Reply to Idea - Lottery Preference for #1 Ranked School

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "Idea - Lottery Preference for #1 Ranked School"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]When did strategy become akin to Satan worship?  Ooooh, no, can't do that, it'll lead to gaming.  [i]Shudder[/i].  Oh, how terrible!  Wake up people.  The whole charter system is gaming.  We're gaming people who don't have the ability, education, or access to research or apply to charter schools.

A variation on the system proposed by the OP that assigns a weight to one's ranking of 12 schools (in addition to the random lottery number) would be quite workable, and would provide better, fairer outcomes, earlier in the process.[/quote]

[b]Because the lottery is intended to maximize the number of people marched to their preferred option[/b]. If people rank strategically, it can't do that.

Hey, I get it. I got a lousy draw, too. But the lottery is not the problem - it's that there isn't enough capacity at desirable schools and a lot of capacity at low performing schools. No lottery algorithm can fix that. At least now the lottery winners (of whom I am not one) can go to the schools they actually desire.[/quote]

For sure, the capacity issue will not be solved by any algorithm.  Everyone understands this.  What we're arguing about is how to assign the scarce resources in the fairest, best way possible.  The bolded part of your statement is the exact issue.  The current algorithm does not take families' preferences into consideration (as expressed by their rankings).  I don't agree with the OP's exact suggestion but I do think that bidders' rankings should factor into the process.  If people decide to rank strategically, what's the big deal?  I really don't see the problem with that.  You could just as easily say to yourself "I'll put YY as my number 1, because most people will strategically bid on Shining Stars instead..."  There is no foolproof way to game the system by strategic ranking.  This isn't a video game with a cheat code.  But what you do get is increased fairness, when someone with a bad number has a better chance at a school they ranked highly--instead of being last on all the lists.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics