School Choice by Atila Abdulkadiroglu & Tommy Andersson

Here's a big new survey on school choice theory and practice:

School Choice  by Atila Abdulkadiroglu & Tommy Andersson, NBER working paper 29822

DOI 10.3386/w29822 ISSUE DATE March 2022 (forthcoming in the Handbook of the Economics of Education vol. 6).

Abstract: School districts in the US and around the world are increasingly moving away from traditional neighborhood school assignment, in which pupils attend closest schools to their homes. Instead, they allow families to choose from schools within district boundaries. This creates a market with parental demand over publicly-supplied school seats. More frequently than ever, this market for school seats is cleared via market design solutions grounded in recent advances in matching and mechanism design theory. The literature on school choice is reviewed with emphasis placed on the trade-offs among policy objectives and best practices in the design of admissions processes. It is concluded with a brief discussion about how data generated by assignment algorithms can be used to answer contemporary empirical questions about school effectiveness and policy interventions.

Some paragraphs from the conclusions:

"Parental choice over public schools has become a major part of education reform around the world. In the US alone, the proportion of the largest 100 schools districts with parental choice over public schools doubled between 2000 and 2016 (Whitehurst, 2017). Currently, parents in Belgium, England, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Wales, and Northern Ireland have the right to or must choose a public or a private school at the primary, lower and upper secondary levels for their children. In fact, for the upper secondary level, only six European countries (Denmark, Greece, France, Cyprus, Malta and Turkey) do not have any type of school choice program and, instead, assign students to schools based on their place of residence (European Commission, 2020). Consequently, the demand for rigorous solutions for student assignment has been growing. Each school-choice program comes with its own institutional and political constraints, which opens the door for further research. In fact, most of the theoretical literature on school choice is motivated by real-life problems identified in the field.

...

"This chapter has focused on student assignment in school choice by taking preferences and priorities as exogenous. An equally important question concerns the welfare consequences of school choice. In particular, the models in the literature ignore probably one of the most important aspects of school choice: access to a school is determined not only by the ability to list the school in the application form, but also by admissions policies, such as neighborhood priority, and by means for traveling to the school. This makes both preferences and priorities endogenous. While wealthy families can choose affluent neighborhoods with good schools before going through the formal choice process, low income families are shut out of such residential choice. The matching models of school choice regularly ignore housing markets, families’ endogenous housing decisions and their impact on welfare. Recent advances in this direction have been made by studying school choice with competitive housing markets and a continuum of students. For example, in a fairly general model, Grigoryan (2021) offers a convincing theoretical argument in favor of school choice by showing that low income families are better-off under deferred acceptance in comparison to solely residence-based school assignment even when applicants are granted neighborhood priorities in deferred acceptance. Much work is still to be done both theoretically and empirically on that frontier.

...

" data generated by assignment algorithms can be used to answer most pressing empirical questions on school effectiveness and policy interventions.29 Seats in a school choice program are rationed by admissions priorities, such as neighborhood priority for pupils living within a certain distance from school, lotteries, student rankings at the school which may be based on an entrance examination, academic records, interviews and other criteria. Such rationing creates quasi-experimental variation in school assignment at unprecedented levels that can be used for credible evaluation of individual schools and of school reform models, such as charters, small schools, and voucher programs. A recent literature focuses on research design with data from centralized admissions and develops econometric techniques."

Updated citation: Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Tommy Andersson, Chapter 3 - School choice, Editor(s): Eric A. Hanushek, Stephen Machin, Ludger Woessmann, Handbook of the Economics of Education, Elsevier, Volume 6, 2023, Pages 135-185,