Reply to Parents of 2-year-old in DC - what should we be doing NOW to prepare for the PK3 lottery?

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Reply to "Parents of 2-year-old in DC - what should we be doing NOW to prepare for the PK3 lottery?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You should read this:

https://www.washingtonian.com/2014/03/24/how-not-to-get-your-kid-into-kindergarten/[/quote]

Dated information. [/quote]

Not that dated. Although I wish she would do a follow up. [/quote]

I agree it is not dated at all.  The core of the article is about the hoops parents jump through for a situation that is largely beyond their control.  The single driving factor is the lottery number.  A high lottery number means that you'll get one of your top picks, and a low number means you'll get one of your low picks.  The strategy of it is really all at the low end: trying to identify a few schools you could live with for a year, which hopefully no-one else has identified, and maybe get luckier next season.  Nothing about that has fundamentally changed.

It is the calculus that makes me question the value of the common lottery.  Yes, I know it was designed by a prize-winning mathematician and I readily concede he is smarter than I am.  I simply submit that the model was originally about getting med students into their desired internships, and by and large med students are highly mobile (for the most part they don't have children and mortgages).  In the case of the DC school lottery, we're talking about data points that are much more fixed (even if the school 4 miles away is available, that doesn't necessarily make it feasible for any given family to attend).  [b]At least with the old system, if you really wanted Spanish Immersion, and you bombed out in the LAMB lottery, you had another shot with the Stokes lottery; with the DC Bi lottery, with the MV lottery, with DCPS ranking Oyster, Cleveland, Tyler, etc.  Now if you get a great number you run the table and if you get a bad number you're left with the dregs.[/b]

Med students have strongly different geographical preferences, different specialty preferences, and can easily move.  This is not representative of EOTP families competing for the exact same spots.[/quote]

This is true and I think the old system, while messy, distributed the odds more fairly because everyone had multiple shots.[/quote]

This is not true. The odds are not distributed more with multiple lotteries. A person with a lucky lottery number can only pick one school, then the other options they had trickle down. There's still the same amount of spots and offered to same amount of people. I can understand how it feels otherwise if you've been dealt a bad lottery number, but don't let your personal experience ignore statistics.[/quote]

Then can you use some probability theory and statistics to explain it to the rest of us?  Because I recall knowing people who did terribly in one school's lottery, but very well in another's.  Let's call the first one school A and the second school B.  Granted they preferred school A to school B, but they still vastly preferred school B to schools C & D & E - not to mention their local neighborhood school.  So, even though they preferred A, they still got lucky with B.  Now, under the new system, the low number they got lands them at the bottom of the pile and they only get into school N or O or P.  How far down do parents have to fall because of one bad draw?

The lottery concept works when everyone isn't competing for the exact same schools.  But the reality is that they are.  It's not a matter of "I want something in Ward 7 or Ward 8, but I'll take Two Rivers or Oyster as a last choice" vs. "I'd really rather have Yu Ying or LAMB, but otherwise I want Payne or Miner."  No.  Thousands of people want a few dozen seats.  At least multiple lotteries gave them multiple chances at multiple schools.  Sorry you didn't get Mundo Verde, but at least you got Cap City!  Now if you blow up once, that's it: better luck next year.  [/quote]

You don't get it. It's ok. It's not about "my friend got more lucky a few years ago" blah blah blah. [/quote]

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