Every summer, an increasingly common event occurs across the country--parents open a letter explaining that their child's school is failing to meet benchmarks set under the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and that, as a result, they have a right to send the child to another public school, if space is available. In the summer of 2009, letters went out to parents of children in more than one hundred District of Columbia public schools (DCPS) and D.C. public charter schools that did not make adequate yearly progress (AYP). This "Outlook" examines the choices available to those families and shows that while around twelve thousand students transferred schools that year, almost three-fourths made a school choice that can be described as choosing the bad over the worse or the unknown over the known. (Contains 2 tables, 4 figures and 6 notes.)