My girlfriend and I drove the hour down to Beverly Hills to catch the education documentary, The Lottery. It ran for just seven days in the Los Angeles area, which boasts one of the least performing school districts in the country, with a fifty percent dropout rate in some parts of the district.
It was a bit ironic that the theatre would be in Beverly Hills, where the choices for parents seem to be what Lexus or BMW to buy their children for their first car. Beverly Hills High is among the best public schools in the country because it is effectively private, thanks to stratospheric the real estate prices. You can imagine their thinking: Lotteries are for poor people, thank you very much.
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Beverly Hills High was the scene of a recent school reform battle, where Beverly Hills decided that those living adjacent to the town can’t attend the school system anymore. A friend, former Sen. Feinstein intern, and editor of the far-left magazine on my campus found a way around it – her parents rented an apartment in Beverly Hills so that her younger brother could attend illegally. To her credit, she changed her position so that she could square being a Democrat and in favor of school choice.
I don’t blame her, but does indicate the kind of contorting that progressives do to escape the school system that their union allies run. It’s a contortion that some black Democrat politicians – notably Mayor Cory Booker of Newark – are making with increased regularity. In a shocker of shockers, Booker says that more money won’t solve the problem of failing schools. Good for him.
But not all black leaders have recognized the importance of school reform. In high school, I interviewed black activist, bussing advocate, and Harvard Law School professor, Charles Ogletree, about issues facing the black community. When I asked about school choice, he told me that parents don’t always know which schools are the best for them and that we really shouldn’t let them. We should put our emphasis on integration and fully funding education, he told me.
Ogletree really needs to sit down and watch The Lottery. Madeleine Sackler, a 27-year-old filmmaker, does a yeoman’s effort with little money to expose the greatest scandal of our time – the capture of our public education operates by the unions and their Democratic allies.
Sackler, who tells The Wall Street Journal, that she isn’t a political person, has captured the naked partisanship of adult politics that has left children in an academic lurch. After covering a protest run by ACORN, Sackler discovered that the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) paid ACORN, “half a million dollars for the year,” to be their rent-a-mob protesting anything and everything that threatens the UFT’s control. In a sign of how utterly non transparent the unions are, Sackler tells the Journal that “it was easier to film in a maximum security prison than it was to film in a traditional public school.”
Enter Eva Moskowitz. A former City Council member turned educational reformer, Moskowitz earned the ire of the UFT by exposing their byzantine 600 page contract to the light. Sunshine may be the best disinfectant, but it wasn’t the best campaign slogan. Moskowitz was defeated for Manhattan borough president, thanks to the teachers’ union, and is now the founder of the Harlem Success academies. The academies are eating the lunch of the traditional school system. In 2009, 95% of her third-graders passed the state’s English Language Arts exam, while Harlem Success, her flagship academy, was first in math out of 3,500 public schools in New York State. She did all that with less: her academies have same or slightly bigger class sizes than their counterparts.
Hell hath no fury like a defeated pol and Moskowitz tells it like it is. The Democrats, whose biggest donor is the UPF, are the real impediment to progress. We see just that at a council meeting, where city council members parrot talking points of the union, attacking Moskowitz for not living in Harlem, where she does, in fact, reside.
This year some 40,000 students are on the waiting list for the Harlem success academies. Sackler follows just four of those families through the process. In each of the stories, just how untrue the lie is that poor parents don’t care about their children’s education. The immigrant prays to God that his son will be chosen, while the deaf single mother says through sign language that she wants her son to have the best education possible. Even the father, who is languishing in prison for a third-strike offense, hopes that his experience can serve as a cautionary note of what not to do, while a MTA bus driver and union member dislikes that the charter schools are non-union, but still recognizes that it’s the best choice for his son.
Alas, the film doesn’t take on some of the more serious problems of charter schools. It fails to mention one of the greatest means by which students can get ahead – school vouchers. Perhaps the politics make such a thing impossible, but it deserves a few minutes in the film anyways. The gains that charter schools have made are possible because of their non-union status, which is itself, in danger now that some charter schools are unionizing.
Meanwhile, Geoffrey Canada, CEO of Harlem’s Children Zone, falls victim to the “Yale or Jail” problem, pointing out that the cost to incarcerate “millions” is roughly triple what it is to educate a child. It’s an interesting point, but to say that the uneducated necessarily become criminals is to rob them of poor folks of their agency. Not everyone who goes to a failing school or who is functionally illiterate winds up being a gangbanger.
Interestingly, Barack Obama features rather heavily in the film. In thrall to those very unions, Obama is rendered into a symbol. His photograph hangs in nearly every classroom in Harlem Success Academy. Students write letters of congratulations to the new president, while education reformers salute his stated commitment to increase the number of charter schools. While it’s true that Barack Obama instructed Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to work towards opening more schools, until he campaigns actively against members of his own party for stifling unions, his policies will fall as flat as his picture on the classroom wall.