Liz Robbins (New York Times) reports on the problems involved in the New York City's school choice maze:

The Department of Education’s dizzying, byzantine system for students to select a public high school left a total of 8,239 — about 10 percent of the city’s eighth graders — shut out of all their choices, and their parents feeling inadequate, frustrated and angry.

They were told to ponder “What next?” — with just two weeks to research and apply to a new set of schools — even as the bitter question “Why?” still lingered.

The answer is more complicated than the toughest word problem in any high school math class.

A major part of the problem was that the information needed to make a choice is simply not available to parents. However, the information available does correlate to socioeconomic class:

Information drives any choice system in the marketplace, said Henry M. Levin, a professor of economics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. In the high school admissions process, information really is power.

“The upper-middle-class families have more of it; they can look at mavens who have gone through the process and can tell others how to game the system,” Dr. Levin said.

Another problem is that competition does not make all schools better as evidenced by the New York City system. Boudreaux concluded in his article:

In reality, of course, groceries and many other staples of daily life are distributed with extraordinary effectiveness by competitive markets responding to consumer choice.

However, distribution does not guarantee quality. And as long as parents are un-informed, schools that are less than competitive do not have sufficient stimulus to improve.