Rank order voting in NY (and in xkcd)

Vox has the story:
New York City adopts ranked-choice voting, a major milestone for the reform
The biggest city in the US is joining a voting reform movement.

"New York City has become the latest — and most populous — city to adopt ranked-choice voting, a major milestone for voting reform efforts.

Voters in the city overwhelmingly approved Ballot Question 1 on Tuesday, enabling voters to begin using ranked-choice voting in local primary and special elections beginning in 2021.

New York City joins 20 other cities around the country, as well as multiple states, that have already started using this method in various elections. Maine, notably, implemented ranked-choice voting for the first time in a federal election in 2018.

Ranked-choice voting works much like its name suggests. Instead of picking just one candidate on the ballot, voters rank their top five in order of preference.

Once those votes are cast, they are counted in the following way, Lee Drutman explains:

Ranked-choice voting lets voters mark their first-choice candidate first, their second-choice candidate second, their third-choice candidate third, and so on. Each voter has only one vote but can indicate their backup choices: If one candidate has an outright majority of first-place rankings, that candidate wins, just like a traditional election.

But if no candidate has a majority in the first round, the candidate in last place is eliminated. Voters who had ranked that candidate first have their votes transferred to the candidate they ranked second. This process continues until a single candidate gathers a majority."

xkcd has the cartoon:

Previous posts:

Monday, September 30, 2019

Ranked-choice voting in Maine, and elsewhere

Friday, October 4, 2019

Eric Maskin on Rank Choice Voting (RCV) in Massachusetts and beyond

Neil Dorosin and school choice in Brooklyn, in the WSJ

Neil Dorosin was the director of high school operations for the NY Department of Education, back when Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag Pathak and I helped them design a school choice system for high school admissions. He later became the Pied Piper of school choice when he founded the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice, which led the effort to redesign choice in a number of American cities. He still lives in NYC, and he's also a dad. The WSJ has made him the poster boy (poster dad?) for this year's middle school choice in Brooklyn (which apparently has some recently introduced random elements):

School-Choice Expert Has Unique Take on Brooklyn District’s New Admissions System
Neil Dorosin’s daughter went through the middle-school process and landed at a charter; ‘It was a complicated decision’
By Leslie Brody, Sept. 21, 2019

"His family’s choice gives a glimpse into how families grapple with decisions as Mayor Bill de Blasio ’s administration experiments with ways to better integrate one of the nation’s most segregated school systems. The School Diversity Advisory Group, appointed by the mayor, cautioned last month that if the city public schools lose students to private schools or other options, “it will become even more difficult to create high-quality integrated schools that serve the interests of all students.”

Here's the WSJ's accompanying photo of Neil:

And here's a picture of the four of us modeling casual wear in Stockholm in 2012.

Parag Pathak, Al Roth, Atila Abdulkadiroglu, and Neil Dorosin

New York City considers bill to ban foie gras

Bill aims to ban sale of foie gras in New York restaurants over 'cruel' process
If bill passes, anyone violating the law could be liable to a $1,000 fine, up to a year in jail or both

"New York City council is considering outlawing the product – which derives from duck or goose and translates as “fatty liver” – which is a staple at many of its top restaurants.

"Critics of foie gras say the process is cruel because ducks and geese are overfed through a pipe which can expand the liver up to 10 times its normal size.

The proposed bill, which could be voted on in months, would ban the sale of foie gras made from birds that have " force fed and establishments from serving it.
...
"If New York introduces a ban it will put the city alongside California, which has a state-wide ban on the production and sale of foie gras. Chicago passed a ban in 2006, but it was overturned two years later.

"Whole Foods banned its sale in 1997 and Postmates ended deliveries of it last year.

"Outside the US, Britain, Israel and India all have bans on sale or production."
***********

For a different view, French law (Code rural) states
"Article L654-27-1
Créé par Loi n°2006-11 du 5 janvier 2006 - art. 74 JORF 6 janvier 2006
Le foie gras fait partie du patrimoine culturel et gastronomique protégé en France. On entend par foie gras, le foie d'un canard ou d'une oie spécialement engraissé par gavage."

Google translate: "Foie gras is part of the cultural and gastronomic heritage protected in France. By foie gras, the liver of a duck or a goose specially fattened by gavage."

Waitlists in NYC school choice--early reflections on yesterday's initial announcements

Yesterday the New York City Department of Education announced a change in the school choice assignment process--I gather that after one round of deferred acceptance, they will do something else, involving interim assignments  and wait lists.  (The original design included a subsequent round of deferred acceptance, after disseminating to unmatched students a list of schools with vacancies, and eliciting new preference lists for this second round.)
The details of the new plan for the second round aren't yet clear (at least to me).

Here's the press release from the city:

Mayor de Blasio, Chancellor Carranza Announce Easier and More Transparent Middle and High School Admissions Process
August 15, 2019
Families will now have one form and one deadline for middle and high school admissions

"“We are changing the middle and high school application processes so families don’t have to go through the gauntlet just to get a placement. There will be one application round and one deadline to make everyone’s lives easier.”

“We’ve heard from families and educators that they want a simpler, more transparent, and more accessible system of school choice, and today we’re taking a step forward,” said Schools Chancellor Richard A. Carranza. “This common-sense change will make a real difference for families across the five boroughs, and improve our middle and high school choice process for years to come.”

The DOE is eliminating the second application rounds for middle and high school. The main round application process and timeline will remain the same, with middle and high school applications opening in October with a December deadline. Students will receive their offer in March. Families can still appeal for travel, safety, or medical hardships; if families have any hardship, they will be able to access in-person support at Family Welcome Centers, rather than wait to participate in a second process. The waitlists will open after offers are released and will be a simpler, clearer process for families, increasing:

• Transparency:  By knowing their waitlist position, families have a better understanding of their chances of getting into a preferred school option in the event that seats become available.
• Ease: This is a shorter process that requires less paperwork. Rather than having to complete a second application and wait weeks—often into May or June—for a second decision or offer, families will complete one process, receive one offer, and receive any additional offers based on waitlist position.
• Consistency:  Families will now have one admissions system at all grade levels, with the changes to the middle and high school process making it more similar to the elementary school admissions process. Currently the elementary school process has one round, and the middle and high school processes have two rounds with different names; now, families will not need to learn a different process each time a child applies to a new school—allowing them to focus on school options and not process."

************
From the WSJ:

New York City Introduces Wait Lists for Students Unhappy With School Placements
City’s complex school-choice system, in which students hope to be assigned to a top pick, has long been daunting for many families
By Leslie Brody

"In recent years, applicants who didn’t like their middle school assignments—given in spring for entry the next September—would have to go through an appeals process. High school applicants who didn’t like their offers would have to try a second round of applications and then appeal if need be.

"Under the new Department of Education system for fall 2020, students will be placed on wait lists for each school listed higher on their applications than the schools they were admitted to. They will be informed of their positions on wait lists and may be offered seats if they open up."

*******************
I got some emails about this. Here's my reply to a reporter...

"at this point I’m only an observer of NYC schools from a distance—I haven’t been involved in advising them for over a decade, and even then I worked only on the high school match, not anything involving middle schools.

So I don’t know anything about the current plans besides what I’ve read today ...

So I don’t have comments so much as questions.

1. How is the NYCDOE going to handle the timing of moving waitlists?  Many vacancies don’t become visible until just before (or just after) the official start of school, which means that there could be some complications right around that time, for families and schools.
2. How will students on multiple waitlists be dealt with?  Suppose a student waitlisted at multiple schools is admitted off one of them in the summer—if he or she accepts that new assignment, do his/her other waitlist positions remain?  
1. (If other waitlists have to be given up, this could be a complicated decision whether to accept a somewhat preferred school, or wait for an even more preferred one…  If other waitlist positions can be maintained, then the process may move slowly, as some students accept for one waitlisted position, and then a better one when it becomes available, and maybe another…)
3. How long will a student have to consider whether to accept a given waitlist position?

As with many questions of market design, the devil is in the details…"

and I added this in replies to followup emails asking for my thoughts on waitlists:

"I’ve always been cautious about waitlists, because some of the questions I asked you just don’t have good answers.  There’s a tension between wanting waitlists to move early and fast—to make planning easy for families and schools, and avoid disruption of the first week(s) of school, and wanting to give students the best chance at the schools they like best…"

"my colleagues and I never recommended waitlists to nyc, back at the turn of the century.:)
We thought it was important to reduce the number of “unmatched” students who had to be assigned to a school over which they  hadn’t had an opportunity to express preferences. This is why we had a second stage of the matching algorithm, in which lists of schools with still available places were disseminated to students unmatched in the first round, so that they could express preferences over these.

Another question about the new system is, how will such students now be assigned?  E.g. they might be assigned to the closest school to their home that has unfilled places.  In what order?  i.e. after some students are assigned this way, some schools will no longer have unfilled places, and students will have to be assigned to other schools.  The things I read today didn’t address that issue, but I gather that these interim assignments of unmatched students, which will turn out to be final assignments for students whose waitlists don’t move enough, will be made without having the students express preferences.

Another question about the waitlists: how will they be ordered?  According to the school priority/preferences that were used in the first round of matching?  Or perhaps unmatched students will be given preference? (that might sound attractive but I think it would be a bad idea, because it might make it seem desirable to be unmatched after the first round, which would interfere with eliciting student preferences altogether….)

My point is not to try to guess what design decisions have been made, but rather that there are lots of important decisions that have to be made to have a working system, and the initial announcements and news reports don’t reveal these. And they will have consequences.  So I hope that the system has been carefully designed."

Surrogacy in NY...remains complicated

Surrogacy is a subject that brings out both sides of arguments about repugnant transactions. Vivian Wang does a great job of covering the story in the NY Times:

Surrogate Pregnancy Battle Pits Progressives Against Feminists
A bill to legalize paid surrogacy in New York passed the State Senate, but has found opposition from prominent feminists, including Gloria Steinem.

"The proposal to legalize surrogacy in New York was presented as an unequivocal progressive ideal, a remedy to a ban that burdens gay and infertile couples and stigmatizes women who cannot have children on their own.

"And yet, as the State Legislature hurtles toward the end of its first Democrat-led session in nearly a decade, the bill’s success is anything but certain.

"Long-serving female lawmakers have spoken out against it. Prominent feminists, including Gloria Steinem, have denounced it. Women’s rights scholars have argued that paid surrogacy turns women’s bodies into commodities and is coercive to poor women given the sizable payments it can bring.
...
"Surrogacy arrangements in the United States can cost anywhere from $20,000 to more than $200,000, according to a report from Columbia Law School.

Ms. Glick added, “It is pregnancy for a fee, and I find that commodification of women troubling.”

"But Senator Brad Hoylman, one of the bill’s sponsors, said the legislation showed “the importance of the L.G.B.T.Q. community to the State of New York.

“I think that’s a mark of progress for our community and a mark of progress for human rights in general,” said Mr. Hoylman, who is the state’s only openly gay senator and has two daughters who were born through surrogacy in California.
...
"Washington State and New Jersey legalized paid surrogacy last year, joining about a dozen other states. Many other states allow it under certain circumstances or have no laws on the topic, effectively permitting it.

"Between 1999 and 2014 in the United States, more than 18,400 infants were born through gestational surrogacy, where the carrier is not related to the fetus. Of those, 10,000 were born after 2010, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Yet the opposite has happened internationally. Surrogacy is illegal in most of Europe. And India — where so-called fertility tourism brought in $400 million each year — outlawed commercial surrogacy last year, over worries about exploitation."

Should NYC school choice diversify school assignments to match applicant demographics?

Some commentators are concerned that features closely correlated with race, for example, can be used in computerized algorithms that don't explicitly use race (see previous two posts here and here). But below is a proposal that sees using features correlated with race as an advantage for achieving diversity in NYC schools, with a view towards making admissions look as diverse as applications.

Here's a report from FastCompany:

How to fix segregation in NYC schools? Let students hack the algorithm
A Nobel Prize winner’s algorithm helps decide which students are placed in which New York schools. A team of students is trying to upgrade it.

"Many of the most desirable, highest-performing schools have a gross disparity between the racial breakdown of who applies versus who eventually attends those schools.

"Data acquired from the Department of Education by IntegrateNYC through a freedom of information request and provided to Fast Company bleakly demonstrates this point. For instance, while white students accounted for one quarter of students who applied in 2017 to Beacon High School, 42% of that Fall’s freshman class was white. At Eleanor Roosevelt High School, 16% of applicants that year were black, yet less than 1% of admitted students were black.

"Part of the problem is that the education children receive from kindergarten to eighth grade is not equal. Students who live in more affluent, largely white neighborhoods have better middle schools, which better prepare students for high school entrance exams. Students from wealthier families are also more likely to be able to afford private test prep for their students. But the city’s current admissions process does nothing to correct this.
...
"The solution students came up with was to create a new matchmaking algorithm that prioritizes factors highly correlated with race such as a student’s census tract, whether they receive free or reduced-price lunch, and whether English is their second language. Such an algorithm would boost disadvantaged students higher up in the matchmaking process, provided they have already passed a school’s screening process."
***********

In NYC, school principals have a lot of agency in determining the input of the school matching algorithm, in the form of preference lists for their schools. The city (i.e. the NYCDOE) provides guidelines for schools. So another approach to achieving more and different diversity would be to provide different guidelines and requirements for schools, that would change the inputs to the matching algorithm (the schools' rank order lists of students), rather than trying to modify the algorithm. My guess is that this would be a more effective, nuanced, and flexible approach.

Glitch in NYC high school admissions this year

An alert NYC parent points me to this account in the WSJ:

Top New York City School Makes Big Admissions Error
NYC Lab School had to rerank applicants after an error; no offers were rescinded
By Leslie Brody, Updated April 9

"A mistake in the city’s high-anxiety admissions process has led the New York City Department of Education to inform 144 students that they had erroneously been denied spots in a sought-after high school and that they have been admitted after all.
...
", a selective school, made an isolated error in ranking applicants and had to rerank them, a department spokesman said by email. He said no offers were being rescinded.
...
"The problem comes at a time of wrenching debate over the city’s admissions system for desirable schools and fair access to opportunity. Supporters say selective admissions enable strong students to attend rigorous schools. Chancellor Richard Carranza and many families have questioned the rationale for sorting students by academic ability in hundreds of public programs.

"Many parents also complain that the city’s method for matching students to schools lacks transparency, and many schools don’t publicize exactly how they rate students or the cutoff scores for admission.
...
"Mr. Goldberg, a member of District 2’s Community Education Council, an elected parent body, said the admissions mishap had ripple effects: Students mistakenly denied offers to Lab took spots at other high schools, edging out other students, who in turn ended up at choices lower on their preference lists. “You can’t really just have a surgical correction because everything is connected,” he said.

The department spokesman disputed that assertion, saying any one school had only a small number of students newly getting offers to Lab, and initial offers assumed there would be some attrition.

The department uses a computer algorithm to match students’ choices with schools’ rankings of applicants. Selective schools rank students by a mix of factors, such as course grades, state test scores and attendance records.

The problem at Lab came to light as some parents questioned why their children didn’t get spots, while peers with weaker academic records were admitted. The school’s principal didn’t respond to requests for comment.
...
"Last year, more than 3,300 students applied for 103 ninth-grade seats at Lab, by city data."
*****
Update: see also this story, which gives some clues to how the NYCDOE is planning to patch up school assignments in light of the error.
 APR. 10, 2019
WRONG ENVELOPE: STUDENTS ACCEPTED TO COVETED LAB SCHOOL AFTER REJECTION SNAFU
"Eric Goldberg, a parent and member of District 2’s Community Education Council, said he was notified Monday afternoon that his daughter was one of the students who had been accepted to Lab, her first choice, after she thought she hadn’t received that match and had already accepted an offer to another school.

"An education department employee called Goldberg to inform him of the admissions error, and that his daughter has until Friday to decide whether she’s going to stick with her original choice or opt for Lab. Goldberg said he has heard from at least 25 other families who received the same phone call that he did.

"He said he’s aware of students who were also newly accepted to Lab but had already accepted offers to Frank McCourt, School of the Future, and Baruch College Campus high schools next year.
“I think the larger implications are first around the transparency of the high school admissions process,” Goldberg said. “There’s limited information available about how schools rank and screen students, and without that transparency, it’s impossible for oversight to identify any issues, you know, with the process.”
**********

It's been at least a decade since I was up to date on operational developments in the NYC choice process, so I'm observing this from a distance. But, back in the day, the NYCDOE was surprisingly well staffed, so in trying to understand what's happening here, I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.

If I had been asked for advice (and I was not--but the natural people to ask for advice at this point would be  Parag Pathak and Atila Abdulkadiroglu, who were involved in the beginning, and are today the world's greatest authorities on school choice mechanisms), I might have recommended that they rerun the algorithm with the correct inputs, and see which students had been adversely affected by the error.  That number might not be too large, because in a big city like NYC, with hundreds of high school programs to apply to, but with applicants listing no more than a dozen, the "rejection chains" have a tendency to be short.   If that turned out to be the case, then calling the adversely affected families and giving them a chance to go where they should have might well be feasible, given the somewhat arbitrary nature of schools' capacity constraints.  The story above suggests that they may have done something like that.

But algorithms need inputs, and I hope that in years to come some procedures will be introduced to check the inputs before the outputs are announced.

Commercial surrogacy to be legalized in New York?

Some stories on the current proposals and the controversy involved.

From the NY Post:

Cuomo proposes law to end ban on surrogate moms

"Gov. Cuomo is proposing a new law that will lift the ban on surrogacy contracts — enabling New Yorkers for the first time to pay a woman to have a baby for them through in-vitro fertilization.

The ban has been in place since 1992.

“New York’s antiquated laws frankly are discriminatory against all couples struggling with fertility, same sex or otherwise” Cuomo said in a statement to The Post."

***********

From the National Catholic Register:

Cuomo Proposal Would Lift New York’s Ban on Surrogacy Contracts --Under current law, surrogacy contracts in the state are punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 or by a felony charge.

"Just days after expanding legal abortion up to the point of birth, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is proposing a law that would lift the ban on surrogacy contracts in the state of New York.

If passed, the law would allow New Yorkers to pay a woman to carry to term a child conceived through in vitro fertilization. It would not allow a surrogate mother to use her own eggs (and therefore be related biologically to the child).
...
"Cuomo’s proposal, called the Child-Parent Security Act, is included in the governor’s executive budget plan for the state and is something his administration has been considering since at least 2015, according to the Post.  
When Cuomo first floated the idea, Jennifer Lahl of The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, slammed surrogacy for treating women “like breeding animals.”
“We try to get a mother and a baby to bond,” Lahl told the Post in 2015. “We’re against ripping the baby from the mother the moment he leaves the womb. It’s not good for the child.”
Surrogacy laws vary widely throughout the United States. Besides New York, only three other states explicitly ban all surrogacy contracts: Nebraska, Michigan, and Arizona. Many other states have restrictions on surrogacy agreements and treat the surrogacy process similarly to adoption, requiring court appearances, home studies and a window for the birth mother to change her mind after the baby is born.
Surrogate mothers are typically paid between $30,000 and $50,000 for carrying a child to term, depending upon the state and the contract.  
...
"Kathleen Gallagher, the New York Catholic Conference director of pro-life activities, told the Post that she found the New York proposal “appalling.”
“This is the buying and selling of children and the exploitation of women. There are going to be poor women exploited by wealthy couples,” she said.
The Catholic Church denounced the practice of surrogacy in the 1987 document Donum Vitae, in which the Vatican stated that surrogacy “represents an objective failure to meet the obligations of maternal love,” calling it a “detriment” to the family and the dignity of the human person by divorcing the “physical, psychological and moral elements which constitute those families.”

High expectations for legalized marijuana in NY State next year

The NY Times has the story:

Cuomo Moves to Legalize Recreational Marijuana in New York Within Months

"Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced that he would push to legalize recreational marijuana next year, a move that could generate more than $1.7 billion in sales annually and put New York in line with several neighboring states.
....
"Ten other states and Washington, D.C., have legalized recreational marijuana, spending the new tax revenue on a range of initiatives, including schools and transportation."

Is legal commercial surrogacy coming to New York and Michigan?

New York and Michigan are two states in which  surrogacy is illegal, but the winds of change are blowing, with new legislation that would legalize it introduced, but not yet passed.  (My understanding is that in both states, surrogacy contracts are presently unenforceable, and there are criminal penalties for commercial contracts.)

Possible changes in New York's surrogacy law are discussed in the New York Law Journal:

Surrogacy in New York: Boon or Bane?
By Harriet Newman Cohen and Kristen E. Marinaccio | July 27, 2018

"New York, like many other states, enacted legislation prohibiting surrogacy agreements following the heartbreaking drama of Baby M. Three decades later, New York is one of just four states1 that still bans surrogacy agreements—however, that soon may change. This article will discuss the proposed legislation known as the “Child-Parent Security Act of 2017” (CPSA) which would lift the ban on surrogacy agreements in New York. It will explore the subtle and not so subtle benefits and burdens that may ensue if the legislation is passed.
...

"Baby M’s Influence on N.Y. Law Makers
In the mid-1980’s, before Baby M, many states including New York were considering enacting legislation to regulate surrogacy agreements.2 By early 1987, a bill was pending in the New York Legislature.3 That same year, just across state lines, in New Jersey, an emotional legal battle was being waged against a traditional surrogate, Mary Beth Whitehead, when she refused to surrender “Baby M” to the intended parents, Elizabeth and William Stern.4 The dramatic media coverage of the Baby M case, which included images of the police forcibly removing the baby from Ms. Whitehead’s arms, quickly caught the public’s attention.5 By June, 1987, facing fierce opposition from feminist and religious lobby groups, a seemingly antithetical coalition, the pending bill in New York was withdrawn.6

"In 1988, the New York State Task Force on Life and the Law unanimously concluded that New York should discourage traditional and gestational surrogacy agreements.7 In 1992, the New York State Legislature adopted that recommendation, declaring all surrogacy agreements void and unenforceable.8"
*************

In Michigan, two bills introduced (but not yet passed):

SENATE BILL No. 1082 September 5, 2018, Introduced by Senators WARREN, ANANICH, CONYERS and YOUNG and referred to the Committee on Families, Seniors and Human Services.      A bill to establish gestational surrogate parentage contracts;  to allow gestational surrogate parentage contracts for  compensation; to provide for a child conceived, gestated, and born  according to a gestational surrogate parentage contract; to  prescribe the duties of certain state departments; to provide for  penalties and remedies; and to repeal acts and parts of acts.

The companion SENATE BILL No. 1084 provides for an appropriate birth certificate with the intended parents as the parents.

Universal enrollment--embracing both district and charter schools--was once on the agenda in NYC

One cause of congestion in school choice systems is that if some students receive multiple offers of admissions, other students must wait for admission to a school they want, particularly if the system is so decentralized that a student is only discovered to have rejected an admissions offer after he or she doesn't show up for the first week of class. So a lot of the school choice work that Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag Pathak, Neil Dorosin and I have done through IIPSC is aimed at 'universal' enrollment systems, in which all schools take part.

This hasn't happened yet in NYC. So it is interesting that a lawsuit has brought to light emails which suggest that universal enrollment was as one point seriously considered by the city.

Chalkbeat has the story:

Mayor de Blasio almost proposed a universal enrollment system for district and charter schools, emails show  BY ALEX ZIMMERMAN

"Common — sometimes known as “universal” — enrollment systems exist in cities from Newark to Indianapolis. Backers of the approach argue it can simplify the often complex and time-intensive process required to apply to either district or charter schools in cities that allow parents to choose among both. Streamlining the process can put parents on equal footing instead of allowing those with more time, knowledge or resources from automatically getting a leg up
...
"Common enrollment systems have gained traction in recent years as some cities have embraced a “portfolio model” of schools, a new way of organizing school districts that has developed strong backing. This enrollment approach is central in New Orleans and Denver, which received input from Neil Dorosin, who created and once ran New York City’s high-school application system."

Safe injection sites in New York City? Learning from Canada...

The NY Times has two recent stories, one perhaps a reaction to the other.  First this:
De Blasio Moves to Bring Safe Injection Sites to New York City

"Mayor Bill de Blasio is championing a plan that would make New York City a pioneer in creating supervised injection sites for illegal drug users, part of a novel but contentious strategy to combat the epidemic of fatal overdoses caused by the use of heroin and other opioids.

"Safe injection sites have been considered successful in cities in Canadaand Europe, but do not yet exist in the United States. Leaders in San Francisco, Philadelphia and Seattle have declared their intention to create supervised sites, although none have yet done so because of daunting obstacles. Among them: The sites would seem to violate federal law.

"The endorsement of the strategy by New York, the largest city in the country, which last year saw 1,441 overdose deaths, may give the movement behind it impetus.

"For the sites to open, New York City must still clear some significant hurdles. At minimum, the plan calls for the support of several district attorneys, and, more critically, the State Department of Health, which answers to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. The city sent a letter on Thursday to the state, asserting its intention to open four injection centers.

 ...
"The most serious obstacle to the safe injection sites may be the federal government. A section of federal law known as the crack house statute makes it illegal to own, rent or operate a location for the purpose of unlawfully using a controlled substance.

The enforcement of the statute in the case of safe injection sites, however, would be up to the discretion of federal authorities. While it is unclear how the Trump Justice Department will respond to the city’s proposal, the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has taken a hard line on drug policy.

“We don’t believe a president who has routinely voiced concern about the national opioid epidemic will use finite federal law enforcement resources to prevent New York City from saving lives,” Eric F. Phillips, the mayor’s press secretary, said in a written statement.

Advocates for the sites point out that needle exchanges were considered illegal when they began, and they are now commonplace; in 2015, for example, when Mike Pence was governor of Indiana, he put aside his moral opposition to needle exchanges and allowed a program to stem the flood of H.I.V. cases."

************

And, today, this:

Opioid Crisis Compels New York to Look North for Answers
Supervised injection sites for heroin users have prevented overdose deaths in Canada. But is New York City ready for the scenes that come with them?

"As Mayor Bill de Blasio has come out in support of supervised injection centers in New York, his stance has been shaped by Canada’s lead.

The country has been a pioneer; its first supervised injection facility, where heroin can be used under supervision, opened in Vancouver in 2003. A decade of political and legal wrangling followed, culminating with the Canadian Supreme Court ruling in favor of the approach in 2011."

Update on Martin Van Buren high school in NYC

One goal of the school choice program in NYC is to allow students to avoid failing schools, to which no one can be assigned unless they specifically include it on their preference list.  The idea is that these schools will become smaller, which might allow them to be fixed.  This is what has happened with Martin Van Buren High School (named after the 8th President of the U.S.):

Martin Van Buren High School is off receivership, in “good standing:” elected officials
"The state Department of Education made the announcement that Van Buren High was also in good academic standing and would be removed from the Priority School List, which gives schools three years to improve in English Language Arts and mathematics. The state also requires schools to have a 60 percent graduation rate.

"From 2014-2015 Van Buren’s graduation rate was 55 percent, but as of the 2016-2017 school year, it had risen to 67 percent."
***********

See my previous posts on Van Buren HS:

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Martin Van Buren High School, in New York City

Monday, May 19, 2014

Credentials and degrees (and, I'm now almost a high school grad)

The welfare effects of centralized school choice in NYC, by Abdulkadiroglu, Agarwal and Pathak in the AER

The Abdulkadiroglu, Agarwal and Pathak paper on the effects of school choice in NYC has now come out in the December 2017 AER ( 107(12): 3635–3689).

They find substantial welfare effects in moving from NYC's old decentralized high school choice system (in which individual schools made uncoordinated acceptance decisions, so some students received multiple offers while others got none) to the stable matching system (using the deferred acceptance algorithm with single tie-breaking) now used. They don't find big gains from trying to reach a student optimal stable matching by revising the tie-breaking decisions.

The Welfare Effects of Coordinated Assignment:Evidence from the New York City High School Match
By Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Nikhil Agarwal, and Parag A. Pathak

"Coordinated  single-offer  school  assignment  systems  are  a  popular  education  reform.  We  show  that  uncoordinated  offers  in  NYC’s  school  assignment  mechanism  generated  mismatches.  One-third  of  applicants were unassigned after the main round and later administratively placed at less desirable schools. We evaluate the effects of the new coordinated mechanism based on deferred acceptance using estimated student preferences. The new mechanism achieves 80 per-cent of the possible gains from a no-choice neighborhood extreme to a utilitarian benchmark. Coordinating offers dominates the effects of further algorithm modifications. Students most likely to be previously administratively  assigned  experienced  the  largest  gains  in  welfare  and subsequent achievement."


Here's the ungated working paper

"Open algorithms" law proposed in New York City

Here is a bill that has been proposed (and sent to committee) by the New York City Council:
Automated processing of data for the purposes of targeting services, penalties, or policing to persons.
Title: A Local Law to amend the administrative code of the city of New York, in relation to automated processing of data for the purposes of targeting services, penalties, or policing to persons

Summary:

This bill would require agencies that use algorithms or other automated processing methods that target services, impose penalties, or police persons to publish the source code used for such processing. It would also require agencies to accept user-submitted data sets that can be processed by the agencies’ algorithms and provide the outputs to the user.

OCT 12 Drinks & Debate: How can NYC's high school admissions process be more fair? by Chalkbeat

Here's an invitation to a discussion of NYC's highschool admission system, and some of the admissions criteria of particular schools: OCT 12 Drinks & Debate: How can NYC's high school admissions process be more fair?  by Chalkbeat

New York City’s high school system is built on choice, but in reality many of the city’s low-income students of color are shut out of its top schools.

Now, the city is trying to figure out how to give more students a fair shot — and in the process make schools more diverse. Chalkbeat NY has been following this story closely, and now we’re inviting people from across the system to join us in a conversation about what can be done to improve this process.

Catch up with our reporters and connect with others who care about New York City schools at this solutions-oriented panel discussion and networking event. Your $17 ticket donation supports Chalkbeat, and drinks and appetizers are on us! (Two drink tickets for either beer or wine will be provided to guests over 21 years old.)

Happy hour will begin at 6 p.m., followed by a panel discussion at 6:45 with additional time for mingling once the panel wraps.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Panelists

- Amy Basile, Executive Director of High School Admissions
- Monica Disare, Chalkbeat NY reporter (moderator)
- Tanesha Grant, Harlem-based parent of a 9th grader at Urban Assembly School for the Performing Arts
- Jennifer Jennings, Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton who studied New York City's high school admissions process
- Holliday Senquiz, 9th grade student at Repertory Company High School for Theatre Arts
- Rhea Wong, Executive Director of Breakthrough NY- Lianna Wright, Executive Director of Enrollment Research and Policy

**************

Here's a related blog post, with some links, that gives the current system a pretty good review:The New York City High School Application Process: Is It Fair to Students? Can It Be Improved?

How (not) to measure school choice

Here's a post I just looked at from The National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College at Columbia (posted in April). It is about more and less illuminating ways to discuss how popular New York City high schools are, as reflected in how often they are on students' rank order lists, how many students they make offers to, and how many seats they have.

The Real Data for NYC High School Admissions

New York City school choice in the NY Times: Not all NYC high schools are good yet

The NY Times recently ran this story, largely critical of school choice in NYC:
The Broken Promises of Choice in New York City Schools
The city’s high school admissions process was supposed to give every student a real chance to attend
a good school. But 14 years in, it has not delivered.
By ELIZABETH A. HARRIS and FORD FESSENDEN MAY 5, 2017

Here's a paragraph that summarizes the main point:
"Ultimately, there just are not enough good schools to go around. And so it is a system in which some children win and others lose because of factors beyond their control — like where they live and how much money their families have."

The story follows several students at a  middle school in the Bronx:
"The Times spent months following the high school application process at Pelham Gardens, where families do not have the advantages that routinely open doors to the city’s best schools. Many families are new to the country, and most are poor."

Parag Pathak (who played a critical role in organizing the NYC high school match--see e.g. here and here) wrote a letter to the NY Times summarizing his reaction to the story. As it appears that the Times won't publish the letter, he gave me permission to reproduce it:

"May 5, 2017

In “The Broken Promises of Choice in New York City Schools,” Elizabeth Harris and Ford Fessenden miss a key point in describing the New York City High School choice system. The choice system does not create good schools.  It exists because there aren’t enough good schools.

I worked with NYC DOE to design the choice system described by authors.   By any objective measure, this system provided better access to schools than the one it replaced.  Without a comparison to the old system, Harris and Fessenden’s description of choice outcomes is misleading.  In the old system, half of applicants from Pelham Gardens (zip code 10469) were assigned to choices they did not rank; in 2003, that number drops to 23%. Under the new system, students from that neighborhood also travelled two miles further to schools they wanted.  Across the city, the new system allows more kids to go to schools they ranked and the benefits were largest for those most likely to be administratively assigned, like those in Pelham Gardens (see, http://economics.mit.edu/files/10633.   This is not to say the process is perfect and couldn’t be improved.  But it is foolish to expect the process to produce miracles, without changing the set of school options.

A broader premise of the article is that schools with highest test scores and graduation rates are indeed “the best.”  Our research, including on NYC’s exam schools (http://economics.mit.edu/files/9773), strongly suggests otherwise.  Naïve discussions of school quality and the role of school choice confuse efforts to improve school quality, where our attention should be devoted. 

Parag Pathak

Carlton Professor of Economics, MIT"

********************

For reference, here's the 2003 NY Times story that covered the school choice system when it was introduced:

REVISED ADMISSION FOR HIGH SCHOOLS

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORNOCT. 3, 2003 

Some unscreened NYC high schools would like to be able to choose the most interested students

Here's the story from WNYC: Theme High Schools Long to Find the Most Interested Applicants

The story talks about some of NYC's specialized high schools, like Food and Finance High School, which apparently aren't allowed to interview students, and worry that not all of the students who are assigned to them are as passionate about Food and Finance as they might be, and might object to all the dirty dishes that they'll have to wash at a cooking school.

Some of the teachers interviewed seem to think they might prefer an immediate acceptance algorithm that would assign them students who ranked them first on their preference lists.

I'm skeptical about that, but I can well imagine that it would indeed serve the school and some students well to make places for the passionate cooks. Allowing the school to interview and rank students would help with that.

HT: Jacob Leshno

New York City high school admissions, signaling 'demonstrated interest,' in The Atlantic

High school admissions in NYC may end with a (well designed) deferred acceptance algorithm, but the process starts long before students and some schools submit their preference lists. The Atlantic writes about how it is hard to form preferences over high schools, and to signal them to the schools through 'demonstrated interest'...

Broken Promise of New York City's High-School Admissions System
Its high-school fair is designed to give attendees a leg up in the application process—but that’s not always the case
(The URL is more informative than the headline:  http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/10/the-broken-promise-of-demonstrated-interest/503168/ )