The paper investigates public and private primary school choice criteria in urban settings by taking an unconventional and supplementing perspective which scarcely has been taken up by research, despite being interconnected with the topic at hand. Instead of analyzing parents' criteria for schools deemed good, which would be the conventional way, their answers on the question whether they perceive a school in their neighborhood as no-go as well as the reasons they state for doing so are qualitatively examined. In addition, based on school and official city data the characteristics of the no-go schools stated by parents are examined in terms of curricular profile, student composition and socio-economic neighborhood status and compared to non-no-go schools (ANOVA and t-test).