Invitation to the Harlem Success charter school lottery

Eva Moskowitz, the head of the Harlem Success charter school, asked me to pass this invitation along (the school, where the lottery will be held, is located at 34 West 118th Street, 3rd Fl., just off of 5th Avenue):

I wanted to personally invite you to our lottery next week on Wednesday, March 28th at 6:00pm.  I know you have been to lotteries before but this really will be a site to behold.  We will have around 4x as many applicants as we have spots -- even more than last year.  There will be hundreds of families seeking out educational options.  This would be a great educational opportunity for the ed reform community.  To see this up close and personal is very different than to read about.

Believe it or not, I've never been to a charter school lottery, but from what I hear (most recently from a friend at the Achievement First schools in Brooklyn, where last week 2,400 students applied for only 400 slots), everyone is crying: tears of joy of the lucky 15-20% of parents, whose children have been given a lifeline to college and a better life, and tears of sadness, rage and despair, for the unlucky 80-85%, who are forced to send their children to schools that everyone knows are utterly failing.  Yet there's this titanic struggle in Albany whether to allow Achievement First, Harlem Success, KIPP, etc. to open more schools and save more children...  Words cannot describe how wrong this is...  (Yet there's almost no media coverage of charter school lotteries, so shame on the media -- and shame on us for not doing more to attract media coverage...)