How does DC lottery really work...any inside info?

[Anonymous]

I've wondered for years, and I figure there must be a former DCPS employee who knows the answer. So here's my list of questions: does the lottery take into account gender? What about ward? Or is it more like taking a percentage of each ward based on how many applicants from that ward? I have no idea why this isn't common knowledge and seems to be so hush hush, but here if there is someone who has actual details on how kids names are selected, I'd like to know.

[Anonymous]

No.

[Anonymous]

It’s a random drawing. The end.

[Anonymous]

Yes, no secret, since it was centralized about 10 years ago. Before that, schools made their own rules. Now they actually have to follow the real rules.

[Anonymous]

Not gender. I've seen classes turn out quite skewed at smaller schools.

If you're asking about application high schools, I 1000% believe they track wards and other demographic stuff, but I can't prove it.

[Anonymous]

They have an outside audit.

[Anonymous]

It's not a secret and no, it does not take into account gender or ward. Here's how it works.

Everyone who enters the lottery for a particular grade is randomly assigned a number so that every student in the lottery for that grade, across the entire city, is ranked in sequential order. This is your master number.

Then the program goes through the lottery lists and the students who listed a particular school on their lottery list are ranked for that school and grade according to their master number. So, just to give an example, the students who listed School Within School for PK3 would be listed in order (S is for student): S1, S5, S8, S13, S14, S19.... etc. until you've gone through the entire list. The only thing that determines your rank for this is your master number.

Then, the program looks to see if there are students in the list who have a preference. Continuing with our SWS example, the only preference you could have is a sibling preference (the student already has a sibling enrolled in the school). Those students will be bumped to the head of the line but again in their rank order according to master number. So in the above example, assume S14, S48, S62, S97, and S128 all had siblings at SWS. Those students would move to the top of the list, in rank order, and the students without preference would then follow.

At a school with multiple preferences (boundary and sibling, for example), the students with two preferences would go to the front of the line, then students with one preference (I can't remember if sibling preference outranks boundary preference or vice versa), then everyone else.

Next the school's available seats for that school and grade are applied to these lists. So if SWS has 40 spots for PK3, they will make offers to the first 40 students on their list. Some students might be dropped from the list because they have gotten an offer at a school they ranked higher, but the point is that the offers are made in order according to the ranking I just described.

Everyone who doesn't receive an offer for that school, and who has not gotten an offer for a school they ranked higher, will then be moved to a waitlist and assigned a waitlist number. Note that your waitlist number is not the same as your master number because of the ranking system I just described. So your master number might be 68, but your waitlist number could be 6 or 43 or even 90 (if there are enough students with a preference to bump you that far down the list).

There's no gaming it, either as an applying student/family or within DCPS or the charter schools. The primary factor is your randomly assigned master number, and the only help you can get is from one of those designated preferences.

The end. No mystery. There are videos about this on the MySchool website.

[Anonymous]

You sound crazed, TBH. There is no conspiracy, this is really clear.

Pre-common lottery, yes it was definitely easy to do funny business.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It’s a random drawing. The end.

That's not true exactly. Each school has their priorities (in bound, sibling, high risk, staff kids, whatever else they do or don't choose) for example.

But, it's not at all a secret. The algorithm is public and one used by other places with central lotteries.

From My School: (Though, I'm not sure this is exactly how I would describe the lottery if trying to put it in laymans terms)

How does the lottery matching work?
This video explains how the lottery matching works. The My School DC lottery is a computerized program designed to match students with the schools they want most, and maximize the number of students who are matched. The lottery is based on the Nobel Prize-winning work of economist Al Roth of Stanford University.

The two most important things to know about the program are:

Students should rank schools in the order they prefer to increase their chances of being matched to their desired school.
Students who apply early get no advantage in the matching process.


The lottery program follows the below process for all schools:*



The program assigns each student a random lottery number and attempts to match each student with their 1st choice first. If the program is unable to match a student at their 1st choice, it will then attempt to match them at their 2nd choice, then their 3rd, and so on in the order listed on the application. However, when it compares two students who have applied to the same school option, the decision is based on two criteria:



(1) The students’ lottery preferences at that school (e.g., sibling preference); and

(2) The students’ randomly assigned lottery number.


The student’s ranking of the schools is critical – it informs the order that the algorithm tries to match students in. However, it is not a factor in whether the student should or will get matched. In other words, the system does not try to fill a school’s seats with students who ranked them highest first. This is why the system is strategy-proof and why students are best served by ranking schools according to their true preference.



After identifying the highest ranked match possible for a student, the algorithm uses the student’s ranking to determine which waitlists to place the student on. Each student is placed on a waitlist at every school they ranked higher than the school at which they are matched. Exception: Siblings who apply to the same schools are placed on a waitlist at any school where one of their siblings is matched regardless if that school is ranked lower on a sibling’s application than where they are matched.



It is possible for a student not to receive a school match in the lottery due to space availability and demand. If a student is not matched to a school, they are placed on the waitlist at every school on their list.


*DCPS selective high schools and programs admit students based on specific criteria. Each of the selective high schools identifies which applicants meet their specific minimum requirements, and then each school determines the order of priority among that group. The lottery program uses the same process described above based upon the student’s ranking, and students will not be matched to more than one school. If a selective high school determines that a student is ineligible to attend, the lottery program will skip this school in the student’s rankings and try to match the student as the next highest ranked school and so forth.



Note: The student’s ranking of their school choices on the My School DC application may include any combination of DCPS schools and public charter schools. However, when the program is comparing two students who have applied to the same DCPS selective high school, the decision is made based on the school’s order of priority for the applicants.

[Anonymous]

I do think the application high schools try to get the mix of students they want...the Walls interview, for example, makes admission very not random. But for PK-8 and the high schools that don't require applications, it really is luck of the draw.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I've wondered for years, and I figure there must be a former DCPS employee who knows the answer. So here's my list of questions: does the lottery take into account gender? What about ward? Or is it more like taking a percentage of each ward based on how many applicants from that ward? I have no idea why this isn't common knowledge and seems to be so hush hush, but here if there is someone who has actual details on how kids names are selected, I'd like to know.

Go back to Fox News and learn more about the voting machines that changed votes.

[Anonymous]

I think the lottery itself is very hard to cheat. People absolutely do falsify their residency (in which case you wouldn't need to cheat on the lottery, if you wanted to enroll in a school you claimed as your IB). People might be faking Equitable Access eligibility. There can be funny business with people getting an inside tip when there's an empty spot at a school with no waitlist, or one family told the class is over-full when another family is told there is a seat. The PCSB does mystery callers pretending to be families of students with special needs, and schools do sometimes get dinged for handling it badly. I feel confident that those things happen, it's very hard to detect and enforce. But the idea that the people who run MySchoolDC are somehow rigging it? That's crazy. Why would they? If they're trying to create less geographic or income segregation, they're doing a really poor job of it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s a random drawing. The end.

That's not true exactly. Each school has their priorities (in bound, sibling, high risk, staff kids, whatever else they do or don't choose) for example.

Each charter school has its priorities. DCPS has unified policies.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Not gender. I've seen classes turn out quite skewed at smaller schools.

If you're asking about application high schools, I 1000% believe they track wards and other demographic stuff, but I can't prove it.

Yeah, it's kind of a misnomer to say that seats at application high schools are assigned through the "lottery." They're assigned through an application process, which is opaque.

[Anonymous]

Lmao this is like a post from 2007.