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thm, leaving your middle v. at-risk distinction aside (I'm sure others will parse it) your comparison to match day is apt. If residency programs can be assigned this way, surely DC schools can be too--and residency match is even more complicated, since the hospitals AND the med students each have preferences, while in DC just the families rank the schools.

To those who have wondered about sibling preference in a unified system, the residency match program has a feature for "couples match" where two people can express a desire to be sent to lower-preference programs if it means they are in the same city. I think that could easily be programmed into a DC system. They also offer an anti-match, where you accept a lower-preference program in order to NOT be placed with a specific person.

As for the parents who are concerned that it's too much burden to check out 20 schools and kids will get placed into a school that's a bad fit, I disagree. Parents don't have to apply to 20 schools, just as many as they think their kid should go to. I think lots of people apply to all the "good" OOB and charter schools now based on reputation, and while a unified application might increase that a little, it ameliorates a lot of bigger issues too. I don't think it's the end of the world for some parents to be surprised their kid gets into a year-round school. The kids whose parents don't do the research might benefit from year-round school. And if the parents don't like it, they can remove their kid--it doesn't lead to any more switching system-wide than the current method does, and I doubt that will happen too often.

One way to get over the lack of information problem would be to publish unified school profiles (like colleges' Common Data Sets, http://profiles.dcps.dc.gov/, or the "compare" feature on electronics companies' website) that allow schools to submit responses to a questionnaire). Ideally, they'd have a lot more information than the DC Schools Chooser http://www.greatschools.org/res/pdf/DC/DC_School_Chooser_2012-2013.pdf but that is a good start.

by sb on Jun 30, 2012 9:11 am • link • report