Here's a modern view from Times Square. (Note the warning and font size in yellow at the bottom of the sign...)
Showing posts with label new york. Show all posts
Showing posts with label new york. Show all posts
Monday, March 24, 2025
Cannabis, NYC style (2025)
Wednesday, February 5, 2025
States' fights over abortions: New York moves to shield doctors from prosecution in states with abortion bans
Not all politics is Federal, even in these unprecedented times.
The NYT has the story:
"Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York signed a bill on Monday intended to give the state’s health care providers an extra layer of protection to shield them from prosecution in states that ban abortion.
"The newly signed law comes days after a New York doctor was indicted in Louisiana for prescribing and sending abortion pills to someone in the state. The charges represented an escalation in the fractious battle between mostly Republican-led states that ban abortion and Democratic-led states seeking to protect or expand abortion access.
"The law, which takes effect immediately, will allow health-care practitioners to avoid putting their names on prescriptions for medications used in abortions, and instead use the names of their medical practices.
"Ms. Hochul, a Democrat, said the goal was to better conceal the identity of providers in hopes of protecting them from criminal, civil or other legal action that anti-abortion states try to take against them.
...
"The legislation signed on Monday augments the state’s telemedicine abortion shield law, under which New York authorities are barred from cooperating with a prosecution or other action taken by another state against a New York abortion provider.
"New York is one of eight states to have adopted such laws. Sending the pills across state lines has become a key way to provide abortion access to women in states with bans.
"Since the Supreme Court overturned the national right to abortion in 2022, a dozen states have enacted near-total abortion bans, and others have imposed strict limits on when during a pregnancy an abortion is allowed.
"In the Louisiana case, Dr. Margaret Carpenter of New Paltz, N.Y., was charged last week, along with her medical practice, for “criminal abortion by means of abortion-inducing drugs.”
Wednesday, December 4, 2024
Adultery is no longer a crime in New York State.
Not only is jaywalking no longer a crime in New York City, the seldom-enforced criminal law against adultery in New York State has now been repealed.
My sense is that the jaywalking ban was rolled back in part because it was inequitably enforced, while the ban on adultery was so rarely brought to trial that it was simply obsolete.
NPR has the story:
Adultery is no longer illegal in New York, By Ayana Archie
"Adultery is no longer a crime in New York.
"Gov. Kathy Hochul on Friday signed off on repealing a 1907 law prohibiting the act.
"New York's penal law previously said that "a person is guilty of adultery when he engages in sexual intercourse with another person at a time when he has a living spouse, or the other person has a living spouse."
"It was considered a Class B misdemeanor, which carries a jail sentence of up to three months.
"The New York State Senate called the law "outdated."
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Interestingly, surveys indicate both that most Americans disapprove of adultery, but that the frequency of adultery is quite high. So it's the law that is outdated, not the act.
Also interesting is that adultery is still forbidden under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. This comes up in discussions about President Trump's nominee to be Secretary of Defense (where he will preside over servicemen and women who are forbidden to follow the examples of their Secretary and their Commander in Chief...)
Here's the NYT on that:
Pete Hegseth’s Mother Accused Her Son of Mistreating Women for Years by Sharon LaFraniere and Julie Tate
"Reports of his infidelity have focused attention on his character and leadership, particularly for a civilian overseeing the military, where active-duty service members can be subject to prosecution for adultery under the Uniform Code of Military Justice."
Thursday, November 28, 2024
Walk free in NYC, where jaywalking is no longer a crime
In NYC jaywalking is no longer a crime, or at least it won't be at the end of January, if I read the story correctly. But I'm guessing is that it will be hard to tell the difference.
Here's the story from the NYT:
Jaywalking Is a New York Tradition. Now It’s Legal, Too. New Yorkers can cross the street wherever they please without fear of a summons. By Emma G. Fitzsimmons, Oct. 29, 2024
"Telling New Yorkers, famously short of patience and time, not to cross the street mid-block did little to curb the illegal practice. Neither did the threat of fines: A violation carried a potential fine of up to $300, and hundreds of people received tickets each year.
"But after decades of mostly turning the other way, city officials finally decriminalized jaywalking, crossing against a traffic signal or outside a crosswalk. The City Council passed a bill last month to allow pedestrians to cross the street wherever they please, and it became law over the weekend, after Mayor Eric Adams ran out of his allotted time to decide whether to veto or sign the bill.
;;;
"About 200 people have died over the last five years while crossing streets in the middle of a block or against the light — about 34 percent of all pedestrian fatalities, according to city transportation officials.
"The law goes into effect in 120 days. Liz Garcia, a spokeswoman for the mayor, said in a statement that New Yorkers should still be cautious when crossing the street."
Friday, July 12, 2024
Growth pains for legal marijuana, in Germany and New York
Transitioning from a thriving black market for marijuana to a regulated legal market isn't so easy.
The Guardian has the story from Germany, where so far clubs, but not shops, have been legalized:
Cannabis legalisation hampered by most German of substances: red tape. Activists say the rollout of laws permitting recreational use of the drug has been hampered by a ‘bureaucratic monster’ by Deborah Cole
"Joints now mingle openly with pints among fans watching the European football championship in host nation Germany, which in the spring became the first big EU country to legally allow personal recreational use of cannabis.
"That is, provided the fan is over 18, only carrying a small amount of the narcotic, not smoking in the stands of a stadium and not in possession of more than three plants at their officially registered home.
...
"The hotly disputed law passed by Olaf Scholz’s three-party coalition, which took effect in April, legalised cultivating up to three plants for private consumption, the possession of 50g (1.75oz) of cannabis at one time at home and 25g in public.
...
"A key phase began on 1 July with the establishment of registered cannabis clubs, which proponents say are vital to assuring the smooth path towards legal weed and supplanting the underworld street trade.
...
"In order to thwart drug tourism, members must have lived in Germany for six months, sign up to a club for a minimum of three months and have a clean criminal record for narcotics.
"Clubs are dependent on fee-paying members to start operating but are not allowed to advertise, said Marten Knopke of the Cannabis Social Club Leipzig, thus robbing them of a key source of capital needed to rent offices and land for growing purposes. Consumption on club premises is also verboten.
“We are subject to more restrictions than any alcohol company,” Knopke said, echoing a frequent complaint from the cannabis scene about drinking, which kills more than 60,000 people in Germany each year. “The government has also made it really difficult for us to stand up to the hidden [narcotics] market.”
...
“There are no shops where you can buy, meaning they [foreign tourists]" will end up buying something on the underground market, which is very dangerous in Berlin,” because of contaminated drugs and the role of the mafia in the trade, he said."
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And here's the New York Times on New York:
The Real Problem With Legal Weed, By Charles Fain Lehman
"When New York legalized recreational marijuana in 2021, the future seemed bright. ...
"Three years later, things are not going to plan. Gov. Kathy Hochul has called New York’s legalization rollout “a disaster.” Mayor Eric Adams has spent months demanding that Albany fix the current system. “What happened?” The New Yorker recently asked in a feature on the collapse of the state’s marijuana “revolution.”
...
"There are around 140 recreational dispensaries operating statewide — about one for every 148,000 New Yorkers. Instead of shopping legally, New Yorkers tend to get their weed from the illegal shops that now blanket the state. Estimates suggest that there are anywhere from 2,000 to 8,000 in New York City alone, with uncounted more from Ithaca to Oneonta. Recent crackdowns have temporarily sealed more than 400 stores — only a small fraction of the total in the city.
"These shops undercut the legal stores, offering the same high at a fraction of the price. And they attract crime: There were 736 robbery complaints at unlicensed shops last year, according to the New York Police Department. Shootings are not uncommon, including the killing of a 36-year-old man captured on video last April.
"They also sell to teenagers, as The Times has reported. Teachers, prevention experts and pediatricians have raised the alarm about high schoolers smoking or vaping marijuana at school."
Thursday, June 6, 2024
Medical aid in dying debated in NY, extended in the Netherlands
Here are two related stories, one from the NYT about a debate on whether to allow medical aid in dying in New York State. The other is from Fox News, about the medically assisted death of a physically healthy young woman afflicted with a frightful psychiatric disorder.
In New York, there's a debate about whether to become the 11th state to legalize medical aid in dying. Some of the opponents worry about a slippery slope, leading to the Netherlands, where mental illnesses can qualify candidates for such aid.
Here's the NYT on the debate in NY:
Doctor-Assisted Death Is Legal in 10 States. Could New York Be No. 11? Activists have renewed attention on legislation related to the emotional issue of so-called medical aid in dying that has long languished in Albany.
"New York is one of 19 states where lawmakers are considering bills that would legalize medical aid in dying, a practice that is legal in 10 states and Washington, D.C.
"The bill in New York would allow mentally competent, terminally ill adults with no more than six months to live to request prescriptions from their doctors for life-ending medication. The patients would have to be able to ingest the medication on their own, and only the person seeking to die could request the prescription.
...
"Opponents worry that some patients might choose to end their lives based on an inaccurate prognosis or after being pressured to do so. And while the current bill is restricted to terminally ill people, they worry that lawmakers could expand eligibility for medical aid in dying after any initial legislation is passed."
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Here's Fox News on the Netherlands:
Physically healthy Dutch woman dies by assisted suicide at age 29. Zoraya ter Beek died by assisted suicide in the Netherlands last week. By Kendall Tietz Fox News, June 1, 2024
"29-year-old Zoraya ter Beek's life was terminated last week after waiting three years for final approval for her euthanasia, which is legal in the Netherlands if the patient is deemed to be experiencing "unbearable suffering with no prospect of improvement."
...
"she tried various things to treat her mental illness, including 33 rounds of electroconvulsive therapy, in which electric currents jolt the brain. But, after her last treatment in August 2020, her psychiatrist told her, "There’s nothing more we can do for you. It’s never going to get any better."
...
"My whole friends and my support system, we really did it together," she had told The Free Press. Ter Beek reportedly saw herself as an ambassador for the Dutch euthanasia program and believed there is proper protocol in place to prevent abuse of the system.
"We’ve had this law for more than 20 years," she had told the outlet. "There are really strict rules, and it’s really safe."
Wednesday, November 22, 2023
Political leadership in NYC: Mayor Eric Adams on antisemitism
Elected officials with executive responsibilities have difficult jobs. The Mayor of NYC has to make sure that garbage is collected, that potholes are filled, that corruption is contained. But political leaders also have an opportunity and a responsibility to address broader social problems, and from a distance I can appreciate that NYC Mayor Eric Adams is speaking out against hate, and not flinching from naming antisemitism as he sees it surge back into public view,
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Earlier (including the video of an earlier speech by Mayor Adams):
Sunday, October 15, 2023
Sunday, October 15, 2023
Hamas, Gaza and American universities: more letters, and two speeches
First, letters from the President of the Hebrew University to his counterparts at Harvard and Stanford:
The leadership of the Hebrew University in a strongly-worded, unequivocal response letter to the presidents of Harvard and Stanford universities, following their weak condemnation of Hamas: “You have failed us, not only as Israelis, who are subject to the imminent threat of being subject to genocide, but also as leaders of an academic institution, who expect their colleagues to present higher moral standards and more courage.”
In a strongly-worded, unequivocal response letter jointly signed by Prof. Asher Cohen, President of the Hebrew University, Prof. Tamir Sheafer, Rector of the Hebrew University, and Prof. Barak Medina, was dispatched to the Presidents of Harvard and Stanford Universities. This letter comes in the wake of what the Hebrew University officials perceive as shockingly feeble condemnations from these revered institutions in response to Hamas’ recent barbaric assault on Israel and the grievous loss of life among the southern residents.
In their letter addressed to the Presidents of Harvard and Stanford, the senior officials of the Hebrew University made it unequivocally clear that there is no room for “balance” or justification when it comes to such a heinous assault by Hamas on Israel. They expressed their deep disappointment in the messages emanating from these universities under their leadership, deeming them to fall far short of the minimum standards expected of moral leadership, courage, and a commitment to truth.
The response letter proceeds to recount the distressing sequence of events that transpired in the southern region of the country, beginning on October 7, 2023, highlighting the war crimes and atrocities committed by Hamas against innocent civilians. It concludes with the stern statement, “you have failed us, not only as Israelis, who are subject to the imminent threat of being subject to genocide, but also as leaders of an academic institution, who expect their colleagues to present higher moral standards, and more courage.”
To read the full letters: https://en.huji.ac.il/news/letters-presidents-harvard-university-and-stanford-university
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And here's a statement from some Yale faculty condemning Hamas but worrying about what comes next in Gaza:
Statement of Concerned Yale Faculty Regarding Crimes Against Humanity in Israel-Palestine
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Earlier:
Thursday, October 12, 2023
I've spent my adult life in and around universities, and in many ways and at many times universities have been at the forefront of progress. But for right now, as we brace ourselves for what may be coming, I'll let two elected political leaders, the Mayor of New York and the President of the United States, have the last words:
Thursday, September 7, 2023
Navigating NYC school choice: advice for families
Each year a new cohort of families has to navigate school choice in New York City. The city offers lots of resources for gathering information. One advantage of employing methods that make it safe to reveal true preference orders is that at least one aspect of the process is straightforward. (Of course, constructing a list of 12 schools out of the many available isn't easy.)
The NY Times offers a guide, which is full of information on how to go about gathering information with which to form preferences over schools:
Applying to N.Y.C. Public Schools Can Feel Daunting. Here’s What to Know. What matters when choosing a school? How should you compare options? And what’s the best strategy for getting your first choice? By Troy Closson, Sept. 5, 2023,
"What’s the best strategy when applying?
"You should rank schools and programs in order of your true preference. There is no better approach. Students are considered for a lower choice only if a higher ranked school does not have space.
"Admissions experts suggest creating a complete list of 12 schools with a balance of programs, priorities and demand per seat, which you can find on MySchools. Apply by the deadline; there is also no benefit to applying earlier"
HT: Parag Pathak
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Another resource:
Abdulkadiroglu, Atila , Parag A. Pathak, and Alvin E. Roth, "Strategy-proofness versus Efficiency in Matching with Indifferences: Redesigning the NYC High School Match,'' American Economic Review, 99, 5, Dec. 2009, pp1954-1978.
Sunday, January 1, 2023
New York State's Living Donor Support Act (LDSA, S. 1594) was signed by Governor Hochul on Dec. 29
Frank McCormick forwards this email:
From: Elaine Perlman
Sent: Thursday, December 29,
2022 5:44 PM
Subject: Governor Hochul Has Signed
the Living Donor Support Act!
"Hello!
I am delighted to inform you all that the New York State's Living Donor Support Act (LDSA, S. 1594) was signed by Governor Hochul today.
New York is becoming the best state for organ donation!
Waitlist Zero's Executive Director Josh Morrison wrote the legislation. State Senator Rivera from The Bronx and Assembly Member Gottfried from Manhattan sponsored the bill.
This spring, a team from the NKDO, NKF, DOVE, LiveOn New York, and Waitlist Zero lobbied for the bill's passage in Albany. Soon after, the LDSA was unanimously passed by both houses.
This new law creates the opportunity for New York's living donors to avoid going into debt to donate. Living donors will be reimbursed for their lost wages and out-of-pocket expenses. New York will be the first state in the country to offer this opportunity for donation to be cost neutral for donors.
Currently the Federal Government only reimburses when both the recipient and donor make less than 350% of the poverty line (around $47,000). The LDSA will reimburse the lost wages of donors who make up to $125,000 as well as the costs of donation (travel, childcare, etc).
In addition, the LDSA will ensure that all potential recipients will be educated about transplantation.
There are currently 8,569 people on New York's transplant wait lists, 7,234 of whom are awaiting a kidney. With the LDSA, we anticipate that far more New Yorkers will benefit from a living organ donation.
Here is the press release.
On Tuesday, January 3rd from 4-5pm ET, we will have a virtual celebration and toast the passage of the LDSA! Here is our zoom link.
Please share this good news far & wide!
Best,
Elaine
Director, Waitlist Zero "
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Because the National Living Donor Assistance Center (NLDAC) is a payer of last resort, the NY law will replace NLDAC for NY donors who do meet the means test, and so it will also allow the NLDAC budget to go further.
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Update: Frank McCormick writes to alert me that, like the authorization for NLDAC, the NY State law (https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2021/S1594) "requires that the Program shall be payer of last resort..." I hope that this doesn't turn into a competition to be the payer of last resort in a way that might cause some NY donors to fall between the cracks, and not be reimbursed either by NLDAC or the State of New York.
Saturday, November 26, 2022
Pay Transparency in New York City as the new law begins to take effect
Here's a report from Glassdoor Economic Research:
A First Glimpse into the Impact of Pay Transparency in New York City by Daniel Zhao
"On November 1, New York City’s pay transparency law went into effect, requiring job listings to include salary ranges. While the move represents an opportunity for job seekers to get greater pay transparency, high-profile errors as the new law went into effect have raised concerns about the efficacy of the law. With similar laws going into effect on January 1, 2023 in California and Washington State, we examined Glassdoor data to give an early view into how employers are grappling with pay transparency in New York City.
"Key Findings
"Pay ranges are being published on the majority of active job listings. 60 percent of job listings in New York City have employer-provided salaries as of November 12, and there are hints of a spillover effect to neighboring states.
"Ranges have widened significantly, but remain relatively narrow. The median width of salary ranges has widened from $10,000 in October to as wide as $20,000 so far in November. Less than 3 percent of daily active job listings in November have a salary range wider than $100,000.
"Professional services like Financial Services, Information Technology and Pharmaceutical & Biotechnology are the slowest to add pay ranges to their pay ranges. This may mean enforcing pay transparency will matter more in these higher-salary industries than in lower-wage industries."
Thursday, October 20, 2022
School choice consulting in New York City
It is a truth universally acknowledged that any stressful process in which affluent people participate must be in need of a consulting industry.
New York City's school choice processes are no exception:
The School-Admissions Whisperer Joyce Szuflita can assuage Brooklyn’s most anxious parents. By Caitlin Moscatello
"For the better part of two decades, Szuflita has demystified the process of public-school admissions for some of Brooklyn’s most overwhelmed, optimization-prone parents. ... Prekindergarten and elementary admission are largely based on where you live. But the game gets significantly more byzantine come middle school and more complex yet for high school, with its tier of “screened” institutions that have traditionally required students to test in, audition, or undergo other high-stress assessments. The process of getting into certain schools — and don’t kid yourself, everybody wants in — has long been a brutal one. Until it got slightly easier. And then brutal again. Or maybe some middle level of brutal? This is why parents need Szuflita.
...
"On September 29, schools chancellor David C. Banks abruptly announced that some of the city’s most prestigious middle and high schools would move away from an open lottery system and increase their use of merit-based admissions. The approach prioritizes students with an A average — children Banks calls “hardworking,” a loaded description in a city with one of the greatest wealth disparities in the country — and reverses the previous mayor’s strategy, which aimed to usher more lower-income students into New York’s top schools.
...
“The pendulum is swinging back a little bit,” Szuflita says of the Banks announcement, insisting that the changes are not as sweeping as they might seem. “The algorithm is still exactly the same.” Contrary to how some have read the news, the old lottery is still partially in use. The random number (a hexadecimal, actually) that each student is assigned works as a tiebreaker to get into screened high schools and can sometimes be a major factor when families submit their ranked choices of preferred schools.
"Clients often panic about their lottery numbers and want to change the ranking of their list, which Szuflita doesn’t recommend for anyone except those with exceptionally high or low numbers. Trying to outsmart the process, she says, is pure “magical thinking.” She’s constantly telling parents to trust the fairness of the city’s sorting algorithm, whose authors literally won the Nobel Prize, and rank in true preference order. (Or, as she tends to put it in emails: “RANK IN TRUE PREFERENCE ORDER!!!!!!!”) Despite this, clients sometimes persist, asking, How do we work the algorithm to our advantage? How do we strategize ranking our list? “That’s when I yell at people in the nicest way,” she says, because they don’t know what they’re talking about and they’re cutting into her time. “Like, ‘No, shut up. Shut up and listen to me. You’re not going to get everything you need to know.’” But most of her consults take two hours, she says, and don’t involve a lot of back-and-forth. “They tell me about their children and then what follows is usually a rapid-fire, two-hour information dump from me. There is not a lot of airing of concerns, because I already anticipate their concerns.” The download is intensely specific, tailored to each family and covering individual schools, principals, teachers, and facility upgrades few people are aware of. She verifies rumors (or sets the record straight) and knows things you can’t find on the internet."
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Related recent post:
Sunday, October 2, 2022
Sunday, October 2, 2022
Return to previous school assignment policies (in some respects) under New York City's new mayor
In NYC, the pendulum is still swinging between inclusive admissions as measured by demographics and determined by lottery, and meritocratic admissions as measured by tests and grades.
The NYT has the story:
In a Reversal, New York City Tightens Admissions to Some Top Schools. The city loosened selection criteria during the pandemic, policies some parents protested as unfair and others hoped would reduce racial disparities. By Troy Closson
"New York City’s selective middle schools can once again use grades to choose which students to admit, the school chancellor, David C. Banks, announced on Thursday, rolling back a pandemic-era moratorium that had opened the doors of some of the city’s most elite schools to more low-income students.
...
"New York City has used selective admissions for public schools more than any school district in the country. About a third of the city’s 900 or so middle and high schools had some kind of admissions requirement before the pandemic disrupted many measures to sort students by academic performance.
...
"Selective high schools will also be able to prioritize top-performing students.
"The sweeping move will end the random lottery for middle schools, a major shift after the previous administration ended the use of grades and test scores two years ago. At the city’s competitive high schools, where changes widened the pool of eligible applicants, priority for seats will be limited to top students whose grades are an A average.
...
"The announcement came as New York City’s education officials are confronting multiple crises in the wake of the pandemic, complicating a dilemma that has bedeviled previous administrations: how to create more equitable schools, while trying to prevent middle-class families from abandoning the system.
"State standardized test scores released Wednesday showed that many students fell behind, particularly in math, and that many Hispanic, Black and low-income students continue to lag far behind their white, Asian and higher-income peers. At the same time, the district is bleeding students: Roughly 120,000 families have left traditional public schools over the past five years. Some have left the system, and others have gone to charter schools."
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And here's the Washington Post:
New York City, embracing merit, rolls back diversity plan for schools By Laura Meckler
"New York City schools announced Thursday they would allow middle schools to consider academics in admitting students to some of the city’s most sought-after programs, unraveling pandemic-era rules aimed at injecting racial and economic diversity into a segregated system.
"High schools would also rely more heavily on merit and less on the luck of a lottery under the new plan, reversing the previous administration’s direction as a new mayor takes command of the nation’s largest school system.
...
"In San Francisco, admissions into the elite Lowell High School were converted from merit-based into a lottery system. As in New York, though, the change was reversed — in this case, after several school board members were recalled, in part over this issue.
"In Northern Virginia, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology also shifted from an admissions test to a “holistic review” that considers several factors, a move that is being challenged in court and has faced resistance from the Republican governor and his administration.
...
"In New York, the debate is particularly fiery because students are required to apply to middle and high school, and before the pandemic, about a third of the city’s 900 middle and high schools included requirements for admission — such as grades, test scores, attendance and behavior records.
...
"That system was largely converted into a lottery under Mayor Bill de Blasio.
"For high school, applicants were put into tiers based on their grades. But the top tier included about 60 percent of all students, who had the first crack at the top schools. Competitive schools drew acceptances randomly from this group.
...
"Now, under the new system announced Thursday, it will be harder to get into the top tier, though once in that group, it will still be a lottery. To get into the top tier, students must be in the top 15 percent of their school or of the city overall, and they must have at least a 90 percent on grades.
"Test scores, which had been used for years but also criticized as biased, will not be considered. Banks said exam scores are a flawed measure but grades are “still a very solid indicator of how you are showing up as a student,” even for students who face hardships at home."
Friday, August 5, 2022
Busing for schools in Boston and NYC, by Angrist, Gray-Lobe, Idoux & Pathak
One of the spinoffs of the design of school choice systems in Boston, NYC and elsewhere is that it has opened up the empirical study of school effectiveness, by allowing economists to use some randomness in the assignments while controlling for family preferences to distinguish school effects from student selection. It has turned out that it's hard to change test scores through school assignments, and neighborhoods remain important. But integration responds to voluntary choice, although the paper below doesn't find effects on college attendance after controlling for the selection of travel by students.
Still Worth the Trip? School Busing Effects in Boston and New York by Joshua Angrist, Guthrie Gray-Lobe, Clemence M. Idoux & Parag A. Pathak, NBER WORKING PAPER 30308 DOI 10.3386/w30308 July 2022
Abstract: "School assignment in Boston and New York City came to national attention in the 1970s as courts across the country tried to integrate schools. Today, district-wide choice allows Boston and New York students to enroll far from home, perhaps enhancing integration. Urban school transportation is increasingly costly, however, and has unclear integration and education consequences. We estimate the causal effects of non-neighborhood school enrollment and school travel on integration, achievement, and college enrollment using an identification strategy that exploits partly-random assignment in the Boston and New York school matches. Instrumental variables estimates suggest distance and travel boost integration for those who choose to travel, but have little or no effect on test scores and college attendance. We argue that small effects on educational outcomes reflect modest effects of distance and travel on school quality as measured by value-added."
"School transportation expenditures today are driven in part by the fact that many large urban school districts allow families to choose schools district-wide, lengthening school commutes for some. District-wide choice is a feature of school assignment in Boston, Chicago, Denver, Indianapolis,Newark, New Orleans, Tulsa, and Washington, DC, to name a few. In choice districts, seats at over-subscribed schools are typically allocated by algorithms that reflect family preferences in the form of a rank-order list and a limited set of school priorities. ... Choice in large urban districts is appealing because choice systems potentially decouple school assignment from underlying residential segregation. Moreover, where school quality is unevenly distributed over neighborhoods, district-wide choice affords all students a shot at schoolsviewed as high-quality.
"This paper asks whether school travel in the modern choice paradigm is working as hoped, boosting integration and learning, especially for minority students. Our investigation focuses on Boston and New York, two cities of special interest because of their high transportation costs and because they’ve long been battlegrounds in the fight over school integration. We estimate the effects of non-neighborhood school enrollment for students for whom school travel is facilitated by school choice. In both cities, students who opt for non-neighborhood schooling have higher test scores and are more likely to go to college than those who travel less. But these estimates may reflect selection bias arising from the fact that more motivated or better-off families are more likely to travel.
"We solve the problem of selection bias using the conditional random assignment to schools embedded in Boston and New York’s school matching algorithms. A given student may be offered a seat at a school in his or neighborhood, or a seat farther away. Conditional on an applicant’s preferences and school priorities, modern choice algorithms randomize seat assignment, thereby manipulating distance and travel independently of potential outcomes.
...
" A parsimonious explanation for our findings, therefore, is that travel facilitates integration but does not translate into large enough changes in value-added to change education outcomes much."
Friday, June 24, 2022
New York City school choice: increased use of lotteries in the news
The recent emphasis on lotteries in NYC school choice is discussed in the NY Times:
N.Y.C. Tried to Fix High School Admissions. Some Parents Are Furious. In an attempt to democratize schools, the city is focusing less on grades, attendance and test scores. Instead, it relies heavily on a lottery. By Ginia Bellafante
"Some back story: Apart from what are known as the specialized high schools — hypercompetitive institutions like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science that, controversially, admit students on the basis of a single standardized test — the city gives eighth graders the option of applying to 160 screened high schools and programs that have their own criteria.
"Whether a student qualifies for one of these selective schools has typically depended on an opaque combination of grades, test scores (different from the ones used for the specialized high schools), essays, art portfolios and other work. The next step has students rank their preferences in descending order on a scale of one to 12, after which they are thrown into a lottery. A prizewinning algorithm developed to match medical students to residency programs then determines where a student is placed.
"Among high-achieving families in Manhattan, brownstone Brooklyn and many parts of Queens, the goal is not a spot in just any of the 160 schools but admission to eight or nine that are especially competitive, prestigious and largely dominated by white and Asian families. What has caused such ire in the current admissions cycle is that many parents discovered that their children — students with grade-point averages in the high 90s, for instance — were admitted to none of their ranked choices. Instead they would be funneled to schools they knew little about.
...
"The state exams, usually a determining factor in high school placements, had been abandoned during the pandemic. So, too, were attendance records. Students with grades in the mid-80s were now bundled with those who had much higher averages, meaning that an eighth-grader with an academically stellar record but a poor lottery number could easily lose out to a merely very good student with a great lottery assignation."
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Previous related posts:
Monday, April 18, 2022
Friday, April 29, 2022
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 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.
Monday, April 18, 2022
NYC plugs a school choice leak (of random numbers)
Some time ago, Esther Duflo likened market design to plumbing. I think she had in mind construction plumbing, making sure the pipes are all tight. But there's also maintenance (and home repair) plumbing, which involves plugging new leaks. Parag Pathak alerts me to such an issue in New York City's school choice system.
The NY Post has the story:
Parents uncover major glitch in NYC school lottery system By Susan Edelman
"A Manhattan mom discovered an embarrassing glitch in the city Department of Education lottery system used to match students with middle and high schools.
"When NYC students filled out their online applications for 2022-23, each kid automatically received a long string of random numbers from 0 to 9 mixed with lower-case letters from a to f.
"The random numbers are used to determine the order in which students are matched to programs.
"Lottery numbers starting with 0 are most likely to land students in a school at the top of their list – 8th graders can rank up to 12 preferred high schools.
...
"But as one 8th-grader’s mom figured out, if students canceled and re-started their applications – as the DOE permitted – they received a different lottery number each time. The loophole allowed users to potentially game the system by simply re-applying until a favorable lottery number popped up.
"Parent leaders alerted the DOE’s Chief Enrollment Officer, Sarah Kleinhandler, who was unaware of the snafu and promised to look into it. She did.
...
"The DOE said it was able to identify 163 students who received new lottery numbers – less than 1 percent of applicants. They included 121 students out of 71,000 high-school applicants, and 42 students out of 58,000 middle school applicants, a spokesman said.
"Students who received new lottery numbers after restarting their applications will get their first lottery numbers back, a spokeswoman told The Post."
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Speaking of home repairs, here's an earlier post about some self inflicted problems:
Tuesday, May 12, 2020
Thursday, April 29, 2021
NYC to stop prosecuting prostitutes (but will continue to prosecute their customers)
NYC will stop prosecuting prostitution, but will continue to prosecute the customers of prostitutes, and pimps.
The NY Times has the story:
Manhattan to Stop Prosecuting Prostitution, Part of Nationwide Shift. By Jonah E. Bromwich
"The Manhattan district attorney’s office announced Wednesday that it would no longer prosecute prostitution and unlicensed massage, putting the weight of one of the most high-profile law enforcement offices in the United States behind the growing movement to change the criminal justice system’s approach to sex work.
"The district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., asked a judge on Wednesday morning to dismiss 914 open cases involving prostitution and unlicensed massage, along with 5,080 cases in which the charge was loitering for the purposes of prostitution.
"The law that made the latter charge a crime, which had become known as the “walking while trans” law, was repealed by New York State in February.
...
"Criminally prosecuting prostitution does not make us safer, and too often, achieves the opposite result by further marginalizing vulnerable New Yorkers,” Mr. Vance said in a statement.
"The office will continue to prosecute other crimes related to prostitution, including patronizing sex workers, promoting prostitution and sex trafficking, and said that its policy would not stop it from bringing other charges that stem from prostitution-related arrests.
"That means, in effect, that the office will continue to prosecute pimps and sex traffickers, as well as people who pay for sex, continuing to fight those who exploit or otherwise profit from prostitution without punishing the people who for decades have borne the brunt of law enforcement’s attention."
Wednesday, April 28, 2021
Selective NYC high schools aren't as hard to get into as is sometimes reported: Sam Abrams in the Columbia Journalism Review
In the Columbia Journalism Review, Sam Abrams explains how data from NYC's deferred acceptance algorithm for assigning students to schools is often misunderstood in the press, when it comes to reporting on how selective the schools are.
Getting Education Data Right: The Case of High School Admissions By Samuel E. Abrams
"The trouble with the story about high school admissions begins with official data. The admissions numbers in the annual high school directories published by New York City’s Department of Education are indeed alarming. Eight consecutive schools in the 2019 directory, for example, exhibited daunting odds: Bard High School Early College, 30 applicants per seat; Baruch College Campus High School, 44; Beacon High School, 19; Business of Sports School (BOSS), 13; Central Park East High School, 37; Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School, 14; City College Academy of the Arts, 22; and The Clinton School, 21. These odds translate into acceptance rates ranging from 2.3 percent, in the case of Baruch, to 7.7 percent, in the case of BOSS.
"But these students are not applicants in the conventional sense. They are students who rank a school by order of preference as one of up to 12 with which they would like to match. This process—introduced in 2004 and derived from the National Resident Matching Program for doctors introduced in 1952—employs an algorithm allowing only one match. Accordingly, if every eighth-grader in New York City exercised his or her right to list 12 schools, each school, on average, could in turn accept only one of 12 students, or 8.3 percent of applicants.
...
"I began encountering this reporting problem in 2005, when the Times published an article on then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plans to create several new high schools to address the surplus demand for seats in exam and screened schools. The Times reported that Beacon had 6,000 applicants for 250 seats the previous year, meaning an acceptance rate of 4.2 percent.
"As a teacher at Beacon at the time, I knew the admissions process from the inside and emailed a correction to the paper: 6,000 students ranked Beacon as one of up to 12 schools in which they were interested; about 1,800 students submitted the requisite portfolio of their best work and visited the school for the mandated interview; and approximately 500 offers were made to fill 250 seats. This meant an acceptance rate of about 28 percent if all 1,800 applicants ranked Beacon first, which is highly improbable, given that approximately 50 percent of applicants to Beacon today who fulfill application requirements rank the school first. But that correction went nowhere, and I resigned myself to explaining the numbers to anxious parents fretting that their children had no chance of getting into Beacon given what they had read in the Times.
...
"Following the 2017 article about 10 of the city’s high schools being more selective than Yale, I wrote a letter to the Times. As that letter went unacknowledged and as the newspaper did not run another letter to elucidate the process, I published a critique on the Web site of a research center I run at Teachers College, Columbia University. That critique led to an article published by Chalkbeat and another by Phi Delta Kappan, which interviewed Alvin Roth, a professor at Stanford who shared the Nobel Prize in economics in 2012 for work decades earlier on market design and who, with two other economists, Atila Abdulkadiroglu and Parag Pathak, developed the algorithm used by the DOE. Roth explained that the Times had indeed greatly exaggerated the number of applicants because the algorithm pulled students from the applicant pool once they were matched. “If I applied to you as my seventh choice, and I got accepted by my first choice, I wasn’t rejected by you,” Roth said. “You never saw me.”
"With a matching algorithm, the closest one can truly get to an acceptance rate is a match rate through adding the number of students who matched with a particular school to the number of students who matched with a school they ranked lower than that school and then dividing the number of matches by that sum.
...
"What is nevertheless certain is that the algorithm developed by Roth with Abdulkadiroglu and Pathak has significantly streamlined the enrollment process in New York. The three economists developed the algorithm, they wrote in a 2005 article published in the American Economic Review, to “relieve the congestion of the previous offer/acceptance/wait-list process” that conferred “some students multiple offers” and “multiple students … no offers.:
Tuesday, February 16, 2021
New York State's new surrogacy law takes effect
NBC has the story:
No Longer an Outlier: New York Ends Commercial Surrogacy Ban. New York's longstanding ban on commercial surrogate pregnancy is about to end nine years after a bill to rescind it was first introduced. By David Crary
"Instead of being a national outlier, New York will become a leader, according to experts on surrogacy . They say the new law, passed in April and taking effect on Monday, has a surrogates’ bill of rights providing the nation’s strongest protections for women serving as surrogates.
"Among the provisions: the right to independent legal representation, a guarantee of comprehensive medical coverage, and the right to make their own health care decisions, including whether to terminate or continue a pregnancy.
“We went to California because it had the best laws,” Hoylman said. “Now New York has the best law. We think it’s a model for other states.”
"The new law allows gestational surrogacy on a commercial basis, involving a surrogate who is not genetically related to the embryo. An egg is removed from the intended mother, fertilized with sperm and then transferred to a surrogate — in contrast to so-called traditional surrogacy that involves an egg from the surrogate. The gestational option is welcomed by many LGBTQ people who want to be parents, as well as by couples struggling with infertility.
"With the change in New York, surrogacy advocates say only Louisiana and Michigan have laws explicitly prohibiting paid gestational surrogacy. Nebraska has no explicit ban, but a statute there says paid surrogacy contracts are unenforceable.
...
"Gestational surrogacy routinely costs between $100,000 and $150,000. Hoylman declined to estimate the total costs incurred by him and Sigal but said, “It was worth every penny.”
"Among the standard costs are fees for lawyers and the surrogacy agency, the cost of in vitro fertilization, plus compensation and health insurance for the surrogate. Compensation rates vary widely — generally $25,000 to $50,000.
"The first bill seeking to repeal the New York ban was introduced by Assemblywoman Amy Paulin in 2012, the year Hoylman was elected to the Senate. It floundered for years in the face of staunch opposition by the Roman Catholic Church and some feminists, who argued that paid surrogacy led to the exploitation of women.
“Under this bill, women in economic need become commercialized vessels for rent, and the fetuses they carry become the property of others,” renowned feminist Gloria Steinem wrote to lawmakers in 2019.
"New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who earlier in his tenure pushed hard to legalize same-sex marriage, argued in response that the surrogacy ban was “based in fear, not love” and was especially harmful to same-sex couples."
HT: Nick Arnosti.
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Here's a related story from the NY Times:
Meet the Women Who Become Surrogates. New York State will now allow gestational surrogates to carry babies for other parents. Here’s why they do it. By David Dodge
"In 1995, Lisa Wippler, having recently retired from the Marines, moved with her husband and two young sons to Oceanside, Calif., and was contemplating her next chapter in life. The answer came while lying in bed one night, reading an article about infertility.
...
"Last year, Ms. Wippler — by this point a three-time surrogate herself — was part of a delegation of surrogacy advocates who traveled to Albany, where she had the opportunity to share her story with lawmakers considering whether to legalize the practice in New York State.
...
"In her advocacy work, Ms. Wippler said, she has been befuddled to hear the arguments put forward by opponents — some of whom contend the surrogacy industry preys on poor and vulnerable women.
“I’m a retired Marine,” she said. “I can guarantee you no one coerced me.”
...
"A surrogate’s compensation varies by a number of factors, including geographic location and whether she is a first time or experienced carrier. At the Los Angeles-based agency where Ms. Wippler now works as the director of surrogate admission, the range falls between $30,000 and $60,000, which is typical across the industry in the United States, she said."
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Earlier post:
Wednesday, April 22, 2020
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