Sunday, March 28, 2010

The Educated Reporter: TER goes to the movies: “The Lottery”

The Educated Reporter: TER goes to the movies: “The Lottery”

TER goes to the movies: “The Lottery”

Today I watched a screener of “The Lottery,” the Eva Moskowitz informercial—er, sorry, charter school documentary—that is making the film festival rounds and coming out in May. Sure, I got a little teary-eyed at the end; every detail of this film is set up for the viewer to believe that if these children do not get into one of Moskowitz’s Harlem Success Academies, they are doomed for life. The sad thing is, I had the feeling the five-year-olds at the lottery got that dispiriting message as well. Why do they let children go to these, anyway?

My critique has nothing to do with those charters or the traditional public schools they serve as an alternative to, none of which I have visited. Even if the former are superior to the latter, I found the film exceedingly manipulative. There was the predictable myth I will never tire of attempting to debunk yet politicans will never cease repeating, that prisons are built based on elementary school reading scores. You hear, as you often do, that the average black twelfth grader reads on the same level of the average white eighth grader. When I tried to track that bit down years ago to use in a book, NCES psychometricians told me it is a misuse of NAEP results, the scale scores for different grades not being directly comparable. There are plenty of legitimate data out there people can