After urging from the City Council, the school superintendent has agreed to take a hard, substantive look at the most contentious issue dogging public schools. That issue is so-called “forced busing” — the mandatory assignment of students to schools that are not of their choosing.

The superintendent’s thought is to create a commission to examine the current school assignment plan and develop ways to improve it. The goal is to maximize parental choice, so that as few kids as possible end up going to schools that they don’t want, while at the same time preserving ethnic and racial diversity in the Boston Public Schools.

The commission has a tough task ahead of it. The school system reports that 89 percent of parents get either their first or second choice when they sign up for a school. It sounds like a high figure, but many argue that the level of satisfaction is not nearly at the same level. In part this is because the perception, true or not, is that parental choice is not available. As a consequence, parents have removed their kids from the schools, sent them to private or parochial schools or, worse, left the city altogether.

A second criticism is that a fair amount of game-playing goes on with school selection. Parents may, for example, want to send their child to the Quincy School, but after investigating learn that their chances of getting in are low. As a result, they will instead select another, less desired school in hopes that their child will get in there. Thus, one’s “first” choice is really not one’s preferred choice. Finally, of course, even at 89 percent, we are still left with 11 percent of parents who find their children going to a school which was not their desired choice.

One nagging matter that the commission will have to confront is the oft espoused goal of neighborhood schools. A number of city councilors have made neighborhood schools, or ‘walk-to’ schools, their holy grail of school reform and a loose coalition calling itself “Just Do It!” has united behind the effort. Taken to its logical extreme, walk-to schools would mean that students would be assigned to schools based upon where they live. The local school would be your school, and if you wanted a different school, you would need to move — much like what happens in the suburban communities around Boston.

But parental choice is fundamentally at odds with this notion. Certainly many parents may want to choose a close-by school for their children. But many will not — witness, for example, the citywide demand for the Latin School. More fundamentally, parental choice is the key to improving the quality of our schools.

A number of people have advanced the notion of voucher programs as a way to reform public schools. Under a voucher system, they argue, schools compete with each other for students. That competition in turn creates better schools as the bad schools are weeded out because no one selects them. Competition also encourages innovation as schools try new programs and new models of teaching to improve themselves.

Boston may not have a voucher system, but a parental choice system functions the same way. As Boston continues to expand the availability of pilot schools and magnet schools, as it continues to try to develop specialty programs in different schools or encourage new models of teaching, parental choice will become even more important as a component of school reform.

The goals of Boston’s school system should be to create a diverse array of educational options at both the elementary and high school levels, and to provide parents with as much choice as possible in selecting from those options. To go the other way — to require kids to go to their local school and only to their local school — will ultimately stifle that diversity, stifle innovation and provide less, not more, choice to parents.