How many synonyms for the word “confusing” are there? I might have used them all as we navigated the NYC high school admissions process over the last few months. Besides all the other hats I wear, I found myself neck-deep in trying to navigate a myriad of recommendations, online reviews, school visits, word-of-mouth, and insider info about prospective schools. To further complicate things, my wife and I both come from Catholic school backgrounds, which has its pros and cons for the type of values we wish to instill in our son. But, at some point after his last entrance exam and the 12th high school choice, I said “NAH.”

Some say “Let go and let God.” I said, “Let go and let there be a better system.”

Over the years, I’ve had serious beef with how we’ve done this amorphous thing we call “school choice.” Fifth and eighth graders and their families choose 12 schools based on factors including ratings, distance, programs, and reputation. (This article does a better job of explaining things better than I can.) When I started teaching, public school students choosing high schools for themselves befuddled me a bit. In my upbringing, I took the Specialized High School Admissions Test and got into one of them, but by then, my mom had already chosen Xavier High School for me.

There was my school choice.

Over the years, as I better understood the process, and as more high schools started “advertising” themselves in specific ways, I said “This can’t be life!”. (“School for This or That.” “High School for All of It And Then Some.” Great, but also why do we need to choose “majors” so early?)

Also, my students deserved better than worksheets that looked like scrolls. Back then, I thought they should all get into their top three choices. Yet, every year, our school had a solid group of eighth graders with great transc not get into any schools. We collectively cried injustice in the auditorium as we commiserated about the systemic foolishness.

But something changed during my doctoral study that shifted my thinking. I stopped wanting good choices for all my students. I wanted every choice to be a good choice for all my students. Let me explain.

In the midst of navigating words like “screened,” “open,” and some hybrid of those, it occured to me how many of these choices were false. My suburban friends shared how their towns only had one elementary school, the one middle school, and one big high school. Through my studies, I saw just how wildly unique New York City was. For suburban and rural folks, the concept that you had “choice” was pretty novel save for the occasional independent exception.

Informally, many of the parents who moved to the suburbs would tell me “Yeah, I moved there because I didn’t have to worry about the schools. Ever.” Some of them worked in the NYC school system.

Some conservative commentators screamed to the rafters about the need for school choice because “equity” or whatever. While we kept arguing about whether children in poverty should have the same options as their wealthier counterparts, I now believe in something wholly different. I wish for every option to be satisfactory. For every child that gets to attend a selective program, the math tells us many more do not. No child should feel disappointed they matriculated into an alternate choice.

In other words, make every school great for the first time.

This country allows test rockets to explode in increasingly toxic skies due to billionaires’ whims and quixotic appetites for all things artificial. This city, much less this country, does not lack for resources. If it was just about my son, I would say we’re fine. But I’ve never based my advocacy as a parent on just my child, but on multiple children. All of our students deserve welcoming learning environments, rich learning experiences, caring and healthy adults to steward all of this.

Educating children well is an investment, not a waste.

Some policymakers and advocates get so steeped in short-term solutions – like school choice in all its forms – that they lose out on opportunities for sustainable, long-term solutions. The grift and short shrift of the public good at the federal level shouldn’t steer our moral and ethical compass. Some may be tempted to share one story about a child who moved from a “bad” to a “good” school. But too many more of schools of children left behind simply due to the composition of the student body. That’s the way we’ve left behind kids time and again.

So, as I’m looking at the school choice platform, I see symbols next to our son’s school choices. These indicators signal the odds of our son getting into a specific school. Factors including my son’s seventh grade GPA, location in relation to the school, and other unseen factors seem to play a role in his grouping. I anxiously laughed. I know what it’s like for parents with way more barriers than us. While some parents have made their child’s school admissions their part-time job, others simply don’t have the luxury to visit the schools they’ll trust their children with.

So while this season’s school choice process may be over, our society will have to learn to make better choices for its schools, preferably before the next season.

Jose