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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What a colossal bummer. As someone who majorly struck out on the lottery last year, I fail to see how this improves the winners and losers situation that's prevailed in past years, other than making it occur on a larger scale.  Some kids stand to win big by having great odds at getting into their top choice, or even one of their top choices, and some kids have awful odds of getting into anything.  [/quote]

I had this conversation with people from the Common Lottery helpline a month ago - I brought up that I noticed last year, because you could click on your DCPS desired school's admit and waitlist and then click on the random assigned numbers of the people ahead of you to see hwo they'd ranked their schools - and when I looked at most of the people who were in single digits, they were on single digits on ALL or MOST of their waitlists.  Whereas many people who were #320 on one had sucky sucky 200s-300s numbers for all their choices too.  It wasn't true 100%, but it was true enough at the many random people I looked at, and it was true of us (but we were lucky to have our numbers all be in the teens and 20s).  The lottery staff said "No no that won't happen again this year", but really, it will, because preference people had preference before, and they do now, and there will be a computer attempt to go down each person's desired rankings, but at the end of the day the computer will use random lottery number, NOT desired school ranking, to choose between people who otherwise everything else is equal.  With the exception of the number of people who previously would have applied to 20 charters and now have to rank most of them along with DCPS (and the double/triple spot-holding that that leads to), it really doesn't sound like it's that much different in terms of giving you a better chance at YOUR #1 ranked school.  But my understanding from the school lottery folks was that you DID have a better chance under this model.[/quote]

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