Hacker Cinema
The Lottery
2010 · Film · documentary · 81 min
Directed by Madeleine Rotzler
Four children enter a high-stakes lottery. If they win, they can attend one of the best schools in New York. A look at the crisis in public education, The Lottery makes the case than any child can succeed.
3 positivefrom 3 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
I think you should spend some time reading up on charther schools and see exactly how they get their funding and what they can and can't do.
If you can't be bothered start by watching the Documentary "The Lottery" and then come back and tell me that a schools methods can't make a difference.
If you are still not convinced I can certainly live with that.
And every single student who want to go to the public school in Tribecca have to have an address there to be zoned for it. If you want to talk about selection bias thats your case not a lottery.
Plenty of kids in Harlem goes to Success Academy. Most of the kids in Williamsburg comes from fairly low-income families. That was the very premise of the school and why it's popular.
Watch the documentary The Lottery on Netflix it's quite illuminating.
I liked Waiting for Superman a little better, but The Lottery is also good and touches on very similar themes. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1515935/
In case you haven't noticed, charter schools have far more interest from parents than there are spots open, that's why they have lotteries to get in. In fact there is a documentary specifically about this, called simply [1] The Lottery.
Also New Jersey schools are some of the most corrupt in the nation, which there is also a documentary about called [2] The Cartel. In The Cartel they actually have a scene from one of the charter lotteries, which is one of the saddest scenes I've ever seen in a film as it literally brought tears to my eyes watching parents and kids celebrate when they were chosen, and brought to tears of anguish when they were not.
Also it would be nice if you could show us where the public school system is supposedly "functioning just fine," as I'd love to see the evidence for that. In fact, there is a movie being released this Friday called [3] Waiting for "Superman" that argues the opposite, along with former NY state educator of the year [4] John Taylor Gatto that argues in his books that the entire system should be abolished and started over from scratch. Sure, there are the very rare few teachers that are actually doing good work, but the system is flawed from the top down starting with the goals (essentially to produce factory workers with no individual thought [5,6]).
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1515935/
[2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1433001/
[3] http://www.waitingforsuperman.com/
[4] http://johntaylorgatto.com/
[5] http://johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.htm
[6] http://www.amazon.com/Weapons-Mass-Instruction-Schoolteachers-Compulsory/dp/0865716692/ref=sr_1_1?s=gateway&ie=UTF8&qid=1285213876&sr=8-1