Every August, across American kitchen tables, parents like Sarah face a quiet reckoning: not simply where to send a child to school, but what kind of future to reach for and what to sacrifice along the way. The expansion of school choice over two decades has multiplied options without equalizing access, leaving families to navigate a landscape of tradeoffs — academic quality, cost, distance, community — that no brochure fully maps. Sarah's months-long deliberation, ending at the public school three blocks from her door, is one family's answer to a question that has no universal solution. It is