Evaluating school choice in Chicago isn't simple

The effects of school choice don't just depend on what school you go to, but also on what other school you could have gone to...

Choice and Consequence: Assessing Mismatch at Chicago Exam Schools

Joshua D. Angrist, Parag A. Pathak, Román Andrés Zárate

NBER Working Paper No. 26137
Issued in August 2019
NBER Program(s):Economics of Education, Labor Studies, Public Economics 

The educational mismatch hypothesis asserts that students are hurt by affirmative action policies that place them in selective schools for which they wouldn't otherwise qualify. We evaluate mismatch in Chicago's selective public exam schools, which admit students using neighborhood-based diversity criteria as well as test scores. Regression discontinuity estimates for applicants favored by affirmative action indeed show no gains in reading and negative effects of exam school attendance on math scores. But these results are similar for more- and less-selective schools and for applicants unlikely to benefit from affirmative-action, a pattern inconsistent with mismatch. We show that Chicago exam school effects are explained by the schools attended by applicants who are not offered an exam school seat. Specifically, mismatch arises because exam school admission diverts many applicants from high-performing Noble Network charter schools, where they would have done well. Consistent with these findings, exam schools reduce Math scores for applicants applying from charter schools in another large urban district. Exam school applicants' previous achievement, race, and other characteristics that are sometimes said to mediate student-school matching play no role in this story.

School choice in Chicago and in D.C.

Here's some news about the new school choice system in Chicago.
Here's the press release from Chicago Public Schools:
Overwhelming Majority of CPS Students Receive Offers to Preferred School Choices Through GoCPS High School Application Process 
81 Percent of Students Will Receive Their First, Second or Third Choice; More Than 26,909 Incoming Freshmen Participated in GoCPS

And here's some background information from GoCPS
Round 1 high school offers were officially released to 8^th grade students and families by Chicago Public Schools (CPS) this afternoon via the new single application system—GoCPS.

Last spring, the Chicago Board of Education voted unanimously in favor of moving to a single application for all public high schools in the district. The decision was a historic shift that solved a major pain point for families and students who, until now, had to navigate more than 290 schools and program options.

New Schools for Chicago and Kids First Chicago have worked diligently alongside community partners, schools, students, parents, and district leaders to ensure successful implementation in the first year of GoCPS. Together with CPS, we are excited to highlight some results of the Round 1 application period:

• 93% of 8th graders successfully submitted applications to high school through the new GoCPS system.
• 92% of students who applied were matched to a school.
• 81% of students were matched to one of their top 3 choices.

Compared to other urban districts, these participation and match results in GoCPS’s first year are exceptional. For example, Denver Public Schools uses a similar system and their highest participation rate is 84% after many years of implementation.

With the right support and plan for continued improvement, Chicago could emerge as the leader not only in universal enrollment, but also in the adoption of modern systems and processes to better serve large, complex student populations.

More Information

---

OUR WORK TO SUPPORT CHILDREN, FAMILIES & THE DISTRICT

• Free enrollment support to families, communities, and schools via our Kids First Chicagoinitiative. 
• Ongoing parent focus groups on the GoCPS application process. Working in partnership with CPS, we have polled parents at each stage of the new enrollment process to gain insightful user feedback. 
• Work directly with the district in creating and distributing clearer and more effective information on school quality for parents and students as they prepare to apply to and accept their school options.

***********
Here's a story from D.C. that highlights that even a good school choice enrollment system doesn't create enough good schools to accommodate all the children, so that until we have enough good schools, school choice will be "playing the lottery" for some families. (But a good system allocates places more efficiently...)
The D.C. lottery is intended to give all kids a fair shot at a top school. But does it?

"Before the District implemented a lottery system using a single application in 2014, parents had to keep track of about 30 lottery deadlines and applications. Charter schools operated their own lotteries, and the traditional public school system ran separate lotteries for lower and upper grades. Chaos ensued. Parents often had to go to each school to submit a lottery application.

Adding to the confusion, charter schools informed parents of the lottery results at different times, which resulted in parents enrolling their children in the first school they heard back from and then, when they received a slot at a more desirable campus, enrolling them there, too.

When Scott Pearson took over the D.C. Public Charter School Board in 2012, he met with Kaya Henderson, who was chancellor of D.C. Public Schools, and they pushed for a unified lottery system. Denver, New Orleans and New York had already streamlined the process, so the technology and precedent were there.

By spring 2014, My School DC was ready for use. Schools aren’t required to enlist in the common lottery, and Pearson said it wasn’t an easy sell.

He worked on convincing the big charter networks, including KIPP and Democracy Prep, to participate, and most other schools followed.

“We had a target customer in mind, and it was a single mom living east of the river who was unbelievably burdened and often locked out of the ability to participate in school choice,” Pearson said.

The engineering behind My School DC is based on the algorithm that earned the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics for formulas that matched thousands of medical residents with hospitals, kidney donors with recipients and New York students with high schools.

Neil Dorosin, executive director of the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice, which develops lottery algorithms, said parents can’t cheat the system, and schools can’t sift through applicants to choose who they want.

Software assigns participants a number that sticks with them until they are matched with a school. Children then get to enroll in that school while remaining on the wait list for any school that a family ranked higher but did not get into.

“All the algorithm is doing is just implementing what that city’s rules are,” Dorosin said. “If you are looking for unfairness, it is not in the algorithm.”

"

School choice in Chicago: GoCPS

Here's an account from New Schools for Chicago:
Chicago Board of Education Approves the Single Application
"Yesterday, the Chicago Public Schools Board of Education voted unanimously in favor of moving to a single application for all public high schools in the city. This decision comes just after a recently released report from the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice (IIPSC) and New Schools for Chicago outlining the feedback and recommendations of parents from across the city. "

**********

And here's a news story from WTTW:

CPS Aims to Simplify High School Applications With New ‘GoCPS’ Model

"The Board of Education voted unanimously Wednesday to approve a new common application for students entering district high schools this fall. The new model, called “GoCPS,” is aimed at transparency and efficiency in that application process, according to CPS Chief Education Officer Janice Jackson.

“We cannot have a system that allows some people to feel that they can access with ease while others feel like it’s too complicated and choose to disengage," she said. "So moving forward, GoCPS allows us to bring more people into the fold, but it also allows us an opportunity to use technology to support them.”

In the current system, students can fill out multiple applications and receive offers from high schools.

With GoCPS, students will fil out a single application, rank their school choices and receive a maximum of two offers – one each from a selective and non-selective school. If they choose to reject those offers, students would go through the process a second time and receive new offers.

If those too are rejected, the student would be placed in their neighborhood school with the option to apply for a transfer within the first 20 days of the school year."

**********

And here's the IIPSC report: 

Parents Discuss their ChallengeswithPublic School Choice in Chicago

Prepared in February2017 by The Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice

Canice Prendergast on The Allocation of Food to Food Banks

Market design has arrived at Chicago, here's a nice paper presented at the recent NBER market design conference.:

The Allocation of Food to Food Banks 
Canice Prendergast∗ Preliminary Draft August 13, 2015

Abstract Food banks throughout the U.S. provide nutrition to the needy. Yet the food that is distributed through food banks often originates with donors - large manufacturers or distributors - far from those needy clients. How that food is distributed to food banks across the country is the subject of this essay. An informal description is given of an innovation introduced in 2005 by Feeding America (at the time the organization was called America’s Second Harvest) that would better allow food bank preferences to be reflected in their allocations. Specifically, Feeding America transitioned from the centralized allocation process, where they would make decisions based on their perception of food bank need, to one where local affiliates would bid for food items. To do so, Feeding America constructed a specialized constructed currency called “shares” that are used to bid on loads of donated food. The process by which this change came about, its necessary idiosyncrasies, and its outcomes are described.
***********
Scott Kominers pointed me to an earlier news article on the paper
What happens when America's Soviet-style food banks embrace free-market economics?

"Initially, there was plenty of resistance. As one food bank director told Canice Prendergast, an economist advising Feeding America, "I am a socialist. That's why I run a food bank. I don't believe in markets. I'm not saying I won't listen, but I am against this." But the Chicago economists managed to design a market that worked even for participants who did not believe in it."

School Choice and Education Reform at Brookings

The Brookings Institute hosts a session on School Choice and Education Reform, featuring Joel Klein, who was chancellor of New York City schools when the high school choice plan there was revamped.

"Large numbers of parents choose where their children are educated by moving to a school district or neighborhood that gives them access to good public schools, but school selection through residential choice is not an option for parents who are poor or unable to relocate. These parents are forced to take whatever is available to them through their local school district, and the schools that serve them do not have to worry about competition. While some districts are satisfied with this status quo, others have embraced policies that make school choice widely available and expose schools to the consequences of their popularity.

"On November 30, the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings will host a discussion exploring the critical role of school choice in the future of education reform. Senior Fellow and Brown Center Director Russ Whitehurst will preview the Education Choice and Competition Index – an interactive web application that will score large school districts based on thirteen categories of policy and practice – and announce the Index’s initial rankings of the 25 largest school districts in America. 

"Following his remarks, Joel Klein, the executive vice president of News Corporation and the former New York City Schools chancellor, will deliver a keynote address offering his reflections on the successes and challenges surrounding the expansion of public school choice in New York City"
***********

The Brookings Institute has also published a companion website and report: The Education Choice and Competition Index: Background and Results 2011. The report contains a ranking of school choice plans around the country.

One of the criteria is the "Assignment Mechanism

Our framework places considerable emphasis on the processes by which students are assigned to schools, treating it as a major category for evaluating choice and competition.  The antithesis of choice is an assignment mechanism based on residence, with little or no chance of parents being able to enroll their child in a school other than the one in their neighborhood. In contrast, the paragon of assignment systems is one in which students are assigned to schools through an application process in which parents express their preferences and those preferences are maximized.  We score districts based on where they stand with respect to these two poles. "

The report is here: The Education Choice and Competition Index: Background and Results 2011.

And it's conclusion (drumroll....) is

"The high score overall goes to New York City, with Chicago in second place.
Both received letter grades of B. The low score goes to Orange County, Florida,
which received a grade of  D. New York  performed  particularly  well in  its
assignment mechanism,  its provision of relevant performance data,  and  its
policies and practices for restructuring or closing unpopular schools.  Chicago, in
contrast to New York, has more alternative schools, a greater proportion of
school funding that is student-based, and superior web-based information and
displays to support school choice.  If the best characteristics of Chicago were
transferred to New York and vice versa, both would receive letter grades of A."

School Choice in Chicago

CPS Application Plan Moves Ahead

"The Chicago Board of Education approved a resolution Wednesday that would require all incoming 9th grade students to apply for entrance into the public school system next year and opens the door to an application process for all grades.

The resolution authorizes Chicago Public Schools officials to create a single application for the high school admissions process that could be introduced as early as the 2012-2013 school year and to develop a similar application for elementary school admissions.

Currently, students can enroll in their neighborhood school without applying. If they choose to go to a magnet, selective, charter or other school outside the neighborhood they live in, they must fill out separate applications.

It is not known if charter schools would be included on the application. District spokeswoman Marielle Sainvilus said the resolution is the first step in creating a common application and none of the specifics have been decided.

The resolution also calls for the district to contract with the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice, a non-profit school choice consultancy, to develop a “school choice matching system.” District officials did not elaborate on what the system would entail.

The current school application process can be dizzying and has spurred the creation of small consulting businesses to help parents navigate the system.

Jackson Potter, staff coordinator for the Chicago Teachers Union, said Tuesday that the resolution raises questions about how the district will ensure that all students, especially those that are homeless or have unstable situations, are able to enroll in school.

The Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice has worked with other urban districts, such as New York and Boston, to overhaul their admissions processes. In New York, all 8th grade students are required to fill out an application and rank up to 12 schools they would like to attend. The district then sorts them based on their preferences. In Boston, all students submit an application, listing the schools they would like to attend. The district then assigns students based on their choice and a number of other considerations, such as how close they live to a school and if a sibling is already enrolled."