‘The Lottery’ a ‘commercial’ that’s hardly unbiased

The documentary “The Lottery” is long on propaganda and short on truth.

Novice filmmaker Madeleine Sackler’s debut documentary, “The Lottery,” appears at first glance to be a compelling look at four families’ search for the best education for their children. The action follows them in the months leading up to the lottery at which the next incoming class at Eva Moskowitz’s Harlem Success Academy charter schools will be chosen. And as they struggle with issues like imprisonment, disability and immigration, it is hard not to root for these working parents and their kids.

Unfortunately, the film is long on propaganda and short on truth. It appeals to the audience’s emotions and natural sympathy for the underdog, but it is hardly an unbiased look at the biggest issue in public education today. Even The New York Times described it as a “commercial” for Moskowitz’s charter schools.

In fact, considering that director Sackler admitted to NY1 reporter Lindsey Christ outside the film’s Tribeca Film Festival debut on May 5 that “The Lottery” was paid for, in part, by sources that also fund charter schools, it may very well serve the same purpose as a commercial.

Nor is Sackler’s partial admission — partial because she refused to identify specific backers of the film — the only reason to doubt her credibility. Although she insisted in a June 5 interview with The Wall Street Journal that she is “not really a political person” and “was in no way affiliated” with the charter school movement before making the movie, her father is none other than Jonathan Sackler, founder and former chair of ConnCan, Connecticut’s premier “education reform” (read: pro-privatization) organization.

In addition to his role at ConnCan, Sackler is the president of the Bouncer Foundation, a private family foundation that, among other endeavors, funds education reform projects. He is also on the board of Achievement First, a regional network of charters in New York and Connecticut whose co-CEO and president, Dacia Toll, figures prominently in “The Lottery.”

But Madeleine Sackler’s bias isn’t the only problem with the film. It is also full of misinformation and, in some cases, outright slander — like Eva Moskowitz’s assertion that UFT reps once told her “we will put you six feet under.”

Moskowitz also insists in the film that her schools serve as many special-needs students as the local district schools, a half-truth at best that Sackler accepts without question. In fact, Moskowitz’s schools serve a comparable number of special-needs students only if one ignores the fact that virtually none of those students have the most challenging disabilities, in sharp contrast to the students with special needs in the district schools.

And the claim, repeated throughout the film, that charters do more than district schools with the same or fewer resources? The truth is that charters like Harlem Success, which share buildings with district schools, get almost exactly the same public funding as district schools — plus tens of millions of dollars more from private sources like hedge funds and the Wal-Mart Walton Family Foundation that aren’t available to district schools.

Either way, charters are enough in the green to pay out big annual salaries to their top executives: almost $300,000 for KIPP’s David Levin and, in 2006-2007, close to $400,000 for Moskowitz. They manage just a fraction of the number of district schools overseen by Schools Chancellor Joel Klein but earn more than him. So much for doing more with less.

Perhaps the single most objectionable statement in “The Lottery” is Moskowitz’s cynical admission that the lottery she holds for her schools is an act of political theater. She hopes for a crowd — for more children than she can possibly accept to her schools — because the very public lottery is intended to pressure politicians to let her open more charters. In this context, children’s disappointment is Moskowitz’s gain in her political crusade against unionized teachers.

Ultimately, the film is no less a contrived political spectacle than the outrageous event for which it is named. The powerful stories of the families depicted are, disappointingly, exploited in the service of an anti-union political agenda rather than told to unite all those who care about improving urban schools.