Is a lottery system really worse overall than just letting people buy their way into desired school district? That model obviously hasn't been working well either.

Depends on your goals and metrics. I'd say yes, it is worse.

An interesting read: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/us/san-francisco-school-s...

Thanks, that was a genuine question.

You can have proper zoning and not have to make it buy in only. Before I moved to the suburbs the city I lived in created “Workforce” zoning to combat gentrification.[1]

What’s really hard to stop are the doctors and lawyers who just send their kids to private schools and vote against everything.

[1] https://www.ajc.com/news/local-govt--politics/brookhaven-zon...

How long has the lottery existed? Hopefully in a reasonable amount of time, it will cause the differences between good and bad public schools to disappear?

This is only the case if the schools are bad because of the students going to them.

> This is only the case if the schools are bad because of the students going to them.

Presumably the good schools got good because they're in rich neighborhoods where the parents pour time and money into the schools. If their kids are going to a wider variety of schools now, the rich parents will have incentive to make all the schools good.

What instead happens is rich parents either move out of San Francisco to the burbs, or send their kids to private school. And so San Francisco ends up both with the lowest population of children of any major city and one of the highest private school enrollment rates in the country (~20%).