to get into a charter school, I felt like I was throwing him into a school that was failing.”
The film highlights several of the prominent aspects of the charter-school wars — including opposition from the teachers union to the typically non-unionized schools, and the heated battle for scarce building space between charters and traditional public schools.
But it’s the anxiety, praying and nail-biting of thousands of parents vying for hundreds of seats — like Ivory Coast immigrant Emil Yoanson and his son, Christian — that take center stage throughout the film.
“It’s very competitive and everybody, of course, wants their child to be in an excellent school,” said Shawna Roachford, another parent profiled in the flick.
“The frustrating part is that all schools should be excellent and we shouldn’t be fighting for a position in one particular school.”
While state lawmakers sought to raise the state’s cap on charter schools above 200 in January, they failed to agree on related changes to the charter-schools law.
That failure contributed to New York’s poor performance in the competition for as much as $700 million in federal education aid known as Race to the Top.
Lawmakers now have until June 1 to raise the cap in order to boost the state’s second-round submission for the funding.
“The message is that if we let the politics and the unions get in the way, then we’re going to undermine our children and their families,” said Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, who is interviewed in the film.
First-time director Madeleine Sackler, 27, a Duke University graduate, said she was inspired to tackle the touchy topic after seeing television news footage of a charter-school lottery at the Harlem Armory in 2008.
“I was really just struck by the sheer numbers of people — there were thousands and thousands of parents teeming out of the armory — and I felt it was a great visual representation of the problem,” said Sackler, who lives in Manhattan.
The Lottery screens tomorrow at the Tribeca Film Festival, and will play again in the city on June 8 and during the week of June 11.
Additional reporting
by Lachlan Cartwright