New York City is not alone when it comes to troubles implementing a No Child Left Behind student transfer policy, a sampling of urban districts across the country shows.

The New York Sun’s survey found that, like New York City, many districts received lists of schools in need of improvement from their respective states around the first day of school last year and then started the transfer process.

This year, some districts, including Chicago and Las Vegas, have found solutions to the start-of-school chaos the transfers created, while most have not.

The Sun also found New York was one of the only cities that did not cap the number of transfers last year to equal the number of seats available in successful schools. This year, New York is limiting transfers, putting the city in the same league as Boston, Houston, and Chicago.

Districts with “open enrollment” – where all students, regardless of their school’s performance, could transfer – had the smoothest No Child Left Behind experiences last year.

Houston, for example, had a choice policy that pre-dated the federal law. A spokesman for the Houston public school system, Norman Uhl, said children there can transfer out of their zoned schools for any reason, provided there’s space.

“If the limit is 22 per classroom and you have x number of classrooms, it’s basically multiplication,” he said.

The same is true in Boston.

A Boston public schools spokesman, Jonathan Palumbo, said students at failing schools this year would be notified in November or December. He said since all Boston children have the right to transfer to a new school through January, the timeline isn’t very significant.

Districts like New York, without choice-based enrollment policies for middle and elementary school students, faced bigger challenges.

After serious hassles, Chicago made the most dramatic changes.

A spokeswoman for the Chicago public school system said, “If you get your test scores in August, you’re scrambling to come up with a plan for September.

It’s chaotic enough when students are getting back.”

After last year’s chaos, the school system decided to allow students to transfer based on their school’s rank on the 2003 list of failing schools. Chicago families decided in June if their children would transfer in the fall.

Las Vegas changed its timeline less dramatically.

Last year, Las Vegas didn’t find out which schools needed improvement until after the start of the school year.

An education official there, Leanne Fagan, said the city gave the state “such a hard time” after that, that Nevada administered its statewide tests earlier, moving up the whole process.

Other cities said last year was hectic, but they aren’t making substantive changes.

The assistant general counsel for the Seattle school system, Holly Ferguson, said, “Since we’ve done it before, we think it will go a little bit more smoothly because we know what we’re doing.”

The executive director for external programs for the Atlanta school system, Mary Bailey, said transfers are happening slightly earlier this year than last year, when children were transferring for two months after school had begun.

Although New York City had to cope with ordinary start-of-the-year enrollment confusion last year at the same time as more than 7,000 No Child Left Behind transfers, it has not changed its transfer timeline.

The press secretary to Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, Jerry Russo, said, “We hope the state will get the list out as soon as possible, and we have discussed with the state the value and importance of doing so.”

The state says it’s working as fast as it can, but the list will again come out around the start of the school year.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Education, Susan Aspey, said most districts can’t figure out on their own which schools will be on the list, but she said districts are encouraged to “get the word out” long before the start of the school year.

The only significant change New York City has made this year is capping the number of transfers at the number of seats available in successful schools.

The head of the City Council committee on education, Eva Moskowitz, has said the cap seems like a violation of the law, but Ms. Aspey said the law permits local districts to limit or not implement choice requirements if doing so would violate a state law.