In his vision of mayoral control, Mayor Bob Duffy would change the city school district's enrollment system back to one based on neighborhood schools. City schools currently use a system that is based on parental choice. Returning to neighborhood schools is an extremely appealing concept, particularly to parents who remember a time when most children walked to schools that were only a few blocks from home.

But returning to neighborhood schools would be a terrible decision, school district officials say. And it would cause more harm than good. Most experts say that both systems have strengths and weaknesses.

While the trend in education over the last decade, particularly in urban environments, has favored school choice, enrollment based on neighborhood schools still has a strong base of support. Many educators and community leaders see schools as the vital link, the connection between families and healthy neighborhoods.

"As we lose neighborhood public schools, we lose the local institution where people congregate to solve local problems," wrote education historian Diane Ravitch in the summer 2010 issue of American Educator. "We abandon them at our peril."

When choice is introduced, Ravitch says, the poorest neighborhoods frequently lose the cream of the crop; the best students leave the neighborhood schools in favor of other options.

Duffy became interested in neighborhood schools, he says, after hearing many parents say they wouldn't buy a home in the city because district officials won't guarantee school placement. Duffy has been trying to increase the city's tax base, but the district's enrollment process works against the city's interests, he says.

"Any parent whose first choice is their neighborhood school should have a guarantee of a seat in that school," Duffy says. "We've had discussions with the district about why we can't do this and we never get a clear answer. We need to be far more customer oriented."

He gets numerous complaints, he says, from parents who simply can't navigate the system.

"One city employee who lives on the east side said she didn't even get her phone calls returned," Duffy says. "I had one parent say the district put their child in a school that wasn't their first, second, or third choice. Their child was put in a school to help raise the test scores of the school where he was finally placed."

Other parents hear about their child's placement so late, Duffy says, they can't make plans for housing or transportation.

"Parents should not be finding out in August where their kid is going to school," he says. "That doesn't work. And I don't know who a system like that does work for."

But district officials say the neighborhood schools concept is more about 1950's nostalgia than 21st century education reform.

"Of everything Bob has talked about with regards to mayoral control, neighborhood schools is the thing I have trouble with," says city schools Superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard.

There are more than 60 city schools, and a fundamental structural problem occurs when district officials try to neatly align schools with neighborhoods. Some neighborhoods have multiple schools, while others have none.

But more problematic is how the city's neighborhoods have changed from the time the schools were built, in some cases more than 70 years ago. Schools like 46 in the Browncroft neighborhood and School 1 in the Cobb's Hill neighborhood once had plenty of families with school age children. But not anymore. If these schools were converted to neighborhood schools, they would probably have to operate at less than half of their intended capacity, says Karen Sangmeister, the district's assistant director of student equity and placement.

At School 46 for example, 18 students from the neighborhood are enrolled in kindergarten in 2010-2011, while 25 are coming from outside the neighborhood. It's a similar situation at School 1 where 13 students are from the neighborhood and 29 are from outside the neighborhood.

Just the opposite would occur in other areas of the city with dense populations of families with school age children. Those schools would be filled beyond capacity. This would create an ancillary problem that district officials are trying to avoid: a worse concentration of poverty in many city schools.

"If you do this you will dramatically increase economic segregation," Brizard says. "I don't think anyone wants that to happen."

It's the concentration of poor children in schools, experts say, which most contributes to lowered student performance.

District officials strongly disagree with Duffy's assessment of the current system. And they say there is a kind of mythology that follows neighborhood schools.

"It assumes that all schools in every neighborhood are good schools," says school board member Willa Powell. "And we know that's not true. Choice empowers parents and creates competition between schools. With neighborhood schools there is no incentive to strive to improve."

The managed choice system is the best of both worlds, says Powell, because parents can still choose their neighborhood school. But she agrees that the district doesn't guarantee placement in any school.

"There's no history of a person not getting their home school as their first choice," Powell says. "Whenever you examine those stories closely, they turn out to be false."

But the current enrollment system is complicated, which may fuel the rumors. Parents can make their neighborhood school their first choice. And if the child lives within a half-mile of the school or has an older sibling already attending that school, the student receives preference to enroll in the neighborhood school.

But parents who don't want to enroll their child in their neighborhood school can choose their three top preferences of schools. However, parents are supposed to select a school from within the zone where they live - the city school district is divided into three zones. That rule is not rigidly applied, however, Powell says. The student's application is entered into a computer, which selects the schools by lottery.

Some schools are in greater demand than others. For example, many parents identified School 50 on Seneca Avenue as their first choice for the 2009-2010 school year, and the probability of getting into that school was 43 percent. School 9, however, had less demand or more capacity and the probability of getting into that school was 100 percent.

Most school enrollment occurs at kindergarten. Parents have to complete the registration process between December and March for the coming school year. After March, the likelihood of parents getting their first choice declines. Parents learn of their child's placement by early June, district officials say, unless they register late.

"There's a huge danger here," Powell says. "Unlike the airlines, we cannot overbook. We would be violating our promise to parents to be fair. If we book to 120 percent of capacity, some students would get bumped. How do you decide that? Plus, it would make it impossible to distribute our resources equitably."

And Powell has another concern. School buildings and property are owned by the city. When districts restructure around neighborhood school systems, real estate developers come calling, she says. The schools that are located in empty-nester neighborhoods become prime targets for redevelopment, she says. School 1 in the Cobb's Hill area, 23 in the Park Avenue area, and 46 in the Browncroft are perfect examples, she says.

Duffy insists that no such plan exists, and that is not what he envisions with neighborhood schools. But he has talked with developers, he says, about ways to use school renovations as a catalyst to invigorate declining neighborhoods.

"We should be looking at schools as community centers," he says.