-By SkyBluez
(Ed’s note: Sky_Bluez is one of my favorite Twitter pals and she wrote a great review of The Lottery, the film we discussed on Tuesday. It was originally posted on her blog The Song Remains the Same.)
Last night I saw The Lottery a documentary about the problems with traditional public schools in disadvantaged areas. The film follows four families who enter the lottery to get a chance at having their child leave their low performing public schools in Harlem and the Bronx and attend a much better performing charter school. The documentary shines a light on how the local Democrat political establishment and teachers unions throw road blocks at every turn and make it extremely difficult for more of these well performing schools to be available for parents who want them.
The film is very well done. You can’t help but feel invested in these children as Ameenah translates for her deaf mother, or Christian gets frustrated working on his addition with his father, or Greg Jr. Laments not wanting to go to “house #2” to visit his dad in prison. All three of these children are raised by a single parent and face great hardship . Then there is Eric Jr. who has better circumstances. Eric has two involved parents. His father is a Union bus driver and mother is an aspiring teacher. This family is torn because they are union supporters, but still want the best for their children, which is not public school.
Besides drawing you into the personal lives of these kids, the documentary also shines a light on the thuggish tactics of unions and how they hire groups like ACORN to show up and protest charter schools. It also shows a local hearing where the director of the charter school is treated with disrespect by local politicians despite having excellent factual answers to their fallacy based questions.
The only drawback to the film is that there seems to be undeserved Obama praise regarding the issue. Most everyone involved appear to be Democrats that are disillusioned with the Unions and will continue to complain about them but won’t take the political steps necessary to change things. The film implies that Obama is a supporter of Charter schools simply because he gives lip service to it. If they looked at his actions rather than his rhetoric, they’d see that he will always side with Unions no matter how unreasonable. This is evidenced by his eliminating school vouchers for future DC residents. They also ignore Obama’s strong ties with ACORN and Unions. Obama has even encouraged thuggish tactics by sicking SEIU Union thugs on peaceful town hall protesters. Not all Unions are this bad, but SEIU and inner city teachers Unions are similar. It may have been too political to put those things in the film, but then they should have left Obama out of it all together, or at least from the adult perspective. There was a very touching scene where Greg Jr. goes on about his love for Obama. That scene is great and makes you glad that these kids have him as a role model.
Despite the Obama denial, the film was excellent and heartbreaking. The final scene of the actual lottery was so sad. Watching all those people you don’t know clinging to the reading of names was bad enough but finding out who doesn’t make it among the families you become attached to is devastating. I cried.