For years, the fight over whether to expand school choice in Florida has been a bitter struggle waged by lawmakers, teachers unions and parents.
But its only part of a larger national struggle to give economically disadvantaged parents opportunities to take their children out of failing schools and into schools they cant normally afford, according to a New York City-based documentary film due out this week.
A glimpse of the ugliness and of the battle for expanded school choice can be seen in screenings of The Lottery in two Florida cities today.
The full-length documentary will be shown in Ybor City and Hialeah at 7:30 p.m. It gets a limited release starting Friday, premiering in New York, where it is set, and then opens in other theaters.
In the film, director and editor Madeleine Sackler documents a 2008 lottery to accept 475 students into the Harlem Success Academy, a much in-demand, publicly funded charter school.
The film, noting that 58 percent of black fourth graders are functionally illiterate, follows four low-income black families who entered the names of their children into the lottery.
While the Success Academy was planning the lottery, it was also mulling a move into PS 194, a nearby failing public school. The decision whether to allow the move was to be made before the lottery winners were chosen, and it could have decided whether the charter school could have held lotteries in the future.
The move prompted protests at the school, which Sackler, a freelance film editor on TV programs at the time, was fortunate enough to film. What she witnessed were protests from not only parents and the United Federation of Teachers, but also the members of the now infamous ACORN community activism group. UFT had paid the then-powerful national lobby to help defeat the move.
"It was very clear that most of the people who were there were paid to be there," Sackler said. "They didn't know much about the school. They didn't know much about the community."
The protesters claimed the Success Academy did better only because of smaller class sizes and took away from public school enrollment and funding. The film goes on to focus on the plight of children who would benefit from greater school choice.
Eva Moskowitz, founder of the Success Academy, speaks forcefully in the film about the politics of unions, calling them thuggish. In the film, she testifies to a meeting that there are 23 charter schools in Harlem and they are transforming public education.
For the first time, Harlem parents have meaningful choices, Moskowitz said. Now, however, a backlash is taking place. There is, I will argue, a union-political educational complex that is trying to halt the progress and put the interests of adults above the interests of children.
Sackler said she was not politically active, but the fact that adults who didnt have a direct investment in the subject were driving the conversation was a cause for concern and a key point of her film. "To me, it's not about being for or against one type of school," she said. "It's about being for great schools."
She said the UFT refused requests for comments in her film. The union also declined to talk with Sunshine State News
The question of school choice was particularly pertinent this legislative session.
On April 22, Gov. Charlie Crist signed into law a measure expanding the states Tax Credit Scholarship Program, which gives tax credits to businesses that donate toward the enrollment of children from low-income families in private schools. The cap for the program, which enrolled more than 27,000 students in private schools, was raised from $118 million to $140 million as part of the law.
While it receivedbipartisan support, the scholarship expansion was opposed by the Florida Education Association, the states largest teachers union. But the FEA, which also lobbied heavily against the controversial SB 6 teacher performance pay bill Crist vetoed in April, has never contracted-out its advocacy efforts to lobbyist organizations like ACORN, said FEA spokesman Mark Pudlow.
We do our own lobbying, he said.
Pudlow said he had not seen "The Lottery" and could not comment on it.
The FEA also opposed the Opportunity Scholarship Program, which issued private school vouchers to low-income parents whose children attended failing schools. The union successfully sought for the Florida Supreme Court to intervene, and the court ruled the private school provision unconstitutional in 2006.
Reach Alex Tiegen at atiegen@sunshinestatenews, or at (561) 329-5389.
