Day cares with wait lists is also something I have never heard of even though I have children and gone through the day care thing and socialize with people who have children. That is so unbelievably foreign to me.
As a result of citywide school choice, people don't really get gentrified out by parents looking for good schools. But many kids will also have really long commute time, and applying for middle and high schools is like a mini college application process, and only people with the time and money can truly navigate it.
Mayor De Blasio kicked off an integration effort[1] in Brooklyn with plans to roll something similar in the other NYC school districts in an effort to counteract the mini-college application process, with mixed reactions depending on where your child would have placed. Reforms are under way for both middle and high school admissions.
[1] https://nypost.com/2018/09/20/de-blasio-kills-admissions-sta...
- general confusion; the guide to high schools, for example, is bigger than the Yellow Pages, and that's with all the information of a high school summarized into a single-sided page. Couple that with Bloomberg splitting failing schools with five schools in the same building and it's just far too overwhelming.
- horrible commute times. Schools were designed to serve their local neighborhoods and usually aren't placed well, particularly in the outer boroughs. If you have to go to a school other than your neighborhood school it can be quite the schlep, especially once you factor in start times. It's impossible to design start times that work for everyone when students come across the entire city, and the lack of coordination also affects things like the overburdened public transport, which gets slammed when schools let out.
- extreme stress on parents and students. You have to go around and tour schools. You have to meet with teachers and principals. You have to attend multiple massive school fairs with staff pushing their schools on you. It's like a college application process, already stressful enough, except you're doing this to children going through puberty. It's absolute madness for even wealthy parents with time to do all of this; working class people working long hours or odd hours or multiple jobs basically don't have a shot. And can you imagine what not getting into your top choices does to kids' well-being?
If school choice were limited to the borough level, it would be more manageable. But at the city level it's far too much.