School lottery makes a game out of education in D.C.

Lotto mania hit the District hard this week, a frenzy of scheming, gaming, playing the odds, hedging bets, with a few lucky winners and plenty of losers.

There are heavy hearts among us.

My first call came at 12:08 p.m., eight minutes after the results of the D.C. Public School lottery were posted.

"Did you get anything? What are your rankings?" asked the caller, a parent who has been sweating the details for months. "I don't know what we're going to do. We got shut out. Totally. We're hosed."

This is the atmosphere when parents from all over the city have a shot, ever so small, to send their children to the best public schools.

It's an opportunity to pretend that you live in Georgetown or Chevy Chase or Palisades while staying in your crummy little house with high property taxes and no parking. Hooray!

More important, it's a chance for many parents to dodge the age-old quandary of whether to put their faith in a struggling school that has been called "up-and-coming" for 10 years, ruin the family finances to pay for private school, or finally give in and trade their urban lives for cul-de-sac living and great public schools outside the city.

I have one child who is a kindergartner at a D.C. public school and another who is eligible for the city's new preschool programs. The kindergartner is slated to move on to a mediocre school with a high student-teacher ratio, middling test scores and no special programs or foreign language classes.

There are public schools in fancier neighborhoods that offer exciting programs with award-winning teachers and have sky-high test scores, so I was eager to get him into one of those, of course.

The lottery deadline was midnight Sunday. To enter, parents had to rank the schools in order of preference.

So tantalizing was that single spot available at the Blue Ribbon school in Northwest, the one given a perfect 10 on national ranking Web sites.

Visions swirled in my head of a fantastic education for the boys, all for the mere cost of a gnarly commute.