School choice in Indianapolis, and elsewhere

The Indy Star has the story on the imminent rollout of centralized school choice in Indianapolis:
Major changes await those wanting to enroll at IPS and charters, but no wait lists

"Wait lists for a spot in Indianapolis' most-desired schools are about to be a thing of the past.

Nearly all of the city's charter schools and all Indianapolis Public Schools programs will have a common application through the a new unified enrollment system called Enroll Indy. Starting next month, families can apply for a spot in up to 10 schools for the 2018-19 school year with just one application. "
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Earlier posts on school choice in Indianapolis here. Indianapolis has a full school choice system that elicits a rank order preference list of schools from each family and assigns each student to the single most preferred available.  This is the kind of school choice system that has been promoted by  IIPSC.

This is not to be confused with school systems that offer a common application, without centralized admissions. These remove the congestion involved in making multiple applications, but don't do anything about the congestion involved in some students receiving multiple offers which must be resolved before other students can be assigned to a school. (This raises a number of potential problems.)

For a school district that has just adopted a common application without a centralized school assignment, see e.g. Houston:
50 Houston Charter Schools Accept New Common Application, whose common app is here: Welcome to ApplyHouston!, organized by Schoolmint

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."

IIPSC: the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice

Over at the Dell Foundation (which funds a lot of work on public school choice), they have a Q&A on school choice and enrollment: Neil Dorosin and Gaby Fighetti from The Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice

"The Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice (IIPSC) is a nonprofit organization with a mission to support groups of people in cities in designing and implementing school choice and enrollment processes. They work with consortiums of people in cities to bring them through a process they call market design: creating a group of policies and operations that, when taken together as a whole, govern the way kids apply to and are accepted to schools.

IIPSC is hosting a conference on May 20, 2015 where education leaders from all over the country will gather to immerse themselves in unified enrollment theory and practice. Practitioners from cities that have already implemented or are implementing unified enrollment – Cleveland, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, New Orleans, New York City, Newark, Oakland, and Washington DC – will be on hand to share their knowledge and experiences. The goal is for all participants to emerge from the conference with a concrete set of knowledge and tools to use in advancing this critical work in their own cities.

Neil Dorosin is the Executive Director and Gaby Fighetti is the Deputy Executive Director of IIPSC. Read more about their work below.

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How has IIPSC effectively launched this current reform movement with unified enrollment?

Neil: IIPSC principals first worked together in New York City in the very early Joel Klein years, and in this environment there were almost no charter schools. This illustrates that the ideas within unified enrollment are not specific to any particular type of school- charter schools, district schools, non-public schools, etc. They are ideas that allow administrators to serve families better. To bring efficiency, equity, and transparency to enrollment and choice systems.

When we began working with Denver we realized that what we were doing requires district and charter sectors to work together in a whole new way, and these changes are fundamental to the way cities manage school choice and then hopefully implement portfolio reform strategy. We are committed to political neutrality and always make sure that people in cities know that our work is meant to advance healthy choice processes, not to advance any political position. We love the fact that people in cities all over the country now see the ideas and guiding principles of unified enrollment systems as things that they believe in and want to advance in their cities.

Tell us about the team who helped design the unified enrollment system.

Neil: Al Roth shared the Nobel Prize in economics for applying matching theory science to solve real world problems. Most famous examples include the Medical Residency match (matching residents and hospitals), kidney donor exchange programs (identifying compatible pairs of donors and recipients from VERY long waitlists, and saving many lives), and for unified enrollment work.Parag Pathak was his student, and is now a full professor at MIT. Atila Abdulkadiroglu co-wrote the seminal paper on the market design approach to school choice in 2003 and joined Al and Parag in the first schools project – in New York City in 2003. Al, Parag and Atila are all now members of our advisory board and active participants in our projects with cities.

It turns out that matching science can be adapted to solve these and other problems, and to make people’s live better in real and meaningful ways. We are motivated by this every day."

OneMatch for Indianapolis schools opens today

Here's an article that I think does an unusually good job of explaining both the benefits of a unified enrollment school choice system, and some of the objections it is facing as it is introduced.

1 Application Will Cover Enrollment For IPS And Indy Charter Schools  by ERIC WEDDLE.

"A new online enrollment system for families to enroll their kids in grades K-12 for the 2018-19 school year at Indianapolis Public Schools and most Marion County charter schools begins Wednesday.

"The so-called common enrollment process is a major shift for city parents and schools. Families will longer fill out separate paperwork for IPS magnet schools and neighborhood schools, or need to remember a smattering of enrollment deadlines among dozens of charter schools.

"Instead, families will log on to a website, pick the schools they want to attend, rank them in order by preference and wait to find out which school their child will attend. The first enrollment round begins Wednesday, Nov. 15, and ends January 15. Enrollment results will be announced February 15

"Cities, including Denver and New Orleans, offer a variation of the one-application approach. Support in Indianapolis has come IPS, the Mayor’s Office, most of the city’s charter schools and local education reform group The Mind Trust.

"As the new system has been rolled out some have raised concerns over the complexity and transparency of the process. 

"Caitlin Hannon, founder of Enroll Indy, the local nonprofit managing the OneMatch enrollment system, says it creates equity by simplifying where families get information about schools and using a computer algorithm to match a child with an open seat.

“It doesn't matter who your parent is,” Hannon says about how students are selected to attend schools with long waiting lists.  “It doesn't matter who you know or how much money you have or if you bake brownies for the school secretary.”

"The technology behind the system is similar to what is used for National Resident Matching Program through which most American doctors get their first job, according to the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice which creates the algorithm used by OneMatch.

"Families are expected to use Enroll Indy’s website to find a school that matches their need and interest, such as it academic performance, after-school care and transportation options.

"Though OneMatch, also part of the Enroll Indy website, families can choose up to ten schools they would want their child to attend and rank the schools in priority.

"The algorithm factors in priories associated with each student -- such as whether they live in a pre-drawn school boundary zone, if a sibling already attends a school and if a parent works for IPS -- and assigns a random lottery number.

The system runs everyone’s choice at the same time and fills open seats based on those factors, Hannon says. IPS will no longer offer waitlist positions for programs that reach capacity. Rather, Hannon says, students will be assigned their top option based on availability.

“This is not about putting you in a school that isn't a school that you want,” says Hannon, a former IPS School Board commissioner. “This is about you telling us what you want, the priorities of the school, and your random lottery number. Those are the only three factors.”

"Unlike in the past, Hannon says, the system will also explain to families why they did not get the school they wanted.

"The new system requires all schools taking part to use a single enrollment application, follow three enrollment windows and use a random lottery process to select which students make it into popular academic programs.

"But not all Indianapolis charter schools are taking part, including Christel House Academy.

Carey Dahncke, head of schools, says the charter network is taking a wait-and-see approach to OneMatch for its two schools.

“Our enrollment has been strong, so the idea of changing practice just didn't seem necessary,” he says.

"Phalen Leadership Academy also did not sign on but two IPS innovation schools managed by the company will use OneMatch.

"The two networks will continue to enroll students using their own system and deadlines.

"The IPS Community Coalition, a group critical of ongoing changes within IPS, has described the OneMatch system as being akin to the dystopian Hunger Games series. In a recent Facebook post, the group said the enrollment system dictates schools choice, not the parents.

"The parents only provide the list of 10. This starts to look like some strange robotic, authoritarian system of the allocation of scarce resources (the 'good' schools), kind of like the Hunger Games. This looks like an inhumane system, not a parent and child-friendly one," the group wrote.

"In a public response, Hannon disputed the notion that families are not choosing their schools.

"We don’t decide anything for families -- they just apply and we run a lottery -- the same way it’s been done for years but in a more efficient place so families don’t have to apply all over the city," she wrote.

"Enrollment for 2018-19 will be held during three rounds: Nov. 15 - Jan. 15 with results on Feb. 15; Jan. 16 - April 15 with results on May 15; April 16 - June 15 with results on June 30. Late enrollment starts July 1.

Enrollment for IPS preschool students will continue to be handled by the SchoolMint application system."

School choice discussion in Indianapolis

The Indy Star has the story:
Will Indy adopt central enrollment system for schools?

"A group is developing a one-stop enrollment system for Indianapolis schools but will the city’s largest education provider take part?

Indianapolis Public Schools leaders are weighing whether to join Enroll Indy, a nonprofit with plans to launch a unified enrollment process for IPS schools and charter schools within the district’s boundaries by next year.

The goal: Help parents find a school for their children in a city with growing options that feature charter schools, innovation network schools, magnet programs and more.

So far, IPS hasn’t made any commitments, though moving toward such a system is among the district’s priorities, IPS Superintendent Lewis Ferebee said.

“Whether Enroll Indy is the best fit for IPS to go down that path is to be determined,” Ferebee told IndyStar. “The concept itself could definitely benefit our families.”

Advocates for a central enrollment system say the way parents now shop for schools is disorganized. To find the best fit, parents must juggle different application deadlines and know what programs are out there, a daunting task with the city now playing host to more than 40 charter schools.

Wealthier families can find the process easier to navigate, placing lower-income families at a disadvantage, organizers say.

“If we’re going to say we have choice,” said Caitlin Hannon, Enroll Indy’s founder, “everybody should have equitable access to that choice.”

Hannon, a former IPS School Board member, said the group is hoping to launch its first application process next fall for the 2018-19 school year. But first it needs buy-in from the city’s schools, and Hannon started making her pitch to IPS this month.

A 2015 report by the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice found that the city’s schools are in “intense competition to enroll students.”

“There is no incentive for IPS, for example, to tell parents about charter schools. Or for Ball State University to ensure families understand the IPS magnet school application,” according to the report. “In both cases, doing so would not be in their best self-interest. For families, though the distinction between authorizers is less important. Parents are looking for the best school for their child, regardless of who runs it. For them, not having the information in one easy-to-access place doesn’t make sense.”

Families would apply through Enroll Indy to any participating school, where they’d rank their school preferences and be matched with a program.

Hannon said families would be asked their priorities, such as location and where siblings attend. Students are then matched to the school “they want the most that they can get into, based on those priorities,” Hannon said.

“I like to explain it as all schools lotteries happening at the same moment…,” she said.

An analysis of a similar system run in Denver Public Schools found not enough seats existed in high-performing schools to serve demand. That meant students often were assigned to lower-performing schools than initially requested.

But the system would come with perks, Hannon said. Parents would no longer have to hold spots for their children at multiple schools, making it easier for administrators to plan staffing needs...."

School choice among different kinds of schools

Chalkbeat on the changing face of school districts, and the role played by universal-enrollment school choice:

A ‘portfolio’ of schools? How a nationwide effort to disrupt urban school districts is gaining traction

"Several years ago, Indianapolis Public Schools looked like a lot of urban school districts. The vast majority of students attended traditional public schools, though enrollment was dwindling, and the district had an adversarial relationship with its small but growing number of charter schools.

"That’s no longer true. The district is actively turning over schools to charter operators, and it’s rolling out a common enrollment system for district and charter schools that could make it easier for charters to grow. Nearly half of the district’s students now attend charters or district schools with charter-like freedoms.

...

"A growing number of philanthropists, advocates, and policymakers say the way to improve schools is to upend the traditional school district. Usually pointing to the same cities as models — Indianapolis, along with Denver, New Orleans, and Washington D.C. — they want to see more charter schools and more district schools run like charter schools.

...

"Another piece of the portfolio playbook is supporting enrollment systems that allow families to easily choose among district and charter schools.

"Adding new schools and new choices can make things harder on parents, who must navigate several enrollment processes to make a choice and get assigned to a school. Common enrollment systems create a single place to navigate it all — while also ensuring that all parents are exposed to new schools, and making it especially clear to district leaders which schools are attracting the fewest students.

“In addition to efficiency for families, unified enrollment helps the system make better decisions about which schools to replicate, recruit, incubate, scale, and maximize and, perhaps, where to locate them,” according to an Education Cities report.

"Denver, New Orleans, and Washington D.C. all have common enrollment systems, and Indianapolis just adopted one. In Denver, the use of a streamlined system did in fact increase enrollment in charters among low-income students and English-language learners, though in New Orleans parents said it was actually harder to navigate initially."

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School choice in Indianapolis: podcast of my talk at the Economic Club of Indianapolis

Here's a link to the broadcast of my talk on radio WYFI in Indianapolis, on markets, marketplaces, Who Gets What, and school choice with unified enrollment which is coming to Indianapolis next year.

Economic Club of Indiana / Dr. Alvin Roth

Indianapolis schools discuss universal enrollment

Market design first steps: Report: IPS, Indy Charter Schools Should Use Same Enrollment Application

"A report out this week is urging the Indianapolis Public Schools district and city charter schools to consider partnering on a one-stop-shop approach for enrollment.

What the report found, basically, is enrolling in an Indianapolis public school -- be it IPS or a charter -- can be bewildering process for parents to navigate.

Students applying to an IPS magnet school have a different steps of enrollment based on whether they are new or returning to the district.

Some charters require in-person applications while others allow online submissions. The deadlines for all public city schools are not the same.

“If you think about applying for college, trying to navigate different deadlines and applications -- that is what it looks like for parents now in Indy,” said Caitlin Hannon, executive director of Teach Plus in Indianapolis which commissioned the a study of enrollment processes for IPS, charter schools and their authorizers.

The report, written by the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice, says the IPS enrollment system and efforts by the city and local nonprofits to promote school options still leave parents and others confused.

Nathan Ringham, an IPS parent quoted in the report, said there is no one source to review deadlines, requirements or other issues related to enrollment.

“I shouldn’t have had to go to the state department of education to figure out the birth date cutoff for kindergarten,” he said. “I shouldn’t have to go to one page to see how we enroll as a new student and then another to see how to enroll in a magnet.”

In addition, enrollment projections by schools have been below target in past years because schools are unsure where students will attend until the school year begins. When teachers are hired months earlier based on flawed enrollment projections projections, they wind up being transferred to other schools or seeking another job, according to the report.

The institute and recommends that the city to consider a so-called common enrollment process. So rather than apply for multiple schools, a parent could fill out one application and rank their preference.

Cities, including Denver and New Orleans, offer a variation of the one-application approach that also provides information about each school, such as academic performance, so parents can compare schools.

“If the first choice is an IPS school and second is a charter and third is another charter -- that is fine,” Hannon said about how a common application would be filled out. “Then all of those would go into a lottery process where an algorithm is built and people are given their preferences by the way they have listed them and based on the requirements of each school.”

Data that could be collected in an open enrollment, Hannon said, could be used to identify whether a charter school is "creaming" -- taking the best students who apply -- or if students from one part of the city are seeking schools outside their neighborhood boundries. 

IPS Superintendent Lewis Ferebee has recently said he is open to discussing the common application."

School choice in Indianapolis

The Indy Star has the story on the changes to come: School choice made easier for Indy parents

"The good news is that change is coming. A new non-profit organization, Enroll Indy, launched by a Mind Trust Education Entrepreneur Fellowship, is working with Indianapolis Public Schools, the Mayor’s Office and the State Charter School Board to streamline the school application process for public school families. Its plan includes a new school information source for parents to learn about their options; a robust effort to work directly with families on navigating the process; a streamlined application that includes both IPS and charter schools; a shared deadline across all schools and a much-needed window of transparency into school enrollment.

For nearly a year, stakeholders in both IPS and the charter sector have worked together on recommendations focused on making enrollment more efficient, equitable and transparent. As such, Enroll Indy is poised to launch a system this fall that will dramatically improve access for all families.

This new system not only will make the enrollment process easier for all families, but it will provide robust data and information to our city as a whole. It will provide new information on the type of schools families want and where they want them, meaning districts and authorizers will be able to collaborate strategically to meet the needs of families, rather than starting schools with no information on the neighborhood’s needs or wants. This data also will enable us to ensure schools are behaving fairly and serving all students, not just those who are easiest to educate."

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."

Is unified enrollment school choice coming to Indianapolis?

"Caitlin Hannon gave up her job and her Indianapolis Public School Board seat for an idea that, while a pretty good bet to give her a future role in education in the city, is far from a slam dunk to succeed.
She’s taken the leap from suggesting as unified enrollment system as a board member to starting one herself. Her goal goes beyond just matching families with the best schools for their children."

Here's the rest of the story, by Scott Elliott at Chalkbeat...

Hannon’s goal: Help parents make choices and give schools useful data
Caitlin Hannon touts a common application system's benefits for families, charter schools and IPS

"Hannon said her goal is to create a single application parents could use to request schools for the 2017-18 school year. Her plan is to have it ready in late 2016 before the district normally begins gearing up its magnet school lottery.
Her vision is a system parents can use to learn about schools, rank them by preference and request children be assigned to their favorites.
A unified enrollment system is not a unique idea. New Orleans is a well known example among a handful of cities that have tried it."

I speak about school choice at The Economic Club of Indiana

I'll speak in Indianapolis about Market Design and Unified Enrollment School Choice.

Dr. Alvin Roth, Stanford University and Nobel Prize in Economics

Date:  March 28, 2017

Time:  12:00 pm

Location: Indiana Convention Center

 

Known for his emphasis on applying economic theory to solution for “real-world” problems, Dr. Alvin Roth serves as the Craig and Susan McCaw professor of economics at Stanford University and the Gund professor of economics and business administration emeritus at Harvard University. Roth has made many significant contributions to the fields of game theory, market design and experimental economics. In 2012, Roth won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences jointly with Lloyd Shapley “for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design.” Roth is a graduate of Columbia University and Stanford University
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My Morse Lecture at INFORMS 2022, tomorrow

 Tomorrow, Wednesday October19, from 8-9am Eastern time, I'll be giving the Morse Lecture at the INFORMS 2022 annual meeting in Indianapolis

Market Design: The Dialog Between Simple Abstract Models and Practical Implementation

I’ll review some of the elegantly simple models that underlie the initial designs for matching processes like the medical residency Match, school choice and kidney exchange, and the modifications, complications and  computations that were needed to get new designs adopted, implemented and maintained over the years.

You can read about the occasion of this lecture, my Philip McCord Morse Lectureship Award here.