Is it right? The heartbreak of too few good schools

This is a handsomely packaged little documentary, shot by Wolfgang Held (Brüno, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, Children Underground) about Harlem students hoping to get into a good (elementary) school. It focuses on a charter school called the Harlem Success Academy, which has, indeed, a very high success rate for its students. The quietly passionate Eva Moskowitz, principal, is an eloquent spokeswoman. So is Paul Tough, Editor of New York Times Magazine and author of Whatever It Takes: you have to go to extraordinary measures to improve the education of poor and disadvantaged kids, but when you do, both say, they can do wonders, and their parents care as much about their succeeding as any parents anywhere. The "zoned" (regular public) schools are opposed to the charter schools; so are the unions. The charter schools don't have special funding, they are simply allowed to operate outside the bureaucratic system of the unions, so they can actually fire teachers, which is virtually impossible in the New York public schools, and have a longer school day and allow teachers to spend more time preparing classes. They are a minority, they are different, and they are a threat to the system.

Harlem people tend to look on charter schools as the enemy, as representing rich outsiders, though in fact the students are Harlem kids. The battles follow racial and class lines, even though they do not exist. This film is partisan. It advocates for the charter schools. But in a way, the opponents of charter schools are right, because there are not enough of them. Hence the lottery to decide who gets in. This is not fair. What is so great about charter schools if everyone deserves to go to them, and anyone can benefit from them, but only a few can go? It's not democratic. All the schools should be charter schools, or none.

The Lottery focuses on four young candidates for admission into the Harlem Success Academy and their parents, as well as on the general issues, and the Success Academy's campaign to be granted use of a condemned public school to accommodate more students in its building. The citizens violently opposed to allowing use of the unused school may seem misguided, but they may be onto something. The broken hearts of the students and parents who lose out in the lottery show that something's not right about the Harlem Success Academy, though nothing is wrong with its teachers, its students, or their success. It's the public school system that is no good, and the charter schools that are not adequate to compensate for that, that are wrong. And this little film, with its admirably clear presentation, is too narrow to accommodate the whole truth. Nonetheless, solutions may begin here. If the people in The Lottery say the trouble isn't the students or their parents, they may be right.

When I saw one of the four hopefuls dress up and say he feels "a lot like" Barack Obama, I realize for the first time how immense it might be for a kid in Harlem to have a black President. But whether this is a signal of more hope or more frustration is hard to say.

We may be in for a wave of documentaries about America's "broken" educational system. Inconveneint Truth and It Might Get Loud director David Guggenheim has one coming out soon called Waiting for Superman which, coincidentally, follows four underprivileged black and latino children and their parents waiting to submit to the gauntlet of a lottery to get them in, or not, to better Harlem schools. To judge by The Lottery, we should be prepared for these films to be poignant without providing real solutions or even fully rounded pictures of the problems. Guggenheim's film promises to be angrier, more comprehensive, and less smug than The Lottery, but The Lottery is a vivid (and beautifully filmed) snapshot of the problem, and hence a decent start.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.