Byzantine choice systems favor savvy parents, and drive them crazy

New York City's school choice system is time-consuming, exhausting and byzantine,

writes Michelle Goldberg, a New York Times columnist. It's "a bureaucratic Rube Goldberg machine that locks out families that don’t know how to operate it while driving privileged ones crazy."

"Places are distributed according to a bewildering mixture of lotteries, grades, tests, interviews, essays, auditions and portfolios," she writes. Most families aren't guaranteed a spot at a local school.

Families list the high schools they want in order of preference. Students are divided into five tiers, based on their seventh-grade report card, then assigned a lottery number to determine their ranking within the tier. Educated, affluent parents research the options, try to get spots on school tours and sometimes hire admissions consultants. Or they move to the suburbs.

New York’s public schools are losing students, writes Goldberg. Forty-one percent of parents who withdrew from district schools said they were seeking "more rigorous" education, according to an Education Department survey released last year. Half of the 40 percent whose families moved said “concerns about schools” were one of their reasons for leaving the city.

Goldberg wants to bring back neighborhood high schools, as an option for parents. People crave predictability, she writes. Under the Bloomberg administration, the city split large neighborhood high schools into smaller themed schools. "There are schools for sports management, marketing and hip-hop — but not nearly enough neighborhood high schools with broad, general-interest offerings and honors tracks. Without a zoned high school, families have little incentive to lobby to make their local ones better."

But those big schools closed because achievement was low. People don't want to send their kids to a neighborhood school that's not very good.

New York City's top gifted school, Hunter College Elementary, has a separate and unequal admissions process, writes Alina Adams, a consultant and author who runs NYC School Secrets.

Parents who pay $425 have their four-year-old's IQ tested to start the admissions process. Those who request a fee waiver "face two more layers of hoops to jump through." That may be why Hunter's decades-long diversity campaign has made little progress.

San Francisco Unified will bring back neighborhood schools, replacing a complicated lottery system, reports Ezra Wallach in the San Francisco Standard.

"Under the current system, families tour and rank any of the more than 100 elementary, middle, and high schools in the city," writes Wallach. "Where they land with the lottery depends on a complex mix of strategy, tiebreakers, and luck."

The new plan, which is expected to be approved in April, guarantees kindergarteners a seat at a neighborhood elementary school. Attendance boundaries will be redrawn by fall of 2028. Parents will be able to apply for "citywide programs such as language immersion, K-8 schools, and special education," he writes. The board rejected an alternative that would have let families apply to any school that had room for students.

Superintendent Maria Su said the district would make every neighborhood school worth attending. “The school down the street should be a good option and a certain one.”

But it will take time, probably 10 years, to improve struggling schools, Deputy Superintendent John Davis told the board.

Few parents are willing to wait that long.

The test scores at her neighborhood school in Portola “do not give me confidence,” said Nancy Tung, a Democratic Party leader in the city. “If the only option for my kids were to go to our area attendance school, I would look outside of the school district for my kid’s education,” she said. “Parents will find a way to put their kids in schools they want their kids to go to, and you’re going to be left with the same equity problems that you have now.”

The lottery was supposed to help integrate schools without using race in assignments, Wallach writes. "But more affluent families were far more likely to use it, and by 2019, the district said, its elementary schools were more segregated than they had been three decades earlier."