School choice in Tel Aviv takes friendships into account

From the paper:

The Friends Factor: How Students’ Social Networks Affect Their Academic Achievement and Well-Being?, September 2012, by Victor Lavy and Edith Sand.


Abstract
"In this paper, we estimate the influence of social relationships on educational attainment and social outcomes of students in school. More specifically, we investigate how losing different types of social relationships during the transition from elementary to middle school affect students' academic progress and general well-being. We use social relationships identified by the students themselves in elementary school, as part of a unique aspect of the Tel Aviv school application process which allows sixth-grade students to designate their middle schools of choice and to list up to eight friends with whom they wish to attend that school. The lists create natural “friendship hierarchies” that we exploit in our analysis. We designate the three categories of requited and unrequited friendships that stem from these lists as follows: (1) reciprocal friends (students who list one another); and for those whose friendship requests did not match: (2) followers (those who listed fellow students as friends but were not listed as friends by these same fellow students) and (3) non-reciprocal friends (parallel to followers). Following students from elementary to middle school enables us to overcome potential selection bias by using pupil fixed-effect methodology. Our results suggest that the presence of reciprocal friends and followers in class has a positive and significant effect on test scores in English, math, and Hebrew. However, the number of friends in the social network beyond the first circle of reciprocal friends has no effect at all on students. In addition, the presence of non-reciprocal friends in class has a negative effect on a student’s learning outcomes. We find that these effects have interesting patterns of heterogeneity by gender, ability, and age of students. In addition, we find that these various types of friendships have positive effects on other measures of well-being, including social and overall happiness in school, time allocated for homework, and whether one exhibits violent behavior."

The paper uses the submitted friendship links, and the outcome of the school matching process, but doesn't give any indication of how the school choice process attempts to take into account the friendship links...




HT: László Sándor

Matching with preferences for colleagues

Marek Pycia at UCLA has a revised paper on matching when you care who your colleagues are:
Stability and Preference Alignment in Matching and Coalition Formation


Abstract: In any state of nature, agents have preference rankings over coalitions they belong to. Given a state of nature, agents’ preferences are pairwise aligned if any two agents in the intersection of any two coalitions prefer the same one of the two coalitions. Our main result says that under mild regularity conditions there exists a core stable coalition structure in every state of nature if, and only if, the preferences are pairwise-aligned in every state of nature. Pairwise alignment is satisfied by some standard models of payoff determination such as Nash bargaining that were not previously recognized as related to stability. As applications, we study complementarities and peer effects in many-to-one matching, the assortative structure of coalitions, and the impact of inequality among agents on coalition formation.

Peer effects in learning and teaching, but not in golf

The October '09 issue of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics contains three papers on peer effects.* The first of these begins "Is an employee's productivity influenced by the productivity of his or her nearby co-workers? The answer to this question is important for the optimal organization of labor...and for the optimal design of incentives." It then goes on to say that it detects no such effects from the random groupings of golfers in professional golf tournaments.

The second paper does find peer effects in random groupings of cadets at West Point, and the third paper finds that students do better when their teachers have better colleagues, i.e. they find that the teachers experience peer effects as measured by the performance of their students.

*The three papers are:

"Peer effects in the workplace: Evidence from random groupings in professional golf tournaments," by Jonathan Guryan, Kory Kroft, and Matthew J. Notowidigdo.

"The Effects of Peer Group Heterogeneity on the Production of Human Capital at West Point," by David S. Lyle.

"Teaching Students and Teaching Each Other: The Importance of Peer Learning for Teachers," by C. Kirabo Jackson and Elias Bruegmann.

Delaying kindergarten entry

The Telegraph discusses the problem of "summer born children," who would be younger than their kindergarten peers if enrolled according to the usual school schedule: Does it pay to delay the start of your child's schooling?. The article focuses on the American experience:

"A survey by the US Department of Education in 2007 found that 14 per cent of children aged 5 to 6 had delayed entry into school, or had parents who planned to delay their entry. In some areas - most often those where parents can afford an extra year of pricey pre-school - the level can reach as high as 25 per cent of the classroom.
The practice is more common among boys and tends to be concentrated in some geographic areas, though nearly absent in others. “Middle-class parents are savvy about wanting to know what the trends are and wanting to make sure that their kids aren't outside the norm,” says one education professor.
That's what comes across in a recent post on a parenting blog from an anxious mother in New Jersey. “I am thinking of holding my daughter back so she is emotionally ready for kindergarten,” she wrote, “but I'm also thinking about it because I worry that she will be the youngest since everyone else is holding back.”
“It's pernicious,” says Morrison, who is concerned, as are many other educators, about the effects on the rest of the student body.
Already, teachers must reckon with children who are 12 months apart in age - a big difference when they are just 5 years old. “On every dimension you can think of, you are going to have kids stretched out along a continuum,” says Beth Graue, a former kindergarten teacher, who studies school readiness at the University of Wisconsin. “You've got to accept that you are going to have gigantic five-year-old girls and tiny five-year-old boys who are going to want to do different things.” When some children begin school a year later than their peers, the range - and the challenge for the teacher - is that much bigger."

If schools are tournaments, this could make sense:
"The notion that small differences in age might make a big difference on the field is familiar terrain to Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker magazine writer and bestselling author. In his latest book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Gladwell studied ice hockey teams in Canada, where the game is high on the list of national priorities.
By the time kids are just 9 or 10, they are already being selected for elite teams, extra training and top coaching, and at that young age, those born nearest to the January 1 cut-off date - the oldest in each year's grouping - are usually the best, with the extra few months giving them a real advantage on the ice. With more special attention, that advantage seems to stick: Gladwell found that in any grouping of elite hockey players, 40 per cent were born in the first three months of the year. "

This sounds a bit like the reverse of unraveling, the process by which transactions become earlier and earlier in some markets. That process can feed on itself; if everyone else is recruiting early, maybe you had better do so also. It sounds like holding children back from school entry could potentially have the same dynamic: if the other children will all be a year older, maybe you should hold yours back too, especially if you're raising a future football player...