A lot of debates on school choice’s merits are unproductively narrow. Sam Chaltain’s new book, Our School: Searching for Community in the Era of Choice , is a welcome exception. Chaltain spent a school year shadowing students, parents, teachers, and administrators in a new public charter school and a traditional district school to gauge how they’re coping with the state of public education today. Near the end of his book, Chaltain writes,

[O]ur democracy needs to be something we do, not something we have. When it comes to a nascent experiment like school choice, we have within us the capacity to turn an open marketplace of learning options into something creative and regenerative. But there is nothing automatic about it. Choice by itself leads to nothing.

One of the things that’s become clearer to me as we’ve worked through the application process in D.C. is the degree to which school choice is much less about choice than it looks on paper—or even in theory. There are Hebrew, Chinese, and Spanish language schools. One promises Spanish immersion, discovery-based learning, and an emphasis on ecological sustainability. There are multiple Montessori charters in our area (where I grew up, “public Montessori school” was an oxymoron).

My wife and I would love to pick a favorite from this list, but since demand for quality seats far outstrips supply, D.C.’s system is, in the words of a parent from Chaltain’s recent book, more “school chance” than school choice. “The most established charter schools have basically stopped being anything other than a true lottery ticket for families,” she continued. “Because most of the spots for the younger grades are taken.”

There are many reasons that the school’s basement was so packed. Washington, D.C.’s universal pre-K program is extremely popular: It enrolls almost 70 percent of the city’s three-year-olds and over 90 percent of the four-year-olds. It supports families by relieving some of their childcare costs and freeing parents to return to work sooner. It supports better academic outcomes for students in the short- and long-term.

But it also gives parents a chance to play the school lotteries earlier and more often. The sooner parents enter the lotteries, the better their chances of controlling some of the uncertainties involved. Parents prepared to enroll their children in the public schools at age three can sometimes secure a slot at a high-quality program that guarantees their child high-quality schooling through high school graduation. And if things don’t work out the first time around, they can take another crack the next year, since some schools start their pre-K programs at age four.

At another open house I attended (for a different charter school), a mother was incredulous to hear that the school anticipated having zero open slots for new kindergartners. They expected their already admitted pre-K students to fully fill those classrooms. Unless she had a three- or four-year-old she wanted to enroll in their lottery, they weren’t the school for her family.