I did not want to continue gambling with my childrens' educational outcomes via De Blasio's opaque/random NYC DOE. Crossing my fingers for Pre-K and K was enough nonsense. For example, putting our actual first choices halfway down our preference lists.

So, now I pay transparent /deterministic property taxes in a town in NJ.

I have only a small number of educational outcome samples to draw for my children. Consequently, I pay for the higher Sharpe NJ strategy instead of blindly accepting high variance hexadecimal dice rolls from the NYC DOE.

Remember, when trying to obtain the best possible outcomes for your children, if you aren't paying in money then you are paying in time. Witness how much effort went into this article and how many very industrious parents will study/internalize it to try to obtain marginally better outcomes for their children next year. You are always competing in expenditures, just with the NYC DOE it's your time versus other parents' time.

How do public schools compare with private ones in your area?

Presumably one can pay to reduce variance.

Generally, I think of public as within spitting distance of private where I live now. I could drop variance further and maybe bring up expected value by going private, but it'd be expensive. Especially because private costs are per kid.

Had I the chance to redo a bunch of things, I might have stayed in the city and gone the private route years ago for any kid with a sufficiently bad random NYC DOE draw. One of those "what ifs?".

My college GF was a childhood immigrant to NYC, and by education lottery was accepted to one of their most-prestigious/science public schools (for HS).

This giant act of fate set her up with an education that eventually led to full-tuition scholarship and then (full-circle) she donates her talents to the foundation which made all her miracles possible.

But the randomness of such a system just baffled my public-education-in-Texas brains, where you go to the school where your residence is zoned [or private school].

The lottery for the good schools is a recent thing isn't it? Your friend got into a good school because she tested into it.

Yes, and none of the three main science/math high schools (Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech) are lottery schools, they all rely on the SSAT exam (and a similar student ranking system). As an applicant you rank your HS choices and those plus your score determine where you are offered a space.

Also, having attended one of these schools (admittedly in a different decade), students who were not ready for the work didn't do well. Not to say those kids weren't also smart kids, but you had to be a certain kind of kid to mesh with the school.

It was a fantastic place, not just for the education, but for spending 4 years with a gigantic group of diverse, interesting kids, almost all of whom were truly brilliant. To this day I think it had more to do with my success than college or grad school.

(2021).

It might make sense to link to the most recent (2023) survey results instead, since relevant changes were made: https://medium.com/algorithms-in-the-wild/results-from-the-2...

I linked this post because it explains how the lottery works which I thought was more interesting and relevant for HN.