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Two popular Los Angeles charter schools have allowed some families to bypass a lottery for admission in exchange for providing special services or a substantial volunteer commitment.

n 2007, the city put an end to the diversity-based admissions policies at the East Village Community School and other elementary schools in the neighborhood. Since then, the East Village Community School has seen a rapid influx of white and high-income families, according to parents and Department of Education figures. "Our school has radically changed since they stopped looking at ethnicity," said Kessler, 47, an East Village resident who is co-president of the school's PTA and has two children there. "I think it would be better for my kids to be exposed to a range of people."

In Silicon Valley, Bullis elementary school accepts one in six kindergarten applicants, offers Chinese and asks families to donate $5,000 per child each year. Parents include Ken Moore, son of Intel Corp.'s co-founder, and Steven Kirsch, inventor of the optical mouse. Bullis isn't a high-end private school. It's a taxpayer- funded, privately run public school, part of the charter-school movement that educates 1.8 million U.S. children. While charters are heralded for offering underprivileged kids an alternative to failing U.S. districts, Bullis gives an admissions edge to residents of parts of Los Altos Hills, where the median home is worth $1 million and household income is $219,000, four times the state average.

"More than seven years ago, a 44-year-old political scientist named Anthony Marx became the president of Amherst College, in western Massachusetts, and set out to change its admissions policies. Mr. Marx argued that elite colleges were neither as good nor as meritocratic as they could be, because they mostly overlooked lower-income students. "

Each year millions of middle-school students nationwide spend angst-filled months waiting to hear if they scored high enough on an entrance exam to attend a selective public high school. In New York City alone more than 27,000 students apply for precious spots in the three best-known schools: Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Technical and Bronx High School of Science. What Mr. Dobbie and Mr. Fryer wanted to know was just how much of a difference attending one of these high schools makes in the long run for students with similar equal admissions test scores.

The roughly 65,000 students who have entered eighth grade in New York City public schools will face a formidable task in the coming months. In addition to completing homework assignments and taking tests, preparing for the dreaded state exams and meeting the city's multiple promotion requirements, all eighth-grade students who wish to attend public (non-charter) high schools in New York city must also submit applications in which they rank up to 12 programs or schools from among nearly 700 possibilities citywide.

Uneducated Guesses challenges everything our policymakers thought they knew about education and education reform, from how to close the achievement gap in public schools to admission standards for top universities. In this explosive book, Howard Wainer uses statistical evidence to show why some of the most widely held beliefs in education today--and the policies that have resulted--are wrong. He shows why colleges that make the SAT optional for applicants end up with underperforming students and inflated national rankings, and why the push to substitute achievement tests for aptitude tests makes no sense. Wainer challenges the thinking behind the enormous rise of advanced placement courses in high schools, and demonstrates why assessing teachers based on how well their students perform on tests--a central pillar of recent education reforms--is woefully misguided. He explains why college rankings are often lacking in hard evidence, why essay questions on tests disadvantage women, why the most grievous errors in education testing are not made by testing organizations--and much more.

In Washington Heights, graduates of Stuyvesant High School and the Bronx High School of Science run the Science Schools Initiative, a yearlong free tutoring program held for three hours every Saturday morning. To qualify, students must show promise on a diagnostic exam and meet the city's benchmark for poverty. "The whole point of this thing is basically to get economically disadvantaged kids into these schools," said Mr. Cleary, who until recently was the program's executive director. "I'm not looking to hit a certain number; I'm looking for some equilibrium."

"Smarick sees two conversations going on today about charter schools. To one side are those like himself who are trying to figure out the new paradigm of schooling, in which privately-managed charter schools are a permanent part of the landscape. This conversation deals with finance, governance, how to get it right. It assumes that charter schools are a permanent part of the landscape and the question to be solved is one of tinkering. On the other side are people who worry about whether charter schools are a blight that damages public education and should be closely scrutinized for their finances, their boasts, and their policies governing admissions and suspensions. This side refers to hedge fund managers, privateers, and exorbitant executive salaries, and makes big headlines out of what Smarick considers the extraordinary miscreant."

Charters are public schools, funded by taxpayers and widely promoted as open to all. But Reuters has found that across the United States, charters aggressively screen student applicants, assessing their academic records, parental support, disciplinary history, motivation, special needs and even their citizenship, sometimes in violation of state and federal law.

A number of charter schools have moved to block the youngest students from enrolling in kindergarten even though they're eligible to attend under city rules - a policy that's backed by the city's Department of Education. Despite city rules that say any child who turns 5 by Dec. 31 of a given year is eligible to enroll in public school, charter authorizers - including the DOE - have allowed some schools to quietly push up their cutoff entry date to as early as Aug. 31. The move leaves the youngest batch of 5-year-olds - who education experts say often struggle the most academically - to either sit out a year or attend traditional district schools, even though charter schools are fully taxpayer-funded.