This story in yesterday’s Times reveals the frustrations parents increasingly face in upscale urban neighborhoods: you’ve paid, maybe overpaid, for a house in a neighborhood that features a great public school. But…you’re not alone and all of a sudden there’s not room in the building.

You’re out of luck.

And…upper middle-class parents are coming to realize what many parents in struggling neighborhoods have long known, that you have no right to a school. A school district, so long as they violate no laws or so long as a lawyer can’t prove that the district is purposely discriminating against a certain group, can assign students anyway they like.