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I agree with this as well, although as Ken has said, there is a lot of grumbling about the supposed "weeding out" without any actual accusations of this happening, much less a finding that it HAS happened.

A unified lottery would take care of many of the inefficiencies Ken points out, in particular parents holding multiple spots. But I wonder if it wouldn't substitute other logistical difficulties:

- You'd probably have to have families who want to take advantage of a sibling preference to declare before the lottery. But does that preclude the family from trying to get into a different/better school via the lottery? (DCPS probably deals with this now, I just don’t know how.)

- What about twins? When the first twin gets in, the other automatically does as well? What about different-age siblings? (I’d be interested to know how Denver deals with it these issues.)

- Is there a waitlist? And if so, how is it ordered? Does Kid #1 in the unified lottery get into his top choice and automatically # 1 on the list of every other school to which he applies? That doesn’t seem right.

- Under the guise of efficiency, it imposes very significant burdens on parents. Now, parents enter a bunch of charter lotteries, many, or most of which they won’t get into, or have a low enough lottery number to bother seriously checking out the school. Under a unified system, though, they have to make final, irrevocable (presumably) decisions before the lottery – that means vetting ALL potential schools. That’s a huge burden. And many won’t have the time to do all that legwork, and will rely on reputation/shortcuts (“I’ve heard Yu Ying/Kipp/Cap City/EL Haynes is good”), which could lead to all sorts of bad placements – anything from “If I’d had the time to look into this, I’d have realized this isn’t a good fit for my kid,” to ‘Year round program? But we go to visit my family overseas every year for 2 weeks in August!!” to “Whaddaya mean, it’s moving to Walter Reed?!?!” It’s unreasonable to ask parents to learn this much information, and unrealistic to think they will. School choice only works when parents can make informed decisions, and I think this leads to less informed decisions by parents.

Measures can be taken to address holding onto spots and skimming the dream – moving the commitment/enrollment date up date up, and imposing tighter controls on the waitlist process. This would also provide more certainty for funding purposes. This strikes me as an attempt at a comprehensive solution that may create more significant problems than it solves, as opposed to more targeted measures that address specific, discrete problems.

by dcd on Jun 29, 2012 2:38 pm • link • report