Among the good schools, are really horrible schools. You put your top 3 choices, and there is a good chance you wont get any of those choices and be placed in a bad school. You get expectations like 5 year olds being expected to take muni for 50 minutes one way.

This all has come from conversations with people who grew up in the bay area, so the 50 minutes on muni might be different now from their childhood, but the top 3 school choice thing came from a coworker today talking about their friend's experience with their kids.

I recently went through the process for my kid, who is currently attending elementary school in SF. You list seven schools in order of preference. If you are not assigned any of the schools, then yes, you will get an assignment that wasn't on your list, and (because nobody requested it), it usually isn't a good one.

Your odds of getting something on your list depends of course in large part on the list. SF has a number of what we call "trophy" schools, as well as a number of highly in demand language immersion programs (Mandarin, Spanish, etc). If you list only those programs, your odds of getting skunked are high. Some people do this strategically, as people who went 0/7 on their list have a higher priority on wait lists than people who got one of their choices. They figure if they get one, great, if not, they have a priority position on the wait list. Other people play it a bit safer.

My approach was to avoid the trophy schools and focus on very good schools below the radar. In my opinion, there are plenty of very good schools in this range, but this is a matter of opinion. Here's the greatschools list.

http://www.greatschools.org/california/san-francisco/schools...

I did get one of the schools on my list. That's partly luck, and partly going in with realistic expectations (even my first choice was only an 8/10, I didn't go for the 9's or 10's). It is absolutely possible to create a balanced list with a good chance of an assignment and still get skunked, it's just less likely.

There's good and bad in the ranked choice system. San Franciscans are very split on it (a recent non-binding vote to make district residence the determining factor in school assignments, prop H, actually failed by a few hundred votes, as close to a 50-50 split as you'll ever see in an election).

I think the reason article summed up the benefits from a libertarian point of view pretty well, so I won't expand on it here.