I have a child entering kindergarten next Fall. This is the big milestone, even though she has already been in public school. I find myself wondering what it's going to be like. I find myself rethinking the purpose of schools, and I wonder whether we have the right school, as I have watched our peers seek kindergartens for their children. The process involves stress and uncertainty.

In our city, because of low performance, many parents avoid the public schools. They choose parochial, charter, or private, or they hope to get in to a public magnet. All of this involves testing, a lottery, or significant cost. This year I've run into homeschoolers, too, people who seem less religiously motivated than simply fed up with traditional school, the time wasted, the focus on testing, the lack of exercise, and so on. It's a confusing time. Our state, New York, continues to change what public school testing means for teachers and districts, even as the tests themselves change to include the Common Core curriculum. For the parent of a young child, it is a lot of information to grasp, and it's very hard to see by reading the news, following the local school politics, and even talking to parents what school is actually going to be like for your child. Negativity abounds.

One question that I keep coming back to is whether there is an ideal school for my child. Does such a thing exist? And if it does, is that a good thing? Should my child's school be ideal, or should it be something else? When I say ideal, I suppose I mean perfect. But I think most parents would admit there is no perfect school, even as they spend energy trying to find it. You do have to find something, but what? You want your kid to be happy, and you want a positive learning environment. But before you've done school, it's tough to even know what you want. Do you want a school that makes time for recess? Do you want a school that does well on tests? Do you want a school with children who are different, from diverse economic or cultural backgrounds, or do you want a school with students your kid already knows? Do you want a particular learning method, no homework, or a school that will boost your child's social capital? What do you want your child to learn? People talk about options, but for me, the questions overwhelm the options.

A lot of parents who I talk to bring up the word "fit," as if school is a shoe you try on. The word aspires to take your child's personality and needs and gifts and mesh them, in some wonderful way, with a grade school, a large building full of administrators, teachers, and hundreds of other students. Is that how school works? It sounds more like the college application process (another welcome milestone parents now view with complete dread). I do know what they are saying; they mean that each school has a character, an identity and a function and a way of teaching. But I think most parents are talking from the experience of having been in a school that didn't "fit" their child. They've grown more concerned about fit after feeling lost or out of place in a school.

Which brings me back to the problem of attempting to choose a school before your child has attended school. I know in many places, a child attends the neighborhood school. But our city does not have neighborhood schools in an attempt to reduce segregation and give parents choices. So you do have to apply to public schools by ranking the ones you are interested in. If you want a charter, that's a separate application for each school. And you would apply to the parochial or private schools individually as well.

So far, the biggest school challenge for us may have already occurred. My daughter attended a large day care for her toddler years and started preschool there before moving to a public school. She was 3 and a half. It was a huge transition to move from a day care setting to a mixed-age kindergarten. She faced it bravely. Her parents, probably less so. We let her ride the bus, so we weren't seeing the classroom, the children in it, or her teachers on a daily basis. Communication went from being a daily face-to-face interaction, with emotions attached, to notes in a blue folder and occasional text messages that were at times hard to decipher.

The stories my own child brought home were more "truthy" than true. And students in this setting were expected to do more themselves in terms of independence and self-regulation than she was in her preschool. She was also there all day, all week. I just felt like there was so much I didn't see. Some things were beyond her developmental age and hard for her. But throughout the course of the year, she grew into the routine, and we did, too. Between school fairs and other fun events, meeting other parents, and attending teacher conferences, we began to see how much she was learning and that she was interacting positively with her school. Every time I visited the school, I felt happy that she was there. But that was my main takeaway — essentially a gut feeling. Other than her educational progress and the school's Montessori learning method, I wasn't sure really what else we could use to help us decide whether to stay for kindergarten.

In the end, we chose the route of least resistance. Instead of applying to new kindergartens, charter lotteries, or the gifted school, we decided to enjoy her current school. We decided we like its character, the diversity, and the mixed-age learning. I did look at the classrooms in the next level, and I worked to attend the parent and school meetings to see whether the school seemed well-run, whether teachers were happy and supported, and I continued to talk to other parents. She'll have a new teacher next year, but the school is now her home. She already talks about the day her sister will get on the bus beside her. I really hope the shoe fits. But if it doesn't, I like to think that's all part of an education. It's not ideal.