Tuesday, January 26, 2010

School choice in SF moves forward

Yesterday Muriel Niederle and Clayton Featherstone were among the presenters to the San Francisco Board of Education, speaking about possible designs for a new school choice system there. It seems that they are well on the way to a good outcome.

One of the Board members, Rachel Norton, has a blog on which she posted before and after accounts of the meeting:
Tonight’s student assignment meeting should be interesting!
Recap: Closing in on a student assignment policy

Here is a video of the whole meeting (but you can navigate a bit so you don't have to watch the full 3 hours: Muriel's testimony, from her slide presentation through answering of questions from the board is from 1:09 to 2:09 on the video).

For the technically inclined, papers about our prior work on school choice systems in NYC and Boston are here.

It has been mentioned in the SF discussions that our team of market designers has worked on a number of problems aside from school choice, so here are background links on some of them for SF readers who are interested:
National Resident Matching Program and related medical labor markets
Gastroenterologists, Orthopaedic surgeons
Kidney Exchange
AEA market for new economists

1 comment:

rpnorton said...

Thanks for the link! I think Niederle and Featherstone's presentation was very interesting and gave us a sound framework for an eventual policy. Community memers here in SF really love the ideas of "strategically simple" and "non-wasteful" methods -- neither of which we can claim for our current system.