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[quote=Anonymous]There’s several reasons.

Though the biggest problem with the way the DC lottery is set up is this:
Every child only gets one shot per year— one number per year.
So if the number is low, the kid gets none of their choices.  And if the number is high, the kid could effectively choose any of their choices.

This is an issue with the algorithm.

One could certainly imagine a lottery system where kids get one number for each SCHOOL they choose, mitigating risk and allowing a new shot at every school — not just a totally correlated slate of outcomes, all good or all bad.

I’ve heard the “designed by Harvard/MIT/Caltech profs” story.  Yes, that’s all fine.  But there’s still room for improving the algorithm.

So here’s a proposed algorithm tweak: for every school a child ranks in the lottery, generate a number (eg a number between zero and 1).  That number is the lottery number that this child uses for this school.  Then do the assignments exactly as they’re done in the current system.  Whenever an assignment is computed for a child at at school, use this child-school assigned number.  When assignment for a child is computed at a different school, use the child-school assigned number for that pair.  The ranking system to decide assignments would still be the same, just using a “child-school” number rather than a “child” number.

Pros: kids no longer have “bad” lottery years and “good” lottery years.  They get multiple bites of the apple in each year.
Cons: kids that list 10 schools have a better chance of matching somewhere they want than kids who list one school.  But isn’t that what we want anyway?

I don’t see any other clear ways to manipulate this proposed lottery algorithm.  Are there any?  I suppose the system is a little less transparent than the current system— it’s almost impossible to use public data to figure out how it would be working, because you can no longer estimate any single master lottery number from published data.[/quote]

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