School choice, school quality, and student performance

 School choice, which allows children to move away from neighborhood schools, doesn't by itself improve school quality, although it may allow under-performing schools to become smaller, which may make them easier to fix, or to close.

Here are two  recent assessments of two different transportation options available to Boston public school students. Both conclude that school quality matters.

The first is an op-ed in the Boston Globe saying that school choice among Boston public schools has led to too much transportation and not enough innovation. (One of the authors, Parag Pathak, played a critical role in designing  Boston's current school choice system.)

Boston needs to reexamine school assignment system
Rather than investing in high-cost travel to send students to schools across the city, Boston should consider redirecting those funds toward improving schools close to home.
By Joshua Angrist, Parag Pathak and Amanda Schmidt 

"Boston’s school assignment system has changed considerably since the 1970s. Busing today is voluntary: Students can choose to attend schools far from where they live as well as a range of neighborhood schools. This choice allows historically disadvantaged students to attend schools with more peers of different backgrounds, an option that many choose. Roughly three-quarters of students opted to enroll in non-neighborhood schools in the 2000s and 2010s. A recent study by our organization, MIT Blueprint Labs, shows that today’s assignment system works in the sense of facilitating integration.

However, the costs of the current system are high. Among the 100 US school districts with the highest enrollment, Boston maintains the greatest per-student transportation costs in the country. As of 2021, the city spent over $2,000 per student on travel, equivalent to 8 percent of per-pupil school spending.

Furthermore, the educational gains afforded by district-wide choice are less clear than the integration gains. Our research, which uses credible, randomized methods designed by Blueprint Labs to gauge the causal effect of enrollment at different types of schools, paints a nuanced picture of the benefits of travel to non-neighborhood schools. Black and Hispanic students who travel to a non-neighborhood school have more white and Asian peers than they otherwise would. But travel does not impact learning as measured by MCAS scores, high school graduation rates, or college enrollment. We argue that this is because in the current BPS choice system — unlike the separate and unequal system of 1974 — the schools students travel to are no better than those nearby.

...

"The vast sums that now go to cross-neighborhood transportation might be better spent. The city might instead invest in programs with proven educational benefits. Saga Education’s effective high-dosage tutoring program, for example, cost just $1,800 per student in 2023. This spending may do more to close racial achievement gaps than non-neighborhood assignment.

"Some might counter that choice is intrinsically valuable and that neighborhood schools are likely to be more segregated than the schools that many historically disadvantaged families choose today. These undeniable benefits must be weighed, however, against alternative uses of the money that flows to busing. Boston schools have improved greatly since 1974: Dropout rates for all students have declined, and gaps by race, while still present, have narrowed. School assignment plans originating in 1974 may therefore be less useful today. It’s time to consider changing transportation policy in light of these changes in the city’s education landscape."

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Here's a paper, about a different transportation program available to some* Boston students, which takes them out of Boston to schools in neighboring towns and cities in the metropolitan area.  Moving to those suburban schools apparently improves student performance more than moving from one Boston school to another.

 Busing to Opportunity? The Impacts of the METCO Voluntary School Desegregation Program on Urban Students of Color  by Elizabeth Setren, NBER Working Paper 32864, DOI 10.3386/w32864, August 2024

Abstract: School assignment policies are a key lever to increase access to high performing schools and to promote racial and socioeconomic integration. For over 50 years, the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO) has bussed students of color from Boston, Massachusetts to relatively wealthier and predominantly White suburbs. Using a combination of digitized historical records and administrative data, I analyze the short and long run effects of attending a high-performing suburban school for applicants to the METCO program. I compare those with and without offers to enroll in suburban schools. I use a two-stage least squares approach that utilizes the waitlist assignment priorities and controls for a rich set of characteristics from birth records and application data. Attending a suburban school boosts 10th grade Math and English test scores by 0.13 and 0.21 standard deviations respectively. The program reduces dropout rates by 75 percent and increases on-time high school graduation by 13 percentage points. The suburban schools increase four-year college aspirations by 17 percentage points and enrollment by 21 percentage points. Participation results in a 12 percentage point increase in four-year college graduation rates. Enrollment increases average earnings at age 35 by $16,250. Evidence of tracking to lower performing classes in the suburban schools suggests these effects could be larger with access to more advanced coursework. Effects are strongest for students whose parents did not graduate college."

*"The program is very popular: 50 percent of Black youth in Boston applied and 20 percent of Latinx youth in the past 20 years"

...

"After demonstrating the comparability of students with and without offers, I estimate the impact of receiving an offer to the program and the impact of participating in the program. Offers to enroll in suburban districts serve as instrumental variables and all models control for approximate waitlist position using age at the time of application, gender, and race controls. Therefore the estimates compare the outcomes of those who enroll in METCO to applicants with similar demographics, who applied at similar times, but did not enroll because they were not selected from the waitlist."

The Robert Rosenthal Memorial Lecture for 2023 at BU, by Parag Pathak

 Parag Pathak gave this year's Robert Rosenthal Memorial Lecture at Boston University. The title of his talk is “Still Worth the Trip? The Evolution of School Busing in Boston” 

(The video below may undergo some further editing, but right now it starts with introductions at minute 3.) 

You can also find the Rosenthal lectures from previous years at the link.

(I had the honor of giving the 2007 lecture... Bob Rosenthal and I are academic siblings, we were both advised by Bob Wilson.)

Tom Payzant, Boston schools superintendent who reformed school choice, dies at 80

 Tom Payzant played a critical role in transforming Boston's school choice from an immediate acceptance algorithm that exposed students and families to complex strategic risk when navigating the system, to a deferred acceptance algorithm that simplified their participation. As Superintendent of Boston Public Schools, Tom came to understand those issues well, and acted on them.

Here's his obit in the Boston Globe.

Thomas Payzant, whose education vision lifted Boston’s schools, dies at 80, By Bryan Marquard

and here's the statement from Boston Public Schools:

SUPERINTENDENT'S STATEMENT ON THE PASSING OF TOM PAYZANT

Here's a pic I took of Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag Pathak, and Tayfun Sonmez when we met with Payzant and his colleagues at Boston Public School headquarters, during the years we worked with BPS, starting around 2003.

Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag Pathak and Tayfun Sonmez at Boston Public School headquarters

Here's a paper that came out of those meetings, describing the deliberations that ultimately led BPS to adopt a deferred acceptance algorithm design for it's school choice system.

• Abdulkadiroglu, Atila, Parag A. Pathak, Alvin E. Roth, and Tayfun Sonmez, The Boston Public School Match," American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, 95,2, May, 2005, 368-371.

Over the course of those years, I was privileged to watch Parag evolve from a super smart young grad student to being a leader in the design of school choice.

I'll post tomorrow about some of Parag's latest efforts to bring the work associated with the design and evaluation of school choice, and market design more generally, into the world of startup companies and big university labs.

Parag Pathak celebrated in Science News

Science News advises us that Parag Pathak is worth watching...

Parag Pathak uses data and algorithms to make public education fairer
After designing school choice systems, he’s studying student performance

(https://www.sciencenews.org/article/parag-pathak-sn-10-scientists-to-watch)


"If he could be granted one wish, he says he would design a school system from scratch. How, he asks, would you set up that system to be as equitable as possible?"

Parag Pathak interview on designing theories for the real world

Here's the introduction, click on the link to read more, or to hear the audio recording.

Designing theories for the real world
The AEA interviews 2018 John Bates Clark Medalist Parag Pathak.
by Chris Fleisher

He’s been hailed for pushing the boundaries of market design theory while making it practical to real-world situations.

Parag Pathak is this year’s winner of the John Bates Clark Medal. The 37-year-old MIT professor has worked to improve the assignment of students to public schools, notably in Boston, and also evaluated the impacts of school choice systems on student outcomes.

And while his theoretical work has won him widespread praise, he says his engineering-oriented approach to economics has helped him figure out which problems are of greatest practical importance.  

The AEA spoke with Pathak about his research, the influence of his mentor and former AEA president Al Roth, the criticisms against economic theorists, and the opportunities to shape public policy.

An edited transcript follows and the full-length interview can be heard by clicking on the media player..."

"Economics that works" in Bloomberg, celebrates Parag Pathak as a reply to some critics of economics

A Top Econ Prize for a Theory That Works
This economist figured out a better way to assign students to public schools.
By Noah Smith, May 15

Here are the opening lines:

"What do people think economic theorists do? The pundits who regularly criticize the profession, particularly in the pages of British magazines, seem to think that they spend all their time making abstruse, unrealistic theories about how free markets are the best of all possible worlds. And it's true that there are still a few economists out there who are essentially doing that. But a lot of theorists are doing something much more humble and practical work on small-bore theories that can be immediately applied to make the real world a little more efficient.

Parag Pathak is a theorist of this latter type. "

And here are the closing lines (what's in between is well worth reading too:)

"In an age when bashing economics is in vogue, the critics should pay attention to researchers like Pathak. Their theories are not as grandiose as the macroeconomic ideas that appear in the press — but they really work, and every day they improve people’s lives."

Parag Pathak wins the American Economic Association's Clark Medal

Here's the announcement, which describes Parag's work well:
Parag Pathak, Clark Medalist 2018

Parag Pathak

See my earlier posts involving Pathak here.

Congratulations Parag, on a well deserved award!
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Update:
Here's MIT's celebration of Parag:
Parag Pathak wins John Bates Clark Medal
MIT economist lauded for work on education, market-design mechanisms.
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here's an interview with Parag in the WSJ
Q&A: How an Economist Unlocked Hidden Truths About School Choice
Parag Pathak of MIT, winner of the John Bates Clark Medal for the nation’s most impressive economist under 40, says he 'fell into the topic'

Here's the Economist's coverage:
A market-design economist wins the John Bates Clark medal
Parag Pathak’s market designs have influenced the lives of 1m schoolchildren

Here's the local angle:
Corning native wins John Bates Clark Medal
"The American Economic Association recently announced its decision to award the Clark Medal to Dr. Parag Pathak, a Corning native and graduate of Corning-Painted Post High School."

MIT celebrates Parag Pathak

Game theory, in the real world: MIT economist Parag Pathak engineers practical solutions to complicated education problems

...
In 2003, New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, who wanted to revamp the school-choice system, approached a Harvard University professor named Alvin Roth about the problem. Roth had studied the method for matching medical students to their residencies; New York officials hoped something similar would work for their school system.

In turn, Roth asked Pathak, then a first-year PhD student in economics, to look into New York’s school-choice system: Was it a substantive and interesting problem? Pathak decided it was. A decade later, he is still producing new research on the topic, and in 2011 received tenure at MIT, in part because of his work in the area.

Moreover, that work has produced real-world results. Based on the research of Roth and his collaborators, New York City soon adopted what is known as a “deferred-acceptance algorithm” to assign places. Then, Roth’s group, now including economist Tayfun Sonmez, helped Boston review its choice system, leading the city to adopt a new method in 2005.

Using this method, schools first weigh all the students listing those schools as first-choice venues; then, the students who are rejected are essentially allowed to revise their lists, and the process repeats until every student has been matched with a school selection. The crucial difference is that students and families can simply pick the schools they most want to attend, in order.

“Our whole agenda is to try to make these systems strategy-proof,” says Pathak, now an associate professor of economics at MIT. “All these methods move in the direction of simplifying the system for students.” Complicated tactical guesses about popularity are moot; the entire process is based on the substantive merits of schools.

This positive outcome, Pathak says, is the fruit of “trying to think of economics as an engineering discipline,” in order to construct practical solutions to real-world problems.

Within economics, his growing area of specialization is known as “market design.” Beyond schools, market-design problems can be found in health care, financial markets, even the process of keyword searching on the Internet. “These allocation problems are everywhere,” says Pathak, who now also studies school-performance questions and has produced papers examining the quirks of housing markets.

What makes schools good?


"Pathak is the son of Nepalese parents who immigrated to the United States in the 1970s. He grew up in Corning, N.Y., where his father is a doctor and his mother a writer, before attending Harvard as an undergraduate. A direct line can be drawn between Pathak’s career and a class he took during his senior year at Harvard in the spring of 2002, team-taught by Roth and Paul Milgrom, two leaders in market design; Milgrom advised the Federal Communications Commission on the design of their broadcasting-spectrum auctions.

Pathak, an applied mathematics major who graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, says that class allowed him to recognize the possibility of linking game theory with practical problems. He soon enrolled in graduate school in economics at Harvard, received his PhD in 2007 and joined MIT in 2008.

Since then, Pathak’s research on school-choice issues has expanded in part because other places, including Chicago and much of England, have adopted systems similar to the ones he endorses — but due to their own initiative. “It’s as if they followed the discussion in Boston, although there is no evidence of it,” Pathak says. “It’s a great story of how markets evolve.” 

Although strategy-proof systems are gaining in popularity, many cities do not employ them. And yet Pathak believes that in addition to making the selection process simpler, the new systems can lead to a virtuous circle in assessing school quality: If administrators know what students’ real preferences are — as opposed to their tactics-based selections — they can examine what makes certain schools popular and try to institute those elements of good schools in other places, too.

“If we have programs that are oversubscribed, we should figure out why and consider replicating them,” Pathak says.

To be sure, it can be very difficult for people to assess whether or not schools are good in the first place, and for what reasons. In part because of this, Pathak’s interests have developed to include measuring school performance. Along with MIT economists Joshua Angrist and David Autor, he is a founding director of the School Effectiveness &; Inequality Institute at MIT, a new center that launched this year.

Angrist, Pathak and a variety of co-authors have published multiple studies about the performance of charter schools in Massachusetts, for instance, using random samples of students from schools’ admissions lotteries. While recognizing that this can be a “politically charged” issue, Pathak says their aim is simply to shine some empirical light on the matter. So far, the results they have found are nuanced: Some charter schools in urban areas such as Boston have dramatically improved student performance, but charter schools in other parts of Massachusetts have generally performed worse than their non-charter public counterparts.

The researchers are still trying to determine exactly why this is, and aim to expand their studies geographically. But the technical expertise of Pathak and Angrist — a pioneer in developing and refining “natural experiments” in economics — makes them confident they can rigorously equitably assess thorny questions about student performance.

“Through school assignment, we have an engine to measure a lot of things about education production,” Pathak says. And now, students have a vehicle for choosing schools on their merits.
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Let me add that, along with Atila Abdulkadiroglu and Neil Dorosin and yours truly, Parag continues to assist school districts in the design and implementation of school choice systems via the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice (IIPSC).

Market designers at the Milgrom/Nemmers Prize conference

A multitude of market designers. Here's a photo of

Bob Wilson, Paul Milgrom; and Parag Pathak in the near background: Faces to recognize, and names to conjure with.

Here's my pre-conference post: Paul Milgrom: Nemmer's Prize Lecture and Conference