Our charter schools in RI admit students by lottery.
That's nice. However ...
A) I'm no expert, but as I understand it, the lottery only applies
to the students who have applied _to a given school_ so there are
unlimited opportunities for gaming the system by influencing who
applies and who doesn't.
B) We need to watch out for selective _retention_ even if there is
not strongly selective admission. It is the easiest thing in the
world to chase a given student out of the school if somebody decides
that student is "undesirable" or "bad for business".
However, in some ways that makes some of the worst problems even worse,
not better, because of the enormous variations from neighborhood to
neighborhood. It makes it illegal to have a diverse school in a non-
diverse district.