Pity the Eighth-Grade Parents

"Being furloughed without pay through October and most of November was a nightmare for federal workers across the U.S. But for Emma, who lives in Chelsea with her twin eighth-graders (and asked to use a pseudonym), the break had a silver lining: It gave her the time she needed - though many parents might argue that no amount of time is truly enough - for the singularly painstaking task of applying to New York City's public high schools."

"Only in New York is this process the standard operating procedure for every public school student. The city's public-education system houses seven categories of admission methods with strangely opaque labels: specialized, screened, screened with assessment, audition, ed opt, open, and zoned. In total, these labels encompass more than 400 schools and more than 900 specific school programs. (A single school can contain multiple programs, each with different pathways to entry.)"

"For Emma, the first minute or two of the process went smoothly. On October 7, she logged in to the portal and discovered that both her daughters had been assigned favorable lottery numbers, known as RANs (an abbreviation for "random numbers"). Each RAN is 32 digits long, but inexplicably, only the first two numbers and letters in the sequence matter."

Furloughed federal workers faced financial hardship, yet one Chelsea mother used the downtime to complete the arduous New York City public high-school application for her twin eighth-graders. NYC requires all public-school applicants to rank programs across seven admission categories—specialized, screened, screened with assessment, audition, ed opt, open, and zoned—covering over 400 schools and 900 programs, some with multiple programs per building. The portal assigns long RAN lottery numbers where only the first two characters matter, and screened admissions groups (SAGs) are calculated from seventh-grade averages across core subjects. The process rewards parents with time, know-how, and persistence.

Read at Intelligencer