WHAT SCHOOL CHOICE LOOKS LIKE.

New York City, with its well-developed network of small schools and charters, is seen as a nationwide model of public school choice. Of course, it is the wealthiest and most educated families who have learned how to access those choices. At GothamSchools, Philissa Cramer does a bang-up job of explaining how "choice" can lead to more educational inequality, not less.

...a disproportionate number of the city’s neediest students continue to wind up in large, lower-performing high schools, even as the number of small schools has increased. Their concentration has in turn caused the large schools to struggle even more.

Here's what the problem looks like for parents looking to place their child in an out-of-neighborhood school, via a new report from the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School (you'll have to download the report to see a larger version of the chart). Would you want to navigate this system? Who do you think would have the time, inclination, and wherewithal to do so?

So what's the solution? Doing away with school choice entirely seems like a bad idea; choice encourages middle class families to keep their children in public schools, which in turn provides more resources and parental involvement for less advantaged students. And yet, through both "choice" enrollment and neighborhood sorting, we are creating segregated mini-systems within larger school districts. In New York, for example, at P.S. 234 in Tribeca, a neighborhood popular with finance-industry types, 70 percent of students are white, compared to 14.2 percent of students in the larger system. As P.S. 234, only 9 percent of children qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. In the larger New York City schools, a whopping 77 percent of students are eligible.

There aren't any easy answers. It's just a reminder that school reform means reforming all schools for all kids, not just giving middle class parents an "out" of bad schools, or giving a few very lucky poor children the opportunity to attend a small school or charter.

--Dana Goldstein