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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]  
I've tried for the last five hours to make sense of the idea that one lottery number across all the schools on my list is somehow more beneficial to everyone.

And it just doesn't. Make. Sense.

First, if I'm #10,000 out of 10,000 total applicants for PK4, there's no way I'm getting in to any school anywhere.  If every school has a wait list that places me based on that number, I will be at the bottom every time.  Even if I have preferences, I'll be the loser in every tie-breaker.  That simply cant't be the way this thing is run.

What makes sense is that I get assigned a random number at each school on my list.  So I could be #303 out of 303 applicants at my top ranked school--
...

At the same time (not in a different round) my tracking number is entered into a lottery at my number 2 choice.  Again, I have no preferences, and this time I've got a great number--#3!  ...

My third choice is my inbound school and my so-so number, let's say #36 out 85, doesn't get me a seat, but I'm still ahead of an OOB, single-child family who got a better number--unless they ranked the school higher than I did.

But if I have a single sucky number across all schools, and my next door neighbor has #8 across all schools, she has a better shot at getting a seat at my 12th ranked school than I do.  At the very least, she has a better shot at our IB school, which is definitely somewhere on her list.  [b]I can't see how I'm supposed to wait,  round by round, for my 10k number to make way for all other preferences at all schools. THEN I get to enter round 2 along with all the families who missed the March 3 deadline.  [/b]And then it's an entirely new lottery number that gets drawn at each school, but this time we're all vying for fewer seats and mostly trying for the best possible wait list number behind everyone who's already on it.

And now, I am completely worn out by the whole shebang.[/quote]

NP here, and I edited the above for brevity. Couple of things to think about (dcmom is 100% correct in everything she's written so this is just to explain further):

1) You are focusing on how bad it would be to be last in the single-number lottery, e.g. #10,000 out of #10,000. But you have not considered that you could also be last in every single one of the 12 individual school lotteries you enter under the previous model. And although we don't have the sizes of any of these lotteries to compare, we can safely say that if you have the absolute worst luck, you will not get into any school under either model.

2) This scenario in bold, where you get nothing in the first round - no lottery process can prevent this! There simply aren't enough spots at the in-demand schools. At least the current model makes it as efficient as possible ( efficient meaning no pareto-improving trades are possible, i.e., when the lottery is done, no-one can be made better off without making someone else worse off - this is what dcmom meant when she referred to "trades")

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