The Lottery, one of 15 films on the Oscar shortlist for documentaries, is one of the most frustrating and infuriating films I’ve seen this year. The film is about Harlem Success Academy, although philosophically it addresses ideas around charter schools generally; it tracks four Harlem families as they anxiously wait to see whether their kids’ names get drawn for the few available kindergarten slots at HSA for the coming school year.

Director Madeleine Sackler selected her subjects wisely, giving us engaging, smart, loving and concerned parents and some very bright, witty, equally engaging kids to care about; we spend enough time with each of the HSA hopefuls to care about what happens to them, and to root for them to get in.

Thousands of kids are competing for only a few places at HSA, and in Harlem, where not getting into a charter school relegates your child to attending the “zone” school for your neighborhood, getting into a charter school could make a huge difference in your child’s long-term success. Will your child sustain and achieve the dream of his five-year-old self to become an astronaut, or President of the United States?

Structurally, the film counts down as we get closer and closer to the day of the public lottery drawing for available seats at HSA, for the most part effectively building tension as the big day nears. My one issue with the structure of the film is that I don’t think it goes far enough in showing us just how high the stakes are (though this may be due to lack of access). It’s one thing to hear dry statistics about how lousy the regular public schools are; it would have been another to actually see them in action. With some hidden camera footage of zone schools (think: The Cove goes to public school in Harlem), this film could have been enormously powerful by raising the emotional stakes even higher.

One of the points The Lottery makes about the need for charter schools is that they most benefit poor urban families, whose kids are at highest risk for not succeeding. For these families, just moving to an apartment in a zone with higher-performing schools, or sending their kids to a private school, or fleeing for the ‘burbs, are simply not options. These kids do not have the advantages of their middle-to-upper-middle class peers. Charter schools seek to level the playing field and provide excellent, free public education to more students.

Which frankly, makes it very interesting to see the film reveal who’s most standing in the way of HSA and similar programs: Not rich white conservatives seeking to keep the minorities down and send young Black men to prison, but liberal politicians (most of those we see in the film are themselves minorities) and the incredibly powerful teachers’ union. Wait, what? Why on earth would teachers’ unions oppose something that so obviously benefits the very students they purport to be passionate about teaching?

The film (which, it must be admitted, has a distinctly pro-charter school POV and tends to frame the liberal politicians and union reps uniformly as the villains here) reveals the filmmaker’s perspective: Teachers unions are brutal, thuggish organizations with a stranglehold on Democratic politicians, especially in urban areas. The union contract is over 600 pages long and specifies a dizzying array of details spelling out exactly what teachers have to do, what qualifications they have to have, what they are not allowed to be required to do, and the complicated, lengthy process required to get rid of an incompetent teacher.

Charter schools like HSA are immune from having to use union teachers and therefore don’t have their hands tied behind their backs by union rules, tenacious and charismatic HSA founder Eva Moskowitz explains. They can (and do) demand higher standards. They can (and do) have longer school days and a longer school year. HSA principals can (and do) fire teachers who are not passionate, engaged, competent and succeeding.

HSA doesn’t have smaller class sizes than average; their classes actually have more kids than your average NYC elementary school. And yet where traditional public schools in Harlem are failing dismally, while teachers and administrators blame their failures on poverty, drugs, welfare, ghettos and single mothers, at HSA kids are succeeding at a rate that, apparently, the teachers’ union in NYC finds rather alarming. How dare they succeed where others are failing?

Moskowitz, who was raised in Harlem and lives there now, would fire back that the process, the bureaucracy, is clearly not working. Kids growing up in Harlem keep failing, and failing and failing, while the lucky few who get into the charters, for the most part, succeed. Meanwhile, the adults who are supposed to be working on behalf of educating children are instead focused on ego and recrimination and blame, and above all on protecting their own self interests.

But does HSA’s success indicate that the excuses public schools in poor neighborhoods give for their failings are bogus? Well, yes and no.

On the one hand, it’s indisputable that HSA’s formula of high academic standards and rigorous expectations of both their students and parents — and their philosophy that every student can and will succeed with structure and support — is clearly working. We see HSA classrooms in action, with engaged, passionate, enthusiastic teachers and kids who are actively learning and working and all in their places with bright shiny faces.

Whatever they are doing at HSA, it is effective for these kids. But isn’t it also thanks to the parents of these kids, who agree to follow the school’s rigorous and structured program, a school where if a child is consistently late in arriving to school, the parent will get a daily wake-up phone call from school staff?

To be fair to the “regular” public schools in Harlem, I couldn’t help but think that it’s likely that the parents we see profiled here, who I expect are generally reflective overall of the parents applying to get their kids into HSA, do not necessarily reflect the mean for parental involvement in desperately poor neighborhoods.

If you are, like these parents, actively engaged in teaching your kids from an early age, reading to them daily, the walls of your apartment lined with your kids’ artwork and learning materials, taking the time to research charter school options and go to meetings and such and fill out paperwork to get your kid into the lottery to begin with … you are already a parent who is likely to help your kids succeed, even if they have to go to a crappy zone school with a subpar program. You’d have a hard time proving that parental motivation and commitment isn’t a factor here.

Nonetheless, we leave the film befuddled as to why, if it’s as easy as charter schools seem to be showing to significantly improve success with with some relatively minor adjustments to the system, we can’t just make all schools as good as charter schools. And moreover, why more parents aren’t demanding it.

High quality, free public education — education that is as good whether you live in Harlem or Connecticut, South Central Los Angeles or Beverly Hills — is in the best interest of the country as a whole, and the children our tax dollars are educating, right? So why should any child’s fate and future rest on the luck of a lottery drawing?

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