four movies on education reform (?!): "The Lottery", "The Cartel", "Waiting for Superman", and "A Small Act"

The first, reviewed by Alisa Harris in World...

The Lottery, directed by Madeleine Sackler, follows...parents and the difficulties facing the charter schools they want to enter....With demand for charter schools outstripping available space, the schools hold lotteries to decide which students may enter. Who signs up to have their child's future determined by a roll of dice, and why? The Lottery (2010, not rated) moves with a delicate touch through these lives, but it faces squarely the controversy surrounding charter schools...

And yes, the film is heartbreaking, too. In a country where 365,000 children are on charter school wait lists, there are few happy endings. Parents who lose out try to explain the unhappy outcomes to confused kids, while the mom who gets lucky jumps up and down and thanks Jesus.


The second, also reviewed by Alisa Harris in World...

The state of New Jersey spends the most money per pupil and has dismal test scores to show for it. The Cartel, an education documentary by journalist Bob Bowdon, explores why. The Cartel is overly ambitious, jumping from administrative costs to school corruption to vouchers to a church tutoring service to charter schools. It tries to make a sweeping case for school reform but ends up seeming glib. The film (2009, Moving Picture Studios, not rated) is at its most interesting when it covers a neglected topic: Why does education cost so much?...


The third, reviewed by Megan Basham in World...

Four years ago director Davis Guggenheim put more than a few conservative noses out of joint with his Oscar-winning global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. This year, he may do the same to liberals with Waiting for "Superman," a scathing look at the U.S. public-school system and those who stand in the way of reforming it...

American students' math, science, and reading scores are pitiful—yet U.S. pupils are first in the world in how good they feel about their abilities....How did we get to this point? It's not for lack of spending or legislation. We spend more per pupil than almost any other industrialized nation...With painful specificity, Guggenheim points out that the real culprit is suffocating bureaucracy and those who have a stake in making sure every inch of red tape stays put.

...viewers will no doubt argue about some of the solutions Guggenheim presents. But his major accomplishment is in making it impossible to ignore who's responsible for educational gridlock....the teachers unions and the politicians who owe enormous amounts of campaign dollars to them...

Finally, the third and fourth, reviewed by Roger Ebert...

Sometimes two films set up an uncanny resonance with one another. I saw two documentaries back to back. One filled me with hope and the other washed me in despair. They were both about the education of primary school children.

"A Small Act" centers on the life story of Chris Mburu, who as a small boy living in a mud house in a Kenyan village had his primary and secondary education paid for by a Swedish woman. This cost her $15 a month. They had never met. He went on to the University of Nairobi, graduated from Harvard Law School, and is today a United Nations Human Rights Commissioner.

"Waiting for Superman" studies the failing American educational system. Oh, yes, it is failing. We spend more money per student than any other nation in the world, but the test scores of our students have fallen from near the top to near the bottom among developed nations....

Both films are powerful. Seen together, they are devastating. They both end in the same way, with a competition among young students to allow them to continue their education. In Kenya, they take a test....In America, they hope to have their names chosen in a lottery. If they win, they will be accepted by a desirable magnet or charter school....

Both movies are blunt about the reasons some students succeed and others fail. It has nothing to do with their intelligence. In Kenya, it is a matter of poverty....In the United States, it is a matter of teaching. "Waiting for Superman" argues that the greatest enemies of American primary and secondary education are the teachers' unions....It was made by Davis Guggenheim, whose last documentary was Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth." Among those at Sundance in support of it was Microsoft's Bill Gates, who appears in it. Liberals....