Playing the DC Public Schools Lottery is a crazy, soul-crushing pursuit:

Consider the car-less Columbia Heights couple who applied to 16 schools and only got their kid into one, requiring a trek that adds two hours to their daily commute. Or the Mount Pleasant parents who went 0 for 6, four years running, for their eldest child, then lucked into one of the hottest schools in the city on their first lottery entry with their youngest. One mother I spoke to spent the first four years of her son’s life in her cramped premarriage one-bedroom apartment (and indefinitely delayed having another child) just so he’d have the right address when lottery time rolled around. Then there was the woman who seriously contemplated signing a lease on an English basement that was in-boundary for Maury, to increase her child’s chance of getting in there. (All right, I admit this last person was me.)

Read The Story