The NYC high school match, continued

When I recently blogged about The NYC High School Match, I focused on the many students who received one of their choices. As I mentioned, "The NYCDOE reports that of 86,000 students looking to enter the 9th grade, 44,012 students received their first choice school, and 7,455 could not be assigned to any of their (up to 12) choices."

Those unmatched students will now go through a supplementary match process. Many of them likely ranked many fewer than 12 choices, and will now have to select among schools that still have vacancies. Needless to say, this is a serious setback for some of them. (Here's a story from the Daily News: Parents fume as kids miss cut for top city high schools).

Michael Hickins, a reporter from Information Week (who writes that his daughter just went through the process) was referred to me by the NYCDOE, because of the work I did to help design the process, along with my colleagues Atila Abdulkadiroglu and Parag Pathak. Here is how our conversation (and others he had) is reflected in his report: NYC Board Of Ed's Algorithm Not Academic.

Helping kids get into good schools is one of the most important things we can do for them, and this is why it's important for schools to use modern matching technology, as NYC does, to try to get as many kids well matched as possible. It's agonizing that we can't provide enough great school places for everyone. There's only so much that can be done with matching technology, which can allocate existing places, but doesn't create good new schools. School systems need our support in other ways as well.