More on NYC school choice lotteries

 Following my recent post on random numbers in the NYC school choice system(s) for high school and middle school, Amélie Marian writes to me from Rutgers, where she is a professor of computer science and a close observer of school choice.

She writes:

"I just read your blog post about the NYC school lottery system glitch and I found the comparison to plumbing extremely adequate to describe what has been happening with the NYC school admission system these past few years. 

...

"One of the most major recent change is that most admissions are now decided solely by lottery numbers; most schools don't rank students anymore***. The random number, originally designed as a tie-breaker, is now the main deciding factor. With this in mind, I, along with parent advocacy groups, pushed the DOE to provide students with their lottery numbers so that families could adjust their expectations and strategize their lists to avoid being unmatched; in one Manhattan district last year, 18% of students did not receive an offer to a school on their list. I have been working on explaining the system to parents, and on crowdsourcing data to help parents estimate their student's odds of admissions at various schools:

 * Part 1 on the random numbers: https://medium.com/p/bae7148e337d  

* Part 2 on their impacts on strategy: https://medium.com/p/42dd9a98b115

"*** MS admissions is purely lottery-based but geographically limited by district. HS admissions is city-wide. Some HS are allowed to screen students, but the screening is very coarse; this year 63% of students qualify in the top screening group, within the group admissions are decided by lottery numbers.

 "Of course, every modification in the system has had unintended consequences. The "glitch" reported by the NYPost was likely due to the DOE system assigning random numbers to applications and not to students, which was a reasonable approach as long as the numbers were not shared with families. And, as you pointed out in previous blog posts, the addition of waitlists has had repercussions as well. In fact, the DOE has changed the way it processes waitlists yearly since their inception, most likely to fix the problems that the previous iteration created. The latest version unfortunately introduces an incentive to strategize for waitlists in the original choice ranked list. "

Congratulations to Ed Glaeser, Scott Kominers, Mike Luca and Nikhil Naik (EI best paper award)

Congratulations to the authors of this fine paper, published in Economic Inquiry.

2018 Best EI Article Award Announced!

BIG DATA AND BIG CITIES: THE PROMISES AND 

LIMITATIONS OF IMPROVED MEASURES OF URBAN LIFE -- Volume 56, Issue 1, January 2018, Pages: 114-137
by Edward L. Glaeser, Scott Duke Kominers, Michael Luca, and Nikhil Naik

Abstract
"New, “big data” sources allow measurement of city characteristics and outcome variables at higher collection frequencies and more granular geographic scales than ever before. However, big data will not solve large urban social science questions on its own. Big urban data has the most value for the study of cities when it allows measurement of the previously opaque, or when it can be coupled with exogenous shocks to people or place. We describe a number of new urban data sources and illustrate how they can be used to improve the study and function of cities. We first show how Google Street View images can be used to predict income in New York City, suggesting that similar imagery data can be used to map wealth and poverty in previously unmeasured areas of the developing world. We then discuss how survey techniques can be improved to better measure willingness to pay for urban amenities. Finally, we explain how Internet data is being used to improve the quality of city services."


The paper's publication history says something about publishing, on line versus in print, at least in Economics.

Publication History

• Issue Online:27 November 2017
• Version of Record online:12 July 2016
• Manuscript accepted:23 February 2016
• Manuscript received:23 November 2015

Kidney dialysis on the California Ballot?

An Orange County Register op-ed discusses a likely referendum to control dialysis costs, and some better proposals...

How to help the 18,000 Californians who need kidney transplants
By KURT SCHULER and MARC JOFFE

"The Kidney Dialysis Patient Protection Act, which is likely to appear on the state’s November ballot, is a well-intentioned but inefficient way for California voters to help dialysis patients.  The initiative would try to restrain kidneMy dialysis costs by limiting the profit margins of dialysis corporations to 15 percent. The group has collected more than 450,000 signatures to put the initiative on the ballot and will soon submit them to election officials. A much better policy option, however, is to encourage more kidney donations, which save lives and get patients off dialysis once and for all..."

"Kurt Schuler, a kidney donor, lives in Virginia and belongs to the Organ Reform Group and Network. Marc Joffe is a senior policy analyst at Reason Foundation."


HT: Frank McCormick