This story underlines the desperate need for school reform.

In a country where every taxpayer's child is entitled to a safe, clean and well-performing school, the situation has become so bad that the American people are fleeing a school system that is dominated by teacher's unions that care more about what's good for their membership than what's good for the children (many teachers themselves, however, are models of devotion). It's an outrage that reform seems so hopeless that there's nothing to do but abandon the schools!

How sad, as the story points out, that parents are reduced to trying to "game" the system to find their children a place at a decent school, wending their way through a computer-selection system informed by byzantine racial quotas. How sad that they are reduced to calling the admissions people at the magnet schools to "beg" and "offer food", all so that their children can receive a shot at a decent education -- a shot that the education establishment and its allies in the Democratic Party seem determined to withhold.