bay area schools lottery
It’s search engine Thursday!
The other day, I noticed a dramatic uptick in lottery related searches
ohlone mandarin school lottery
"mountain view" schools lottery elementary 2010
cupertino school district are all students enrolled?
cupertino union school district lottery date 2010
Wow. That’s a lot of lottery searches!
I touched upon this last week, and I think that it’s now time to discuss this.
So what are these searches all about? Now, you might guess that this is because Bay Area Schools are so packed because voters in the late 1970’s decided to close many of them to save money because children aren’t the future… or that some districts are dramatically better than others voters in the late 1970’s decided to defund schools believing that children aren’t the future so districts rely on direct parental donations…
Or, these searches could be about how enrolling your child into a Bay Area school is like buying a winning lottery ticket! You’re guaranteed to get back a huge reward on your investment – even if you need to bring $2000-$10,000 in cash to class. Your child will go to Stanford, and then booom start the next Google.
I think it’s the latter… not the former. But that’s just my guess.
March 4th, 2010 at 9:07 am
Palo Alto has several specialty schools where admission is (supposedly) by lottery. Mandarin immersion at Ohlone is one of them (and Oh the battles over getting that program started). Regular classes at Ohlone, which doesn’t have grades and I understand is more touchy-feely than a normal school–are also by lottery.
There are a couple more programs in PAUSD where admission is lottery based–Spanish immersion, direct instruction (the polar opposite of Ohlone), and I’m sure another that I can’t think of right now.
The funniest thing to me about all of the lottery programs in PAUSD are the parents who apply to all of them. The conversations probably go something like this:
Wife to Husband: “Should we just send our precious snowflake to her normal, nice, highly rated elementary school, or should we apply to one of the lottery programs?”
Husband: ‘Our child is too special to go to a normal, highly rated school. He might not get in to one of the lottery programs, so lets apply to them all. Spanish or Mandarin? Doesn’t matter. Traditional Direct Instruction or Hippy Ohlone? Doesn’t matter. It just cannot be a normal school. All that matters is that it isn’t the normal neighborhood school.”
That conversation isn’t exaggerated. I have actually heard it more than once.
(Full disclosure, my child attends a lottery programs in PAUSD–but we only applied to one, and chose to do so based purely on some particular needs that child has. I’m sure everyone thinks that.)
March 4th, 2010 at 12:25 pm
Cupertino has a couple of lottery schools:
the CLIP Mandarin immersion
Faria, the super hard core academic school. Got 1000 on API one year!
Macauliffe, the touchy-feely Montessori style. The polar opposite of Faria
Also, in some cases, the neighborhood school may be overcrowded so a child may have to go to a different school.
March 4th, 2010 at 4:25 pm
Sorry, RE. It looks like the authorities have caught up with you:
SEC charges market psychic alleging $6M scam
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5isky0X_VB0hQzBsYIzAd6yL2uOewD9E847IO0
March 4th, 2010 at 8:29 pm
> my child attends a lottery programs in PAUSD–but we only applied to one, and chose to do so based purely on some particular needs that child has.
I assume you are also part of the 98% who favor public transportation for others, am I right?
March 4th, 2010 at 8:36 pm
I do! Especially for old people. They’re terrible drivers.
March 4th, 2010 at 8:40 pm
nomadic, did you open a bottle of fine sparkling wine when you heard this?
March 4th, 2010 at 9:08 pm
burp. Three shots of tequila with lunch.
March 4th, 2010 at 9:28 pm
This is a particularly timely post today. Take a look at today’s editorial in the Murky News:
…if education funding continues to decline, and if turf battles continue to prevent real reform, it’s not just students who will suffer. California’s greatness is at risk.
http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_14514324?nclick_check=1
March 4th, 2010 at 9:56 pm
> This is a particularly timely post today.
Correction:
And if businesses can’t find skilled workers here, there are plenty of other places in the world they can go.
should read
And if businesses can’t find skilled workers here, they can import them from plenty of other places in the world.
March 5th, 2010 at 10:38 am
Herve@5:
LOL
More seriously, I favor finding the right school for your kids. What is crazy is thinking that the right PAUSD school for your kid (for example) might either be Ohlone–super touchy-feely–or Hoover–strict, direct instruction. The two are complete opposites and a kid who really needs the structure at Hoover most surely won’t blossom under the lack thereof at Ohlone.
If you enter both of those lotteries, you aren’t thinking about what your kid needs. Instead, you just can’t handle horror of attending a normal school in one of the top ranked school districts in the nation.
Hey, we are all special–some of us just need to prove it.
March 5th, 2010 at 2:37 pm
And for the record, the search may have come from someone looking at this thread at palo alto online
http://www.paloaltoonline.com/square/index.php?i=3&d=&t=10920