Did everyone land?
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}
Anonymous
What could they have done? Er, provided a kindergarten class. Pretty sure they'd have had 100 percent reenrollment if they actually offered kindergarten. |
Anonymous
It could have been appletree, which ends at PK4. And of course, all of those kids would have had an IB K that they had a right to attend. You can't be shut out of K-12, though you can dislike your options. |
Anonymous
Thank you for this. I'm the PP who apparently knows painfully little about statistics. But we applied to six schools before the common lottery and our wait list numbers went from #6 to a few in the #20s-40s, all the way into the hundreds. Same child last year apparently had a terrible lottery pull and was well into the hundreds for ALL of our choices. This is not brain surgery and I'm surprised that people are throwing statistical slurs around when it's super basic. |
Anonymous
+1. |
Anonymous
I'm not sure exactly what your point is, but surely you know that your personal experience does not equal statistics? Nobody disagrees that in the common lottery the early pulls do a lot better. But look at the bigger picture. Did you get into a school you love under the old system? It sounds like no, if you played the lottery again. A number 6 waitlist means NOTHING if it's not the school you want to be at. And there are not enough places at the schools that people love. The vast majority of the people who had options at more than one school under the old system were still playing the lottery again because they weren't happy with the choices available to them. |
Anonymous
NP - and you 2 PP's seem to not understand that 12 separate shots at 12 schools gives EVERYONE who applies better odds at getting into one than 1 lottery number for all 12 determining it. Yes, you deal with the exact same number of actual open spots in both scenarios, but you increase your odds of getting lucky somewhere dramatically when it's a separate draw (and separate random lottery number) for each school. But don't worry, you're just as cute as you think the other PP is when you don't understand something. 
|
Anonymous
| Okay, you win, statistics moron. Let's go back to a system in which everyone has an equal chance to land a desirable spot, but the spots they land are not desirable to them. Great plan. |
Anonymous
DP, ok, so explain it. If you have 12 schools, school 1, school 2, school 3, etc, and 1000 people applying for spots at all 12 schools, explain how the Common Lottery giving each person one single lottery number that is the biggest determining factor in how much "choice" you get or how good a choice you get, somehow gives ALL 1000 people the exact same odds of getting into even ONE of the 12 schools, than 12 SEPARATE lotteries where each of the 1000 gets a new chance at a great number? Please explain that, because I don't understand you saying you didn't have better odds with 12 separate lotteries either. |
Anonymous
Without going into the statistics (I will wait for someone else to explain), I will note that in your second scenario (last year), very few people would actually have a CHOICE, they would just be stuck with whichever one they got into, even if it was someone else's first choice who got into their first choice. In the current scenario, people do have choices. |
Anonymous
|
Different PP. Odds were better mathematically, I guess, but the premise now is to get people into schools they like BETTER so they will not have to keep lotterying year after year.
It's really not that great to have separate lotteries if you're going to get offered places at Payne Elementary, Burroughs and Miner when you wanted Mundo Verde or John Eaton. Better to get the winners where they really want to be than to keep churning people endlessly through schools they don't like. Bonus is that the lottery might actually concentrate high SES neighbors at their IB schools where they might be inclined to get involved. |
Anonymous
| The same number of students get into the desirable spots either way in this scenario. Thus, every student still has the same chance to get one of the 12 spots. The only difference is that with one lottery you know earlier whether you got into your chosen school, a different school, or got shut out. |
Anonymous
NP here. Because you still have the same number of seats at desirable schools. If you only have 200 non-sibling seats in PK-3 for schools that these 1000 people are excited about, there are still only going to be 200 winning families and 800 losing families no matter how you order the lottery. There have been several threads trying to explain this same point to people over and over again. |
Anonymous
Childish namecalling aside, another issue you clearly don't understand is the difference between working to improve the overall number of quality spots available (which is essential obviously in DC), and just pointing out basic facts about the pluses and minuses about different application/lottery systems. Those are two totally different issues, even though the overwhelming demand compared to the small supply is a root cause for both. You're too petty to pay attention to the fact that it's possible to both be in favor of the common lottery (which I am), AND to recognize that there is a drawback, namely that actually individual odds of getting in to one of the better schools are reduced if there's one draw. Good luck with just spinning around on namecalling and oversimplication. Hopefully others are actually able to recognize the pluses and minuses and keep working to improve BOTH the number of quality school spots available (by improving the schools we already have and opening new schools where necessary, both complex but crucial endeavors) as well as by improving the application system each year. |
Anonymous
You still don't understand the difference between one single student's odds of getting into 12 schools in 12 different lotteries vs. 12 schools in 1 lottery. No one is arguing the fact that at the end of the day, there are only X number of spots with Y numbers of people looking and only X students will end up in those spots. Yes, we all understand that part. |
Anonymous
|
There is no disadvantage, you are just a poor loser.
Analyzing the simple scenario (12 schools, equally desirable to each person) that you gave above, if there are 200 spots and 800 students, each student has an equal chance to get one of those spots regardless of whether it is one lottery or more, as if they get more than one they have to toss it back in the pot. But there are three major advantages that you see, two that have been discussed recently, and one that you just pointed out: 1. People actually get to choose which school they prefer and you no longer have the scenario in which someone who wanted Yu Ying got into EL Haynes and vice versa and can’t switch. 2. There is no waiting for the major shakeout, most people know fairly early what the plan will be and have time to act accordingly, instead of waiting until October to have any clue how it will end up. 3. People research their options and don’t just choose the most popular option, thus convincing more people to apply for lesser known (generally neighborhood) schools and invest in them when they get in. This increases the number of acceptable choices and conceivably can improve the schools long-term. The one actual disadvantage is that the parents need to do a lot of upfront research when they might not end up having the option, thus they get invested and some end up having wasted a lot of time, which could turn them into poor losers who no longer understand statistics. |