{"product_id":"the-lottery","title":"The Lottery","description":"Product Description\n\nIn a country where 58% of African American 4th graders are functionally illiterate, The Lottery uncovers the failures of the traditional public school system and reveals that hundreds of thousands of parents attempt to flee the system every year. The Lottery follows four of these families from Harlem and the Bronx who have entered their children in a charter school lottery. Out of thousands of hopefuls, only a small minority will win the chance of a better future. Directed by Madeleine Sackler and shot by award-winning cinematographer Wolfgang Held, The Lottery uncovers a ferocious debate surrounding the education reform movement. Interviews with politicians and educators explain not only the crisis in public education, but also why it is fixable. A call to action to avert a catastrophe in the education of American children, The Lottery makes the case that any child can succeed.\n\nReview\n\nThe ginger stepchild of President Obama's election platform, it seems that this country's broke-ass education system is finally stepping up for its media moment. On the heels of a recent 60 Minutes piece on Washington, D.C.'s SEED school and New York Times Magazine cover story focused on education reform comes The Lottery, a precise, impassioned look at the battle between zone and charter schools in Harlem. Director Madeleine Sackler interweaves the stories of four charter hopefuls and their families with an exploration of an issue whose politics have grown so complex that they squiggle even partisan lines. Sackler finds personal, persuasive points of entry for key factors in the debate: Statistics contrasting the annual amounts spent on a child's education and a prisoner's housing are followed by the account of a school lottery entrant's incarcerated father, who laments his lack of choice as much as the choices he made. An electrifying community meeting finds Harlem Success president Eva Moskowitz both vilified and heralded as \"our Obama\"; by local parents, as the unions depend on such poorly understood class and neighborhood tensions to maintain the status quo. Sackler reframes education reform as a moral issue, and it's impossible to look at the fallen faces of kids turned away from a school of all things and disagree. --The Village Voice\n\n'What's funny,\" says Madeleine Sackler, \"is that I'm not really a political person.\" Yet the petite 27-year-old is the force behind \"The Lottery\" an explosive new documentary about the battle over the future of public education opening nationwide this Tuesday. In the spring of 2008, Ms. Sackler, then a freelance film editor, caught a segment on the local news about New York's biggest lottery. It wasn't the Powerball. It was a chance for 475 lucky kids to get into one of the city's best charter schools (publicly funded schools that aren't subject to union rules). \"I was blown away by the number of parents that were there,\" Ms. Sackler tells me over coffee on Manhattan's Upper West Side, recalling the thousands of people packed into the Harlem Armory that day for the drawing. \"I wanted to know why so many parents were entering their kids into the lottery and what it would mean for them.\" And so Ms. Sackler did what any aspiring filmmaker would do: She grabbed her camera. Her initial aim was simple. \"Going into the film I was excited just to tell a story,\"; she says. \"A vérité film, a really beautiful, independent story about four families that you wouldn't know otherwise\" in the months leading up to the lottery for the Harlem Success Academy. But on the way to making the film she imagined, she \"stumbled on this political mayhem really like a turf war about the future of public education.\" Or more accurately, she happened upon a raucous protest outside of a failing public school in which Harlem Success, already filled to capacity, had requested space. \"We drove by that protest,\" Ms. Sackler recalls. \"We were on our way to another interview and we jumped out of the van and started filming.\" There she discovered that the majority of those protesting the proliferation of charter schools were not even from the neighborhood. They'd come from the Bronx and Queens. \"They all said 'We're not allowed to talk to you. We're just here to support the parents.\" But there were only two parents there, says Ms. Sackler, and both were members of Acorn. And so, \"after not a lot of digging,\" she discovered that the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) had paid Acorn, the controversial community organizing group, \"half a million dollars for the year.\" (It cost less to make the film.) Finding out that the teachers union had hired a rent-a-mob to protest on its behalf was \"the turn for us in the process.\" That story of self-interested adults trying to deny poor parents choice for their children provided an answer to Ms. Sackler's fundamental question: \"If there are these high-performing schools that are closing the achievement gap, why aren't there more of them?\" The reason is what Eva Mosko\u003cbr\u003eASIN: B003XSTS2W\u003cbr\u003eVSKU: DBV.B003XSTS2W.G\u003cbr\u003eCondition: Good\u003cbr\u003eBinding: DVD\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eNote:\u003c\/b\u003e Any images shown are stock photographs and product may differ from what is shown.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCondition Notes\u003c\/b\u003e: Individually inspected: Guaranteed to play perfectly or your money back. Case may show wear and may be in library packaging. Ships Fast!  \u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Dream Books Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":41598254940218,"sku":"DBV.B003XSTS2W.G","price":8.29,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0555\/6011\/0138\/files\/B003XSTS2W-0.jpg?v=1786850925","url":"https:\/\/shop.dreambooksco.com\/products\/the-lottery","provider":"Dream Books Co.","version":"1.0","type":"link"}