The Daily Telegraph has an article about school choice in Britain that uses what strikes me as a tricky standard to declare that something is rotten in Britain:
Children 'forced to accept unpopular secondary schools': Almost 75,000 children have been rejected from their preferred secondary school amid a desperate scramble for the most sought-after places, official figures show.
The article goes on to say
"More than one-in-seven pupils across England are being forced to accept second, third or fourth-choice schools this September, it emerged.
...
"According to figures, some schools in parts of London received as many as nine applications for every place.
"Mr Gibb said: “I want us to reach a position where it is parents choosing schools, not schools choosing parents."
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And here's a similar article about younger kids: More children rejected from first-choice primary school
"Among councils that provided year-on-year figures, some 90 per cent reported an increase in applications in 2012 compared with 2011.
"In those areas, almost 14 per cent of four and five-year-olds failed to get into their first choice school
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Britain would not be alone in having a shortage of good schools, but the point I want to raise about these articles is that the statistics mentioned could instead indicate that Britain has a few remarkably good schools that are oversubscribed. That would be something quite different, but it would still mean that many students didn't get one of their top choices.
Sunday, April 22, 2012
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Entire England switched to capped versions of student-optimal stable mechanism with the 2007 education code; at least 60 local authorities (out of about 150 in the country) gave up Boston mechanism just since that year; London gave it up in 2005 I believe. (We discuss this reform in detail in our recent paper with Parag.) So inevitably people are seeing students receiving less "first choices" since all these places abandoned a mechanism that pushes you to rank less risky schools as first choice.
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