"School choice" proponents argue that offering parents public school options other than traditional neighborhood schools empowers them to secure an optimal school for their children. But choice does not remedy the core social problem: that racial residential segregation enables White parents to have a higher-quality choiceset of schools than their Black counterparts. In our study of the Cleveland, Ohio, Metropolitan Area, we find Black parents are more likely than White parents to live in neighborhoods where schools fail to meet state academic proficiency standards, motivating Black parents to pursue "choice" schools more often. While studies have shown how parents choose schools and whether their efforts lead to higher student achievement, parents' experiences of choosing a school and coordinating their child's attendance at that school is less well understood. We examine how choice is experienced day to day by comparing 26 Black and 15 White parents' processes for selecting a school and managing their children's daily routines. Given entrenched racial residential segregation in the Cleveland region, we find introducing choice schools imposes a "parenting tax" on Black parents because they expend resources—time and energy—to activate a public good most White parents can take for granted. Introducing "choice" into a highly-racialized K-12 system exacerbates Black parents' disadvantages, which largely stem from Black communities' inadequate access to high-quality public goods generally. Better schooling options for Black children requires developing an opportunity structure focused on equitable public resource distribution across racial groups irrespective of where those groups reside within a metropolitan area.