The LAUSD Choices application opened October 1 and closes November 6. For the next five weeks, parents across Los Angeles will log into a district website and rank up to three magnet programs for their kids. Most of them want a seat. A smaller, better informed group is hoping not to get one.

That second group is playing a game the district built and has never bothered to fix. Under LAUSD’s magnet priority point system, a child who applies on time to an oversubscribed magnet and is turned away earns four points toward the next year’s application. Do that three years in a row and the child has banked twelve points, the most the district allows for waiting. Twelve is also exactly what a child earns for finishing the top grade of a magnet program and moving on to the next one. So families who know the rules treat the early elementary years as a three year points farm for the middle school they actually want.

None of this is hidden, if you know where to look. One LAUSD elementary school PTA’s website tells families that every year they apply and don’t get a spot, they bank points, and advises starting in second or third grade. Other schools skip the website and say it out loud. At Mar Vista Elementary, former principal Katherine Choe held a meeting every year walking parents through exactly this strategy. That principal has since left, and it remains to be seen whether the annual meeting survives the transition. The catch is that only families in the know, like those at Mar Vista Elementary or at schools whose PTAs spell it out, ever hear about the strategy, and they hear it years before their child needs a seat.

The magnet system was not designed as a perk for strategic parents. It was a court remedy for segregation. In 1963 the ACLU filed Crawford v. Board of Education on behalf of Black students, later joined by Latino students, challenging the way Los Angeles drew school boundaries. The scale of the problem was staggering. According to the ACLU’s account of the case, in 1968 eighty LAUSD elementary schools were majority Black, nearly all of them more than 90 percent Black, at a time when Black students made up 22 percent of the district. In 1970 Judge Alfred Gitelson ruled that the district had engaged in deliberate segregation, in violation of the state and federal constitutions.

What followed was a decade of fights over busing, including an organized anti-busing campaign called Bustop, launched in 1976 by future school board president Roberta Weintraub and activist Bobbi Fiedler to keep Valley kids from being bused. Mandatory busing in Los Angeles did not last, but the voluntary tools did. LAUSD opened its first magnet, the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies (“LACES”), in 1977, and in 1981 the Superior Court approved a desegregation plan built around magnets, voluntary transportation, and extra support for the communities most harmed by segregation.

The district still describes its magnets as programs established through an integration court order to address what it calls the five harms of racial isolation, among them low academic achievement and lack of access to college. Part of that remedy was the PHBAO designation, short for Predominantly Hispanic, Black, Asian and Other non-Anglo. Schools whose surrounding attendance area is at least 70 percent non-white get smaller class sizes, and their students get four priority points when they apply to magnets. The theory was simple. Kids stuck in racially isolated neighborhood schools should get a head start on the seats that let them out.

There was always a second half to the design, and it is worth saying out loud. Magnets were the district’s answer to white families who had fought mandatory busing. Instead of ordering kids onto buses, LAUSD would entice them, with themed and enriched programs, extra resources and free transportation, to choose integrated campuses on their own. The bait only worked if the seats were held for the families being courted, so admission was tied to racial targets. Schools were set up to hit a set mix of white and non-white students, often something like 60 or 70 percent non-white, and in practice that meant separate lotteries for white and non-white applicants.

Here is how the 2027-28 system works, according to LAUSD’s own rules. A child can earn 4 points if their resident school is PHBAO, 4 if their resident school is officially overcrowded, and 3 if a sibling attends the program. On top of that sits the big prize, 12 points, which comes one of two ways. Either the child is finishing the top grade of a magnet and applying to the next level (for example, moving from a magnet middle school to a magnet high school), or the child has sat on an on-time magnet waiting list for three consecutive years at 4 points a year. The maximum is 23. When a program has more applicants than seats, the district fills them starting from the highest point total and drawing randomly within each tier, while also weighing what it calls the need to maintain a racially balanced enrollment.

Now look at which of those points actually separate one family from another. PHBAO covers roughly 90 percent of LAUSD schools, so most applicants get those four points and they cancel each other out. Take Mar Vista, for example. Most of the kids finishing elementary school here feed into Webster Middle School, which is designated PHBAO, so every one of them who applies to a middle school magnet collects four points just for having Webster as their home school, whatever their family’s own race or income. Webster’s students are about 70 percent Latino, 16 percent Black and under 8 percent white, and 86 percent qualify for free lunch. The district’s own norm category list makes the logic even plainer. Mar Vista Elementary is classified non-PHBAO, so kids zoned there earn no PHBAO points while their families bank waiting list points in the early grades. Then, in the year it matters most, their home school becomes Webster and the four points switch on. The points attach to the address, not the child.

Overcrowding points are nearly extinct. LAist found just four schools carried the overcrowded label in 2024-25. Sibling points help only families already inside a program. That leaves the twelve. And the twelve are earned in one of two ways, by already being in a magnet or by understanding the waiting list well enough to work it.

This is not a new insight. More than a decade ago the Larchmont Buzz laid out the logic for its readers, explaining that because current magnet kids walk in with 12 matriculation points, outsiders need to bank the full 12 waiting list points to compete at all for the most popular schools. A system sold as a ladder out of segregated schools has quietly become a system that rewards whoever started climbing first.

The strategy follows directly from the fine print. If a family is offered a magnet seat and turns it down, all of its waiting list points are erased. So the trick is not just to apply somewhere. It is to apply somewhere you are confident you will not get in. Families who play pick the most oversubscribed programs in the district, often listing a single school, and then wait to be rejected. The district even helps, by publishing how many applications each magnet received the year before against how many openings it has. On parent forums like the long running Ask a Magnet Yenta blog, families post their results each spring by grade, race and point total, building a crowd sourced map of exactly where a rejection is safest.

Think about what that requires. A parent has to learn a rule that matters for middle school while their child is learning to read. They have to be able to say no to a seat their child is offered, which only makes sense if the neighborhood school is an acceptable fallback. And they have to be plugged into the PTA pages, parent groups and blogs where this knowledge travels. None of those conditions are about race on paper. All of them track time, stability and social networks, which in Los Angeles track class and, very often, race.

The result is a system that hands its most valuable points to families for knowing how the system works. LAUSD today is about 74 percent Latino, 10 percent white, 7 percent Black and 3 percent Asian, and some magnets are almost entirely students of color because few white families apply to them. The competition is concentrated at the handful of high demand programs where a twelve point head start decides who gets in. LAUSD knows who holds those twelve points. Every application lists a race, an address and a resident school, and the district assigns every point. It does not publish a breakdown of who is banking waiting list points by race, income or neighborhood, but it should.

Meanwhile, the only part of the point system under legal attack is the part that still does what the court intended. In January, the 1776 Project Foundation, a conservative group created by the 1776 Project PAC, sued LAUSD in federal court to kill the PHBAO program, calling it discrimination against white students. One plaintiff is a parent whose children attend a non-PHBAO school and were turned away from a magnet for lack of those points. In February, Trump’s Justice Department, through Civil Rights chief Harmeet Dhillon, moved to join the suit, and the ACLU, which brought Crawford sixty years ago, has moved to intervene to defend it. For now the 2027-28 rules still award PHBAO points.

Notice what the lawsuit leaves alone. It goes after four points tied to neighborhood segregation, which the district’s own court orders were written to address. It says nothing about the twelve points that reward insider strategy. If we strip out PHBAO as Trump’s DOJ would have it, the waiting list game does not shrink. It becomes the whole game.

Here in Mar Vista, every parent of a second grader is now making a choice, whether they know it or not. The family that applies this month to a school it never intends to attend is not breaking a rule. It is following the incentives LAUSD wrote. The family that doesn’t hear about the strategy until fifth grade has already lost. Every seat that goes to a carefully cultivated twelve point application is a seat that does not go to the kid the remedy was built for. And every phantom application inflates the demand numbers the district publishes, which can scare off exactly the families who take those numbers at face value and never apply.

There is another reason this system survives, and it rarely gets said out loud. LAUSD needs middle class families, white families especially, to stay, and many have not. Census estimates compiled by Statistical Atlas put non-Hispanic white kids at roughly 16 percent of K-12 students living in the city of Los Angeles, while LAUSD’s own enrollment is about 10 percent white. The difference is private school. Citywide, about one in nine high schoolers attends one. In Mar Vista it’s closer to one in six, and in Brentwood it is more than six in ten.

For families with that exit, the magnet points game works as a retention program. Win a seat at a coveted magnet and you stay in the system. Lose, and the private school brochure is already on the kitchen table. Everyone involved understands that threat, which may be why the rules that reward it have never been fixed. And the families who stay are already sorted. An analysis by the group Available to All found that a white LAUSD elementary student has a 40 percent chance of attending a school where two thirds of kids read at grade level, compared with 6 percent for Black students and 5 percent for Latino students. When the families with the most resources can always leave, or can always game their way into the best seats, the pressure to make every neighborhood school excellent drains away with them.

This is fixable, and the fixes are not exotic. LAUSD could stop awarding waiting list points to applicants who list only programs they are statistically certain to miss, or cap how far those points can carry a family. It could replace the waiting list bonus with points tied to actual need, such as family income, English learner status, housing instability or foster care, so the twelve point head start goes to the kids the court order describes. It could publish, every year, who holds waiting list points by race, income and resident school, so the public can see whether the system is integrating schools or sorting them. And it could stop making a five week window in October the only door, by explaining the point system to every family at kindergarten enrollment, in every language the district already prints its brochures in.

But the deeper problem is the premise. A lottery for escape seats only exists because the district has accepted that certain schools are worth escaping. Points, waiting lists and twelve point strategies are what scarcity looks like when it is managed rather than ended. The democratic answer is not a cleverer lottery, but neighborhood schools good enough that nobody in Mar Vista, or Boyle Heights, or Watts, has to game a spreadsheet in second grade to ensure their child attends a decent middle school. Until then, the least LAUSD owes families is a system that rewards need over knowledge and access. The application closes November 6.