Incentives in matching markets: Counting and comparing manipulating agents by Bonkoungou and Nesterov

 Here's a paper that caught my eye in the current issue of Theoretical Economics, Volume 18, Issue 3 (July 2023)

Incentives in matching markets: Counting and comparing manipulating agents by Somouaoga Bonkoungou and Alexander Nesterov

Abstract: Manipulability is a threat to the successful design of centralized matching markets. However, in many applications some manipulation is inevitable and the designer wants to compare manipulable mechanisms to select the best among them.  We count the number of agents with an incentive to manipulate and rank mechanisms by their level of manipulability. This ranking sheds a new light on practical design decisions such as the design of the entry-level medical labor market in the United States, and school admissions systems in New York, Chicago, Denver, and many cities in Ghana and the United Kingdom.

"First, we consider the college admissions problem where both students and schools are strategic agents (Gale and Shapley (1962)) and schools can misreport their preferences as well as their capacities. We show that when all manipulations (by students as well as by schools) are considered, the student-proposing Gale–Shapley (GS) mechanism has the smallest number of manipulating agents among all stable matching mechanisms (Theorem 1). Dubins and Freedman (1981) and Roth (1982) show that this mechanism is not manipulable by students. This result was one of the main arguments in favor of its choice for the NRMP. However, it also has the largest number of manipulating schools among all stable mechanisms (Pathak and Sönmez (2013)). Our result still supports its choice when all strategic agents are considered. What is more, it is still the best choice even when schools can only misreport their capacities, but not their preferences. All these conclusions carry over to the general model where, in addition, students face ranking constraints: although the student-proposing GS mechanism is now manipulable by students, it is still the least manipulable mechanism.

"Second, we consider the school choice problem (Abdulkadiroglu and Sönmez ˘ (2003)) where students are the only strategic agents and also face ranking constraints. Historically, many school choice systems have used the constrained immediate acceptance (Boston) mechanism, but over time shifted toward the constrained student proposing GS mechanisms and relaxing the constraint. We demonstrate that the number of manipulating students (Theorem 2) weakly decreased as a result of these changes."

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."

Market design, redesigned (in startups and university labs)

Market design is evolving, and new ways of organizing it are being explored. 

In my post yesterday, I talked about the early work on school choice that Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag Pathak, Tayfun Sonmez and I did under the auspices of Boston schools Superintendent Tom Payzant. The market design by economists in Boston, as with the earlier successful effort in New York City, was conducted as part of our research work as professors.  Not a penny changed hands, and we all felt good about that.

But if there was a flaw in that working arrangement, it was that no contracts were signed, and so as staff turnover took place in school districts, and the individuals we had dealt with departed, the district's institutional memory eroded, and they didn't always remember to turn to us when difficulties arose that we could have helped them with. Partly to address that, and to have at least one person able to devote time to approaching school districts, Parag and Atila and I supported Neil Dorosin in founding the non-profit  Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice, which during its lifetime helped school choice in a number of American cities, including Denver, New Orleans, and Washington D.C.

Parag and Atila went on to be founding members of MIT's School Effectiveness and Inequality Intiative, which just this week was "relaunched" with a different team as MIT Blueprint Labs, which aims to build on MIT's strengths not just in school choice but in a much wider area of market design and policy analysis, and to be a lab with a large staff and extensive fundraising:

Launch announcement of MIT Blueprint Labs

Featuring

Professor Parag Pathak Faculty Director MIT SEII / Blueprint Labs Research spotlight: K-12 education

Professor Joshua Angrist Faculty Director MIT SEII / Blueprint Labs Research spotlight: Higher education and the workforce

Professor Nikhil Agarwal Faculty Director, Health Care MIT SEII / Blueprint Labs Research spotlight: Health care

Eryn Heying Executive Director MIT SEII / Blueprint Labs

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

Update: and here's the Blueprint Labs new (announced Aug. 11) website: https://blueprintlabs.mit.edu/

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In a related development, Parag has cofounded a new for-profit Ed-tech startup called Avela, that plans to spread the technologies he's helped pioneer.  A for-profit firm has some funding, employment and investing opportunities that aren't available to non-profits or university labs, let alone to teams of professors organized informally. And as in the Blueprint Lab, they hope that the tools they will develop will be readily applicable to quite a broad range of matching markets and market designs.

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

These various efforts look to me like design experiments themselves, in the search for sustainable ways of making market design a permanent part of not only the research that economists do, but of the practical effects we hope to foster.

Observing all this from the West Coast, and over several decades, I can't help noticing that these institutional changes have been accompanied by team changes, and shifting collaborations among market designers.  

There are also a growing number of different kinds of economists (and computer scientists, operations researchers and businesses) involved in designing and assessing markets, and market design has not only changed markets, but changed the way economists work, in many small and large ways.  Econometricians and development economists have led the way in organizing large labs, and market design may be heading in that direction as well. Big and small tech firms have also started to think of market design as among their core competencies, and as a discipline they should be hiring.

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Here in California, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that my colleague Paul Milgrom has for a long time engaged in auction design through his for-profit company Auctionomics.

And Susan Athey is the faculty director of a big lab at Stanford using different technologies in other areas of market design:  the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab, which describes itself this way:

"We use digital technology and social science research to improve the effectiveness of leading social sector organizations.

"Based out of Stanford GSB, the lab is a research initiative of affiliated academics and staff, as well as researchers and students, who are passionate about conducting research that guides and improves the process of innovation.

"Research Approach

We collaborate with a wide range of organizations, from large firms to smaller startups, for-profits to nonprofits, and NGOs to governments, to conduct research. Then, we apply and disseminate our insights to achieve social impact at large scale."

Thomas Toch on school choice and the presidential campaigns

Toch: School Choice Is Here to Stay. But How to Make It Fair and Equitable for All Families? High-Tech Common-Enrollment System Can Help

"The leading Democratic presidential candidates — liberals Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, but also moderates Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg — have derided publicly funded charter schools as a threat to traditional public schools. But charter schools and the new, more consumer-oriented public education landscape they represent are here to stay.
...
"In this climate, the policy question is not whether we should have public-sector choice. Instead, we should be asking how to make choice systems in public education efficient and fair for all families. One promising answer: common-enrollment systems that allow families to select traditional public schools or charters through a single, centralized selection process powered by algorithms that match as many students as possible to their top choices.
...
"But taking advantage of expanding public options traditionally meant navigating myriad application timelines and deadlines without information to make clear comparisons.

"It meant oversubscribed schools pulling names out of paper bags, families pitching tents on sidewalks — or paying others to camp out for them — to get to the front of waiting-list lines and schools cherry-picking applicants to get the most attractive students. It was a system favoring the well-educated, the wealthy and the well-connected.

"For schools, that system made planning almost impossible. Many students were admitted to multiple schools but didn’t let schools know their plans, causing thousands of waitlisted students to change schools even after the start of classes, leaving administrators guessing about revenue and staffing, and disrupting instruction.

"But in recent years, the District of Columbia, Denver, New Orleans and a handful of other cities have launched a new way of matching students to schools that addresses these problems."
********

In the manner of journalists with space limitations, Toch goes on to attribute these advances to "Alvin Roth and colleagues."  Of course, prominent among those colleagues are the two leaders in the modern school choice revolution, Atila Abdulkadiroglu and Parag Pathak.

School choice in Denver, 2019 report

Here's the latest report from Denver's unified school choice:
Record High Participation In District’s Round 1 of SchoolChoice
Mar. 21, 2019

 

DPS marks eighth year of providing equitable, transparent enrollment through unified system

Denver –Thousands of Denver families took an active role in selecting the best-fit school for their student during another successful SchoolChoice enrollment season. Denver Public Schools (DPS) this week sent out over 27,000 emails and text messages notifying families of their students’ school assignments for 2019-20. Round 2 of SchoolChoice opens on April 3.

The goal of SchoolChoice is to level the playing field by giving all DPS students access to a quality education, regardless of their address or socio-economic background. And SchoolChoice is succeeding. This year, SchoolChoice placed 92% of kindergarteners and 95% of sixth-graders in their first-, second- or third-choice school. Ninth-graders were placed in one of their top three choices 94% of the time. For all three grade levels, match rates for first or second choices were also strong: 89% percent for kindergarten; and 93% for sixth and ninth.

In a continuing effort to provide the best service to Denver families, DPS shifted the timing of the Choice window to close in mid-February, allowing the district to release results nearly a month earlier than in 2018. And the district opened a new walk-in enrollment center in the southwest area to better support families. The DPS SchoolChoice process allows families to rank their top school choices on a single online application. The district then runs a computer algorithm designed to maximize the number of students getting their most-preferred option, subject to availability. The system is based on the 2012-Nobel Prize-winning work of Stanford and Harvard professor Dr. Alvin Roth.

DPS is one of the only large districts in the country in which all its schools, whether traditional, innovation or charter, participate in its choice program. Prior to 2011-12, families had to complete different applications for different schools on different timelines. SchoolChoice is primarily for families with students who will be transitioning into a new school next year, including those entering kindergarten, middle school and high school. The process is also open to families who are not necessarily in a transition year but would like the opportunity to choose a new school for their student.

Because virtually every school is an option in this single enrollment process, DPS provides families with the tools they need to adequately research schools and make informed decisions. These tools include the annual Great Schools Enrollment Guides, School Finder online school search tool, the Great Schools Regional Expo series, and individual school tours.

SchoolChoice is not limited to the Round 1 window that closed Feb. 20. Round 2 of SchoolChoice begins April 3 and will provide opportunities for families who did not participate in Round 1, or who participated in Round 1 but want to re-explore their options or who are new to DPS.

SchoolChoice Data

SchoolChoice participation rates by transition grades:
Kindergarten – 89%
Sixth-grade – 84%
Ninth-grade – 76%
TOTAL – 84%

SchoolChoice Match rates:

Grade	2019: 1stChoice	2018: 1stChoice	Change	2019: 1stor 2nd	2018: 1stor 2nd	Change	2019: 1st-3rd	2018: 1st-3rd	Change
K	81%	80%	1.6%	89%	88%	0.9%	92%	92%	0.5%
6	83%	83%	-0.2%	93%	94%	-2.0%	95%	97%	-2.1%
9	85%	80%	5.0%	93%	93%	0.0%	94%	95%	-0.6%
K,6,9	83%	81%	1.8%	91%	92%	-0.4%	94%	94%	-0.7%

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."

School choice in Chicago and in D.C.

Here's some news about the new school choice system in Chicago.
Here's the press release from Chicago Public Schools:
Overwhelming Majority of CPS Students Receive Offers to Preferred School Choices Through GoCPS High School Application Process 
81 Percent of Students Will Receive Their First, Second or Third Choice; More Than 26,909 Incoming Freshmen Participated in GoCPS

And here's some background information from GoCPS
Round 1 high school offers were officially released to 8^th grade students and families by Chicago Public Schools (CPS) this afternoon via the new single application system—GoCPS.

Last spring, the Chicago Board of Education voted unanimously in favor of moving to a single application for all public high schools in the district. The decision was a historic shift that solved a major pain point for families and students who, until now, had to navigate more than 290 schools and program options.

New Schools for Chicago and Kids First Chicago have worked diligently alongside community partners, schools, students, parents, and district leaders to ensure successful implementation in the first year of GoCPS. Together with CPS, we are excited to highlight some results of the Round 1 application period:

• 93% of 8th graders successfully submitted applications to high school through the new GoCPS system.
• 92% of students who applied were matched to a school.
• 81% of students were matched to one of their top 3 choices.

Compared to other urban districts, these participation and match results in GoCPS’s first year are exceptional. For example, Denver Public Schools uses a similar system and their highest participation rate is 84% after many years of implementation.

With the right support and plan for continued improvement, Chicago could emerge as the leader not only in universal enrollment, but also in the adoption of modern systems and processes to better serve large, complex student populations.

More Information

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OUR WORK TO SUPPORT CHILDREN, FAMILIES & THE DISTRICT

• Free enrollment support to families, communities, and schools via our Kids First Chicagoinitiative. 
• Ongoing parent focus groups on the GoCPS application process. Working in partnership with CPS, we have polled parents at each stage of the new enrollment process to gain insightful user feedback. 
• Work directly with the district in creating and distributing clearer and more effective information on school quality for parents and students as they prepare to apply to and accept their school options.

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Here's a story from D.C. that highlights that even a good school choice enrollment system doesn't create enough good schools to accommodate all the children, so that until we have enough good schools, school choice will be "playing the lottery" for some families. (But a good system allocates places more efficiently...)
The D.C. lottery is intended to give all kids a fair shot at a top school. But does it?

"Before the District implemented a lottery system using a single application in 2014, parents had to keep track of about 30 lottery deadlines and applications. Charter schools operated their own lotteries, and the traditional public school system ran separate lotteries for lower and upper grades. Chaos ensued. Parents often had to go to each school to submit a lottery application.

Adding to the confusion, charter schools informed parents of the lottery results at different times, which resulted in parents enrolling their children in the first school they heard back from and then, when they received a slot at a more desirable campus, enrolling them there, too.

When Scott Pearson took over the D.C. Public Charter School Board in 2012, he met with Kaya Henderson, who was chancellor of D.C. Public Schools, and they pushed for a unified lottery system. Denver, New Orleans and New York had already streamlined the process, so the technology and precedent were there.

By spring 2014, My School DC was ready for use. Schools aren’t required to enlist in the common lottery, and Pearson said it wasn’t an easy sell.

He worked on convincing the big charter networks, including KIPP and Democracy Prep, to participate, and most other schools followed.

“We had a target customer in mind, and it was a single mom living east of the river who was unbelievably burdened and often locked out of the ability to participate in school choice,” Pearson said.

The engineering behind My School DC is based on the algorithm that earned the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics for formulas that matched thousands of medical residents with hospitals, kidney donors with recipients and New York students with high schools.

Neil Dorosin, executive director of the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice, which develops lottery algorithms, said parents can’t cheat the system, and schools can’t sift through applicants to choose who they want.

Software assigns participants a number that sticks with them until they are matched with a school. Children then get to enroll in that school while remaining on the wait list for any school that a family ranked higher but did not get into.

“All the algorithm is doing is just implementing what that city’s rules are,” Dorosin said. “If you are looking for unfairness, it is not in the algorithm.”

"

Opioids and harm reduction: drug checking and Safe Injection Facilities

From Mason Marks writing on the Bill of Health blog at Harvard Law School:

The Opioid Crisis Requires Evidence-Based Solutions, Part III: How the President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction Dismissed Harm Reduction Strategies

" it is noteworthy that the Commission ignored harm reduction strategies such as drug checking, which could reduce deaths due to consumption of contaminated opioids. Many countries including Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and the Netherlands offer free and confidential drug checking (also known as pill testing) to drug users. Drug checking could reduce consumption of adulterated drugs and provides opportunities to support and counsel users who may otherwise receive no contact with medical or public health professionals. Drug checking is also a valuable source of information about drug use such as pricing, availability, effects, and composition of street drugs. This information can be used to further our understanding of drug use and its effects.

Some experts argue that drug dealers will be less likely to add dangerous adulterants to their products if they know that consumers have a mechanism to test their contents. The identification of drug contents can alert authorities to the presence of synthetic opioids, which can lead to public warnings and announcements that may further drive dealers to withdraw deadly additives from the market. The practice can also improve law enforcement efforts to reduce the illegal importation and sale of synthetic opioids. Dr. Carl Hart, Chair of the Department of Psychology at Columbia University, supports the use of free and anonymous drug checking in the United States. In a Scientific American article, heargues that the opioid crisis is a distinctly American problem. According to Hart, “Throughout Europe and other regions where opioids are readily available, people are not dying at comparable rates as those in the U.S., largely because addiction is not treated as a crime but as a public health problem.” Drug checking is one example of how European countries approach drug abuse from a public health angle rather than a punitive law enforcement perspective.

Critics of drug checking argue that it could normalize drug use or “send the wrong message” to potential users. For instance, the practice could create the appearance of safety when in fact the drugs being consumed are dangerous. ...

"Supervised injection facilities (SIFs), arguably a more controversial option than drug checking, were also ignored by the President’s Opioid Commission. SIFs provide a place for people to inject drugs under professional supervision to minimize the risk of HIV and hepatitis C infection, drug overdose, and death. They are primarily used in Switzerland, Canada, and Australia. However, the City of Denver is taking steps to become the first U.S. city to offer SIFs. In November, a plan for a pilot program won unanimous approval from a bipartisan ten-member legislative committee. However, the City’s General Assembly must approve the plan in January 2018 for it to move forward. Seattle and San Francisco are considering similar proposals. The State of Vermont is also considering using SIFs. On November 29, 2017, a commission of health and law enforcement professionals, led by State’s Attorney General Sarah George, recommended that Vermont make SIFs a part of its opioid strategy. However, the Vermont Commissioner of Public Safety and the Vermont Association of Police Chiefs disagree. The Commissioner stated, “Facilitating the ongoing use of heroin through SIFs sends the wrong message, at the wrong time, to the wrong people.”

...

"A 2014 review published in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence, examined the outcome of 75 studies and concluded that SIFs are an effective harm-reduction strategy not associated with increased drug use or crime. In early 2017, the Massachusetts Medical Society published its analysis of SIFs. It found that peer-reviewed research published in leading academic journals, such as JAMA and the New England Journal of Medicine, supports the conclusion that SIFs produce positive outcomes such as reduced mortality and increased access to drug treatment.

...

"Admittedly, there could be an “ick factor” associated with SIFs, and overly zealous drug control advocates could find them repugnant. However, when thousands of lives are at stake, emotional reactions to SIFs must be weighed against the scientific evidence. If the evidence suggests that SIFs are effective, then lawmakers must be courageous and allow their decisions to be guided by science rather than emotions such as disgust."

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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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."