Charter schools, good or bad? That’s the question raised by director Madeleine Sackler’s timely but standard documentary “The Lottery.”
It revolves around four hard-luck families who enter their kids in the admissions lottery for the highly regarded Harlem Success Academy. There are, we’re told, 3,000 applicants for 475 seats in this charter school, which receives public dollars yet is exempt from many burdensome regulations, including union rules. The kids’ futures are left to the luck of the draw.
Sackler gives voice to parents, teachers, principals, students and Joel Klein, chancellor of New York’s schools. There’s even a sound bite from President Obama.
What’s to blame for the lousy education too many kids receive in NYC’s public schools? The teachers union, the city bureaucracy or, perhaps, the pervasive poverty of families?
The film has no ready answers, although it becomes abundantly clear that both those for and against charter schools are more concerned with covering their own asses than with helping students get a quality education.