Posted: 08/29/2010

The Lottery

(2010)

by Shannon Huebscher

If you are looking for a documentary that will equally enrage and inspire you, I highly recommend The Lottery. This film describes the quandary that America’s educational system lives in. With startling statistics like that 58% of African-American fourth graders are functionally illiterate, we watch the city of Harlem’s school district try and overcome these seemingly indomitable challenges through the introduction of public charter schools. These charter schools, like Harlem Success Academy in particular, modify their curriculum to help better engage their students and have found phenomenal success - they boast that 100% of their third graders passed their math exam and that there are no other schools in the state of New York that scored higher than HSA students on the same exam.

The problem comes in that the demand for enrollment vastly outweighs the supply available for charter schools like HSA, so there is a mandatory public lottery system put into place to determine who gets to enroll there. With thousands of children (and their parents) wanting them to enroll there, there are only a few hundred spots available, and thus making it incredibly competitive.

In The Lottery, we follow four children who are hoping to get a spot in Harlem Success Academy, and also hear from a plethora of educators and parents who deal with the everyday reality of the sub-par public school system in Harlem. These parents want their children to have a better chance in life than they had, and they know that they can only gain this through providing them with a top-notch education - one that is not accessible through most of the public schools.

Learning about the lack of quality educational opportunities for these children, and more of the disheartening statistics enraged me - but conversely, I was inspired by how many of these educators are working tirelessly to help make positive changes in our public school systems so that a child’s future isn’t determined by luck in a lottery system. The more I learned about these families and the hardships they’ve faced, the harder it was to keep a dry eye. This is a must-see film that I hope will spark some action in our country to make some changes for the better, and allow the system of poverty to not determine the future of our children any more.

Shannon Huebscher is a freelance writer living in Minneapolis.

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