Susan Pendergrass & Nora Kern:

Improving the quality of public education in our nation’s cities is a top priority for civic leaders. Beyond its impact on property values, the availability of safe, high-quality schools can have a substantial effect on the quality of life in urban neighborhoods, much like grocery stores, parks, and jobs that offer a living wage. But urban school districts often struggle. Some assert that the struggle is due to their more disadvantaged student population.
In fact, in more than one-third of public schools in U.S. cities, 75 percent or more of the students qualify for free or reduced-price meals.1 Academic performance is also a challenge. On the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), administered by the U.S. Department of Education and also known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” only 28 percent of 8th graders in urban public schools were proficient in reading, and 29 percent were proficient in mathematics.2 Given this performance, parents who can move out of a failing urban district often do. And those who cannot are forced to wait and hope that the traditional public schools will get better.

With the advent of public charter schools, however, parents finally have a viable public alternative in some
of our lowest-performing urban school systems. Each school year thousands of families faced with schools unable to meet their children’s needs seek better options by applying to public charter schools. Unfortunately, in communities with few high-quality public school options, the demand for public charter schools is substantially higher than the number of seats available. When this happens, public charter schools hold lotteries to determine which students will be able to attend. And every year far too many students end up on wait lists, rather than in the schools of their choice. No student’s fate should be decided by a lottery ball.