Under Chancellor Antwan Wilson, the children of current and former public officials will no longer receive preferential placement in the District’s infamously competitive school enrollment system. The move follows a report from the D.C. Inspector General that former Chancellor Kaya Henderson had allowed the children of several top public officials to bypass the My School DC lottery system and enroll directly in the District’s most coveted schools.

Adopted to replace a chaotic system of individual lotteries and applications (and the occasional donated brownies), My School DC is a common lottery for a majority of the District’s public and charter schools. A computerized system uses a student’s stated preferences and randomized lottery number to determine which students receive the most demanded seats.

My School DC – and its Denver, New Orleans, and Newark counterparts – was designed for efficiency, transparency, and impartiality. A database of participating schools saves parents hours of researching, and a single, online form replaces mountains of paperwork. Information can be provided in several languages, and the process is fairly simple.

Though it can be complicated by high demand and shrinking class sizes, the lottery in theory is neutral. Those who govern it, however, are not.

Chancellor Henderson authorized the transfers under a regulation introduced during Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s tenure, which predates the district-wide lottery system in place today. Such discretionary transfers are only valid if “in the best interests of the student, and that the transfer would promote the overall interests of the school system.”

The enrollment of a high-profile student in DCPS may spur confidence in the quality of the District’s public offerings. But the condition of their enrollment—bypassing waitlists nearly 1,000 students long—undermines DCPS’s commitment to the common lottery system. In a district already troubled by intense competition, each line-jumper only deepens public distrust of DCPS’s ability to provide for all students.

As growing 21st Century School Systems implement their own lottery systems, the vulnerability of the District’s system to favoritism and Chancellor Wilson’s ban on preferential enrollments for the children of public officials should stand as both a warning and a lesson.

No system of school choice is absolutely fair. But the combination of a lottery system and similar preemptive policies can level the playing field for students regardless of social standing or parental activism.

When I was in high school, I had a teacher everyone loved: Mr. C.

Mr. C told us stories about traveling, he talked about baseball, and he let us sit with our friends and socialize. We completed worksheets; we earned As in the class. We were happy, and our parents were happy with our grades.

When the A.P. Exam results came in, only two students out of our class of twenty-five received passing scores.

The problem with Mr. C. wasn’t that he was a bad person. The problem was that he wanted to be our friend first and our teacher second. Our test results showed that we had learned none of the course content, and, ultimately, Mr. C did a disservice to us as students, regardless of how much we liked him.

Extend that scenario to an entire school: The school creates a comfortable and safe environment. Students are happy with their teachers, and parents are happy with their children’s grades. But the students perform abysmally on standardized tests. Despite the overall satisfaction of parents and students with the school, there’s evidence that the students aren’t learning.

In the new book Charting a New Course: The Case for Freedom, Flexibility & Opportunity Through Charter Schools, Jeanne Allen, Max Eden, and others argue for the end of results-based accountability for charter schools, at least as far as standardized testing is concerned.

The charter sector they envision is one where authorizers no longer carefully screen charter operators prior to issuing a charter, and they no longer shut down schools based on the results of test scores. The free market guarantees quality control: if the customers are happy, the school stays open. If enough families desert it, it runs out of money and closes.

But this would ultimately do a disservice to students, regardless of how much they and their families liked their schools.

Schools are first and foremost places of learning. If we’re going to spend taxpayers’ money on them, we need objective evidence that students are learning.

Of course, test scores should not be the only relevant factor in determining the success or failure of a school, and no good charter authorizer judges schools on test scores alone.

Chester Finn, senior fellow at The Fordham Institute, explains that effective authorizers are also looking at various gauges of student growth, as well as graduation rates, pupil and teacher attendance and persistence, and more (e.g., Advanced Placement scores, dual credit results, where kids go to high school after leaving the charter middle school, etc.). Good authorizers also do site visits and pay attention to school climate.

We need authorizers who investigate charter operators prior to allowing them to open schools, then conduct in-depth evaluations of schools based on a variety of factors, including test scores, and finally close or replace those whose students are falling far behind.

Not all parents have the ability to assess schools, and those parents trust regulating bodies to ensure that the schools available to their children are high quality. Parents and students have a right to choice, but we need to make certain that they choose from a selection of effective schools.

In 21^st century school systems, we need well-authorized charter sectors in which strong authorizers scrutinize charter operators, shut down failing schools, and invite successful schools to replicate, so we have no doubt that our students are learning. Otherwise, we’re simply replacing one failing school system with another