When LA Gave Us Clearer School Choice Info, We Didn’t Get The Fairness We Were Promised
I’m sitting here at that same wobbly IKEA dining table I sat at in 2019, when LA Unified rolled out that fancy new school choice dashboard. The one that promised to level the playing field, finally give all of us parents the same good information wealthy, connected families had had for decades. The table still has that tiny bite mark my oldest left when he was two, right by the spot where I rest my mug. Back then I burned my oat milk latte three days in a row while I clicked through every elementary school within a 10-mile radius, because suddenly all the data was right there. Class sizes, teacher retention rates, percentage of kids meeting math benchmarks, even how many bathrooms were out of order on average during the school year. Before that? I had nothing. I’m a first-gen mom, moved here from Fresno for work, no cousins with kids in the system, no long-time neighbor to spill the real tea. I’d spent three months hanging around the Silver Lake playground just begging random moms for their hot takes, and half of them were too busy guarding their own kids’ spots to be honest. This new info felt like a gift, at first.
I remember the birthday party at the Echo Park playground that spring. All of us with kindergarten-age kids were huddled by the snack table, pretending we weren’t talking about school, while our kids smashed cake into each other’s hair. Someone pulled up the dashboard on their phone and passed it around, and you could feel the air shift. The zoned school five minutes from all of us? The one with the beautiful community garden and the annual pumpkin patch everyone went to every October? Turned out 78% of their teachers had left in the 2017-2018 school year. Seventy-eight. I remember my friend Mia sucked in her breath so loud I heard it over the piñata music. No one had ever told us that. We all just thought it was a nice little neighborhood school.
So what did we do? What any of us would do, right? We all scrambled to apply to the schools that looked good on paper. The one out in Mar Vista, 12 miles away, that had 95% teacher retention and class sizes capped at 20. I put my name in. Half the playgroup put my name in. I felt weird about it, actually. There was Sarah, whose kid was already going there, whose house was five minutes from it, and we all avoided eye contact with her the whole party, like we were trying to steal something that was hers. That awkwardness never really went away, even now, when we see each other at the grocery store.
When assignment emails went out that May, half of us got spots, half didn’t. I got a spot at a small charter in Atwater Village that checked every box on the dashboard: 18 to 1 student-teacher ratio, 90% of teachers had been there more than five years. I was so relieved I cried in the Target parking lot after I got the email. Turned out, the dashboard didn’t list anything about special ed funding. When my kid got tested for dyslexia in first grade, I found out the charter didn’t get the same district funding that neighborhood schools got for support staff, and they only had one part-time aide for the whole K-5 campus. I spent three months going to school board meetings, emailing every person I could find, just to get him two hours of support a week. I never would have known to ask that if the dashboard didn’t leave it out, but also—would I have chosen differently if I’d known? I don’t know. I still don’t.
My friend Lila got her kid into that Mar Vista school everyone wanted. She was driving 45 minutes each way every day, because you can’t do that distance on public transit with a 5-year-old at 7:30 in the morning. She paid $180 a week for after school care, because the school got out at 1:45 and she couldn’t leave her marketing job early. A year in, she told me the dashboard didn’t mention that they split the kids into GT and non-GT in second grade, and all the best teachers requested the GT sections. Her kid didn’t test into GT, so he got a first-year teacher who was still getting her credential, and no extra support for his ADHD. She moved him back to the neighborhood zoned school last fall. Funny enough, the neighborhood school just hired three new teachers who got signing bonuses from a new city grant, and so far this year, no one’s left. Lila says it’s the best he’s ever done.
I ran into the principal of the zoned school at Trader Joe’s on Hyperion a couple months ago. We were both grabbing avocados, and I knew she knew I’d seen the bad teacher retention numbers on the dashboard. We made small talk about the weird unseasonal rain, and then she just blurted it out: “I know the numbers look terrible. But charters can pay teachers twenty thousand more a year than we can. What am I supposed to do? They leave for more money as soon as they get experience.” I just stood there holding my overripe avocado, feeling like an asshole. I’d judged her school for a year based on a row in a spreadsheet, and I never once thought about what she was up against.
People talk like better information is going to fix all the unfairness in school choice. I get why. Before, if you didn’t know the right people, you ended up with whatever school you stumbled into, and that was unfair. But now that we have all this info? It just feels like we all get to be anxious together, instead of some of us being clueless and some of us being in the know. The few schools that looked good on the dashboard got so many more applications after it launched that they had to add three portables, and their class sizes went up by five kids a room within two years. All the info in the world doesn’t change the fact that there’s just not enough good, fully funded, fully staffed school spots for every kid in LA. The rich parents still win, anyway. They can afford the gas to drive an hour each way, they can afford the after school care, they can afford to take three days off to tour every school and meet every principal before they apply. Better info doesn’t fix that.
I’m getting ready to do this all again next year, for my youngest. I opened the dashboard last night, scrolled through all the numbers, felt that old knot in my stomach start to form behind my ribs. Then I closed the laptop and went to watch my kids build a fort out of couch cushions. I know more than I did five years ago. That’s true. But more information didn’t give me a better option. It just gave me more to worry about. Maybe that’s just how it is here. No one’s hiding the bad stuff anymore, but the bad stuff still exists. That’s not the ending anyone promised us. But that’s what happened. (Word count: ~1120)
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