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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It may not be remotely appealing to anyone living in NW DC or the good capitol hill elementaries, but the reality is most people in urban school systems are already doing some form of this, whether it is charters, choice/magnet schools, private school, or going to an out of bounds school.  Breaking apart segregation via income makes sense to me and removing this notion that you have to buy into a million dollar house neighborhood to receive a quality education.[/quote]

I know nothing about SF, but "breaking apart segregation via income" through a citywide lottery for DCPS would be an incredibly stupid thing to do in DC.  The result would be to destroy the good schools that are there now, and would do nothing to improve the failing ones. schools in upper NW and CH are doing great because there is a high number of kids from well educated, committed  families. mostly IB for those schools (although not always - Hearst is a great school with a majority of OOB population).  a citywide lottery would destroy these schools (making them less useful to poor kids from failing schools), and would certainly not improve the failing schools. I live in CHCH (not rich, rented for ages in a 2bd apt with two kids, finally bought a small fixer upper that will never be fixed), two parents working full time and two kids, DH works in Rockville and drives there with the only car we have, our families live thousands of miles away, so no help from Granma in picking up the kids from school. we have already a very hectic and stressful life, and our kids' elementary school is less than 5 min away by car, 15 on foot. there is no way in hell we could (and would ) drive one kid to Anacostia and the other to Georgetown if these are the lottery picks (or even both to the same school in similar locations) every day back and forth during rush hour. it takes 30 minutes on Sunday, with no traffic for us to drive to Union Station. from our home to a school in Capitol Hill or Anacostia the commute would be probably over an hour (just to the school, then we would have to drive to work).  if this type of proposal is approved, we would apply to a charter and if we did not get in, we would move to MD. we are not selfish, we are realistic.  simply because we are barely making now as it is, and driving the kids all over town would simply not be a viable option for us (and BTW, if I liked driving for hours every day, maybe we would have bought or rented in far out counties where schools are good, cost of living lower). I think there are plenty of other families in our situation. they would pull the kids from DCPS and go private, charter or move.  driving a good chunk of the families who are contributing to make good schools good our of DCPS does not sound like a winning strategy.

this system may work elsewhere, but not in DC.  we have family in the Midwest, in a town of about 100K people, little traffic and so on. in order to have higher SES diversity, a couple of years ago some kids were moved from their neighborhood HS to different HS in town. our nephew was one of the kids who had to change school, going to a HS on the other side of town. the family was not happy, but they accepted the situation. he was 16, was driving and the move to a school the other side of town resulted in a commute of 15-20 minutes while the original was only 5. so not too bad.  In DC, a drive to the other side of town would take over an hour in traffic. people who have the means to avoid it, would most likely do it.

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Thank you PP for your examples And reasoning. I think you hit the head on the nail. Yes- you wound prefer to stay in the city. But making city wide lottery might make it hard to keep doing so. [/quote]

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