As a child of middle-class suburbs, I was lucky enough to have access to a high-level public education that served me well and helped me successfully graduate on time and send me on my way to college. When I moved out of the suburbs and into the city, I began to realize just how fortunate I was. Every day, the newspapers would shoot statistics about failure rates, budget constraints, teacher strikes, etc. In a nation such as this, the failure of public schools not only affect how our children go through their youth. It affects what happens after, and this affects all of us.
'The Lottery,' a documentary by Madeleine Sackler, faces this problem head on by showing the story of four young children and their families as they attempt to gain access into one of the few successful public schools in Harlem, NY. The school, known as Harlem Success, is a public charter school that, due to insufficient funding, can only afford to accept small numbers of children at any given time. Therefore, entrance into the school is done through a 'lottery,' in which thousands of children are entered, but only a small portion are given enrollment.
Ms. Sackler, as the documentarian behind this story, does a fantastic job of handling both sides of the situation. She shows the struggle, the hardships, and the heartbreak that goes along with being a parent of a child forced to attend inferior school systems. She also shows the other side of the story, which (for some reason) would prefer there to be no public charter schools and only the degrading current schools. While the emotional look of the film does get rather heavy handed, it is appropriate due to the heart-wrenching subject matter. To know that only a small amount of this desperate children will be able to receive a high quality education is a truly depressing notion. It's a system that must be changed, must be fixed, and quickly. If not, it's going to just continue to get worse, sending our society further into a downward spiral.
Final Verdict: 8/10.
-AP3-
