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.

...

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."

Updates on school choice

Some recent articles look at school choice in several American cities, including some (Denver, New Orleans, DC) where IIPSC has helped out, and some that are contemplating a unified school choice system.

Detroit Needs Universal Enrollment for District and Charter Schools, Report Says
"Creating a one-stop shop where Detroit families can enroll in both district and charter schools would help families navigate what has become a very complex school-choice system. That's at the heart of a series of recommendations made in a report commissioned by Excellent Schools Detroit, a nonprofit devoted to improving the city's schools."



How Parents Experience Public School Choice
By Ashley Jochim, Michael DeArmond, Betheny Gross, and Robin Lake

From the executive summary:
"A growing number of cities now provide a range of public school options for families to choose from. Choosing a school can be one of the most stressful decisions parents make on behalf of their child. For all families, but for some more than others, getting access to the right public school will determine their child’s future success. How are parents faring in cities where choice is widely available?
...
"Parents experience school choice differently in different cities. Differences across the cities suggest parents’ perceived challenges and opportunities with choice vary depending on where they live.

"In Denver, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C., parents were more likely than parents in the other cities to say their school systems were getting better. In Philadelphia, only 11 percent of parents reported having a positive outlook about the public education system, compared to 65 percent in D.C.

"However, a generally positive outlook does not necessarily mean that families are satisfied with their public school options. Denver parents were most likely to report having another good public school option available to them, but parents in Philadelphia, New Orleans, and D.C. reported the most challenge finding a school that provided a good fit for their child.
...
"Cities have made uneven investments in the systems that support parent choice. Parents’ experiences with choice are likely shaped by the systems and supports put in place by policymakers, including access to information about schools, the enrollment process, and transportation options.

"Denver, D.C., and New Orleans have made the most progress in investing in these systems. However, we saw little consistent evidence linking specific investments with positive outcomes, which may simply be a reflection of the newness of the investment or may indicate the need for these cities to
go further into developing these supports.

"In Denver, parents who enrolled their child after implementation of the common (sometimes called “unified” or “universal”) enrollment system, which enables parents to apply to all charter and district schools via a single application, were less likely to report struggling with enrollment processes. Yet, in New Orleans, parents were more likely to report problems after the introduction of common enrollment. "

Confusion in NYC high school wait lists

In August, the New York City Department of Education announced a change in the school choice assignment process--without announcing any details.  But the plan was that after the initial run of the deferred acceptance algorithm, they would institute some sort of wait lists. I blogged about it at the time, and was concerned by the lack of detail.

Here's a current story from Chalkbeat that suggests that the details are still opaque, but that families are learning that the waitlist position they were given isn't reliable:

‘How can you move back on a waiting list?’: NYC’s high school admissions tweaks spark confusion
By Alex Zimmerman  May 8, 2020

"students vying for the city’s most coveted schools are discovering that their position on high school waitlists can worsen over time, a situation that has come as a surprise to some families — adding anxiety to an admissions process that is already famous for its complexity.
...
"Every student who fills out an application and does not get into their top choice is automatically waitlisted. If you get your third choice school, for example, you’ll be on the waitlist for your No. 1 and 2 choices. Nearly 44,000 students did not get into their first choice high school this year, automatically placing them on at least one waitlist.

"The second way is that students can add themselves to any waitlist once the initial matching process is over, even for schools a student didn’t initially apply to.

"In general, students who initially applied to a school but didn’t get in and are automatically added to its waitlist should be ranked ahead of students who add themselves later on, officials said. But there are exceptions.

"The first major exception is if a student is in a higher priority group than someone who is already on the waitlist. Some schools, for instance, give preference to students who live in certain neighborhoods, which can override a student’s position on the waitlist even if they were added first. (Officials said this is the most common reason a student would see their position worsen.)

"Olga Ramos, the admissions director at Bard High School Early College Queens, pointed to a second reason families can move backward — something that surprised her at first.

"If a student got into their first choice school, and listed Bard as their second choice, they could still add themselves to Bard’s waitlist and be considered as if they had been automatically added — potentially bypassing students who were already on the list."

*********
Here's an earlier story in Chalkbeat by Mr. Zimmerman, indicating that the system was still pretty opaque as the school choice process got ready to announce admissions in March:

NYC high school offers are coming this week with a big change: waitlists. Here’s what you should know.  By Alex Zimmerman  Mar 18, 2020

Here's what was known then...

"What are these waitlists, anyway?

"New York City students must apply to high school, listing up to 12 schools they want to attend. A complicated algorithm, developed by a Nobel prize-winning economist, then matches a student to one of their choices.

"That fundamental algorithm is not changing. But for the first time this year, any student who does not get into their first choice school will automatically be added to the waitlist of every single higher-ranked school they didn’t get into.

"Every school that has more applicants than seats will have a waitlist. It’s a similar model that the education department uses for pre-K, kindergarten, and middle schools — something education department officials said is an advantage."

**********
Here's a story from the time of the initial announcement:

Goodbye round two applications, hello waitlists: NYC announces changes to high school admissions
By Christina Veiga and Alex Zimmerman   Aug 15, 2019

"Starting next year, the city will allow students to sit on waiting lists for schools they wanted to attend, but didn’t get into. The city is also eliminating the second round of admissions, which it now uses to for students who aren’t matched to a school they applied to during the typical process.
...
"“It’s like going to a store and getting the ticket, you know what number you are, and you know how many folks are ahead of you, and you’ll be able to watch the process go,” said Deputy Chancellor Josh Wallack. “You’ll also be able to talk with an administrator in a school who can give you a sense of how much waitlists move each year and that varies a bit by school.”
*****

I'm still confused about a different issue that I haven't yet seen addressed. In the original school choice system using the deferred acceptance algorithm, there was a second round in which students unmatched in the first round were asked for additional preferences over schools, so that they could be matched.  How were those unmatched students assigned to schools this year?

Here's my August post:

Friday, August 16, 2019 

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

School choice in Detroit?

The Detroit Free Press has a story on the current debate: Common enrollment: Lessons for Detroit

When preparing to move to Washington, D.C., in 2012, Erika and Lamont Harrell spent so much time applying to charter schools that it felt like a full-time job.

They filled out 24 applications — a dozen for each of their two sons — and juggled different school websites and deadlines.

That was before My School DC, a common enrollment and lottery system that has one application and the same deadline schedule for most of the city's publicly funded schools, including charters. A week-long task one year turned into 20 minutes the next.

"The process is just so much easier, and it's less stressful," said Erika Harrell, 33.

More than 200 miles away, in Newark, N.J., the first days of the school year in September were marked by student and parent protests of a similar reform effort called One Newark. Some parents complained that their children were matched to far-away schools that they didn't put on their list.

Common enrollment — in which a computer algorithm tries to match kids to their top-ranked schools — is one of the main reform ideas bubbling out of the discussions around reshaping public education in Detroit.

Changing how kids enroll won't improve academics — a significant issue in a city where more than 80% of ranked schools in Detroit Public Schools are in the bottom quarter statewide. But supporters say it would give all families an equal shot at seats in sought-after schools, bring order to what is now a chaotic enrollment process and stabilize school rosters earlier in the year. The data gleaned from it could inform decisions on which schools should close.

Common enrollment can be tough to sell to parents, at least initially.

The cities that have common enrollment — such as Denver, Newark, New Orleans and Washington — offer lessons for Detroit.

Officials there say they have had significant successes in getting kids matched with their top-choice schools.

But no system is perfect. In Denver, for example, researchers say common enrollment has been stable and successful, but lingering gaps remain in terms of participation by minority, special-ed and low-income students. They also said the city needs more seats in high-performing schools to meet demand.

Improving choice for all students

Common enrollment works best when all or most schools are involved, experts say. The systems have centralized management.

In Denver, where common enrollment launched in 2012, 100% of public schools participate, including charters.

Denver officials say they're happy with how it's working. In the system's first three years, between 76% and 89% of all students were matched with one of their choices, and between 64% and 72% got their first choice school, according to a recent study by the Seattle-based Center on Reinventing Public Education.

"Previously ... we had over 60 application processes and time lines, so only the savviest of parents were able to take advantage of school choice," said Roberta Walker, manager of choice and enrollment for Denver Public Schools.

The school district was an early supporter. A promise of transparency (the system is audited annually) and some pressure from foundations that fund charter schools helped bring charters on board, said Mike Kromrey, executive director of the community group Together Colorado.

Denver Public Schools runs the system, called SchoolChoice.

Getting everybody on board could be stickier in Detroit. The city has a decentralized education system with roughly 100 schools within Detroit Public Schools, 64 charter school districts (made up of 98 schools) and a 15-school reform district for the state's worst schools.

And with a dozen charter authorizers, Detroit has far more than the other cities. In Denver, for example, the public school district is the only charter authorizer.

The charter sector has exploded in Detroit in recent years, leading to fierce competition for students.

"It takes a great deal of trust across schools for everybody to commit to a centralized process," said Betheny Gross, senior analyst for the Center on Reinventing Public Education.

"A charter school is not naturally going to be inclined to hand over their enrollment process. ... Each child comes with a bundle of resources that funds their school."

In New Orleans, the common enrollment system called OneApp brought order and transparency to a chaotic process. But in a city where about 95% of students attend charters, some of the highest-performing schools have opted out.

"If every school isn't going to be in it, it doesn't resolve the problem that it was created to resolve. It doesn't give you access to every school," said Karran Harper Royal, a New Orleans resident and outspoken critic of OneApp.

Supporters say common enrollment has made it hard for schools to "cream" students — using back-door methods to selectively admit children or push others out. A principal couldn't specifically seek out students with good test scores, for example.

"In the absence of any meaningful regulation, this stuff can happen all the time," said Neil Dorosin, executive director of the New York-based Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice. The group helps build common enrollment systems.

In Newark, common enrollment was attacked by some families who complained siblings were split up. Mayor Ras Baraka publicly blasted what he called superintendent Cami Anderson's "secret" algorithm. Anderson has argued that, despite some initial bugs, the system has improved school access.

Newark officials have since added a feature that will allow families to move all of their children to the same school, Dorosin said.

Centralized authority

In cities with common enrollment, one authority oversees the systems.

Whereas the public school system runs common enrollment in Denver, in Washington, D.C., it falls under the deputy mayor for education. New Orleans' system is run by the state reform Recovery School District, with input from the local Orleans Parish School Board. The state-operated Newark Public Schools district handles enrollment there.

The applications that parents fill out are processed by a central clearinghouse.

In contrast, a Detroit parent who wants to sign up their kid for a DPS school today has to make an in-person visit. Three schools require an entrance exam, and one a performing arts audition. About two dozen DPS schools require an application.

The city's charter schools have their own applications, due dates and lotteries.

"There's no coordination now. A kid can get into Cass Tech High School and four different charters. The schools often don't know if they're actually going to get that kid" until well after the school year starts, Dorosin said. "It makes it difficult (for schools) to plan."

Districts don't get the full amount of state funding for students who enroll after the fall count day.

The nonprofit education group Excellent Schools Detroit is pushing for a new commission to oversee school openings and closings, transportation and enrollment across the city. The proposal comes as the Coalition for the Future of Detroit Schoolchildren is facing a March 31 deadline to come up with proposed school reforms.

...

Implementing full common enrollment in Detroit would likely require legislative changes, experts say. But lawmakers might balk.

"The expansion of school choice and putting parents in the driver's seat has been the general path the government has been on. If recommendations were to come ... that restricted choice and artificially managed or regulated choice, I would ... think that many in the Legislature" would have serious questions, said Gary Naeyaert, executive director of the Great Lakes Education Project, a charter lobbying group.

Naeyaert said he believes "managed and regulated choice is not free and full choice."

Debate over school choice

Yesterday's post discussed how it is difficult to create effective schools in poor neighborhoods: first class physical facilities aren't enough.  However, school choice isn't uniformly seen as helping: recent editorials in Boston and New York have championed the idea of returning to something more like neighborhood schools.  The theme seems to be that school choice is a poor substitute for having uniformly excellent local schools.

The Boston Globe ran a series of four editorials.

1. Boston Globe editorial: School-assignment plan — a relic in need of a full overhaul
"whenever officials reassess the Boston school-assignment plan, the busing crisis remains the touchpoint. Segregation was the original sin of the Boston schools - the conscious failure to invest in schools in poor, black neighborhoods - and remains the most oft-cited reason why the city should resist proposals to return the system to its neighborhood roots.
"Boston’s punishment is a daunting, time-consuming assignment process that drives away thousands of families - some to charter schools, some to Metco, and many out of the city entirely. It’s a plan that doesn’t remotely provide desegregation - with some schools more than 99 percent minority - but that officials are reluctant to change for fear of upsetting the fragile political equilibrium that sustains it.
"What remains is a system where students travel on buses to schools far from their homes, a daily migration that deprives them of playmates, consumes precious hours that could be devoted to learning, and costs the city $73 million - about 10 percent of the schools budget - for transportation alone.
"In addressing the sins of the past, the current assignment plan also masks the sins of the present. A formula so complicated that only the most sophisticated parents understand it, the plan combines parental choice, the luck of the lottery, and a built-in preference to keep siblings together. But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the whole buckling contraption is designed to make up for the fact that about half of Boston’s schools rank in the bottom fifth on statewide tests."


2. Boston Globe editorial proposing smaller zones which "would give families a smaller range of choices, but make them more meaningful": Let students stay near homes — but offer choice as needed

3. Globe editorial on a successful pilot school: Leadership and flexibility, not buses, improve schools

4. Last in the series, Globe editorial imagining how a system of largely neighborhood schools should work: Future of Boston schools must reflect city’s transformation
""The Boston of the 1970s is long gone. What’s needed now is a return to normality, to a system where most kids go to school near their homes, and follow a predictable path to middle school. Those who seek a different experience - through the performing arts, two-way bilingual education, or intensive math and science, among other subjects - can find exciting options through magnet schools. Choice should be used to highlight the varied programs available in a big, urban system - not as a way to scramble the map, sending children on an hours-long odyssey in search of better principals and teachers."

The Bay State Banner summarizes their view of this debate: Superintendent to take on school assignment process
"The current school assignment process has been roundly criticized by parents in neighborhoods throughout the city. While many in the white community, including many city councilors, advocate for a return to a neighborhood schools system, where seats in any given school would be reserved for children who live in close proximity, many parents in the black community say they want better choices for their children."


NY Times op-ed: Why School Choice Fails, in which a Washington D.C. mom writes about how the process of closing failed schools left her neighborhood without any neighborhood schools.

And here's a NY Times letter in support of school choice: Does School Choice Improve Education?
"If access to high-performing schools has to come down to a number, better it be a lottery number than a ZIP code."

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 

NYC school choice: long lines for high school tours (and some confusion about first choices)

The high school choice process in New York City uses an algorithm that makes it safe for families to list high schools in their order of preference over them.  But forming well-informed preferences is no easy task.

The NY Times has a story about long lines forming for tours of a desirable public high school:

Why White Parents Were at the Front of the Line for the School Tour
The high stakes of high school admissions in New York — and the lengths some go to get any small advantage.  By Eliza Shapiro

"Parents who pay $200 for a newsletter compiled by a local admissions consultant know that they should arrive hours ahead of the scheduled start time for school tours.

"On a recent Tuesday, there were about a hundred mostly white parents queued up at 2:30 p.m. in the spitting rain outside of Beacon High School, some toting snacks and even a few folding chairs for the long wait. The doors of the highly selective, extremely popular school would not open for another two hours for the tour.

"Parents and students who arrived at the actual start time were in for a surprise. The line of several thousand people had wrapped around itself, stretching for three midtown Manhattan blocks.
...
"Many New Yorkers cannot leave work in the middle of the afternoon, and some students surely did not know that the open house — or even the school — existed in the first place."
**********

The story goes on to talk about the matching system for high schools, which uses a deferred acceptance algorithm.  Parag Pathak points out to me that one paragraph contains a sentence that is easy to interpret incorrectly:

"Beacon, unlike Stuyvesant, does not have an admissions test. But to win a spot, students must have high standardized test scores and grades, along with a strong portfolio of middle school work and admissions essays. Students are much less likely to be accepted if they do not list Beacon as their top choice." (emphasis added)

Parag writes about this line: "while factually correct, the statement creates a misleading impression: a student is only less likely to get Beacon if they didn't list it as their top choice in the case that they were assigned their first choice school instead.  And most people who apply to Beacon list it first because it's their top choice. "

The manner in which the deferred acceptance algorithm (with students proposing) makes it safe for families to state their true preferences can be summarized this way: If you list Beacon as your second choice, and don't get your first choice, then your chance of admission to Beacon is the same as if you had listed it as your first choice.

Of course, even with that guarantee, a family's choice may not be simple if they would have liked to rank order 15 schools, and are only allowed to list 12. Then they have to consider whether, if they are rejected by their first choice, they are likely to be accepted by Beacon, or whether rejection from their first choice is a signal that they might not be competitive at Beacon either. (In which case, listing Beacon as first choice wouldn't have helped...)

See my recent post:

Thursday, November 14, 2019

Correlation Neglect in Student-to-School Matching, by Rees-Jones, Shorrer, and Tergiman

Denver's new school choice plan: communication is paramount

One of the challenges of introducing a new market design is communicating effectively with participants. Even a strategy-proof system that makes it safe to list your preferences straightforwardly may cause parents to worry whether this is the case. The new school choice system in Denver is dealing with this: Denver Public Schools' new school choice system stressing out some parents

"Denver Public Schools is rolling out a new school-choice process that centralizes school enrollment, and parents are feeling the stress of learning the new ropes.

...
"The process is still not entirely clear to me," said Tracy Edwards- Konkol, a parent of a fifth-grade daughter in the market for a middle school.

...
"Edwards-Konkol has delayed her return of the new four-page application — due Jan. 31 — that requires parents to submit a list of their top five school choices in order of preference.

...
"A line in the application that states that enrolling at a school other than the neighborhood school means forefeiting that guaranteed seat — has some parents thinking twice about choice.


"Fearing that not getting into the first- or second-pick school would place her child at the end of the line to get into their own — likely full — neighborhood school, Edwards-Konkol considered not even applying at Denver School of the Arts, her daughter's first choice.

"When I downloaded the form and saw that line, I panicked," Edwards-Konkol said. "Several parents I've talked to in fact are now looking at this new school in Stapleton because there might be more room at that school. Parents are looking for a safe school."

"But DPS director of choice and enrollment Shannon Fitzgerald said that understanding is incorrect.

"Even if the neighborhood school is not included in the list of top-five choices, if there was no room to enroll the child at the five preferred schools, the child would still have a guaranteed spot at their home school.

"Every student is allowed to hold a spot at one school at any given time," Fitzgerald said.

"It's only when a student is actually placed or enrolled at another school of choice that the neighborhood seat would be offered to a student from outside the neighborhood, she said."

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

---

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.

***********
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.”

"

School choice in Denver

Denver Public Schools is getting ready to develop a new public school choice plan, with the help of IIPSC (The Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice), the nonprofit founded by Neil Dorosin after he helped implement New York City's high school choice plan. The plan is that Neil will again be assisted by the same team of economists. An innovative element of the plan is that both public and charter schools will participate in the same school choice process.

Here's a story in Colorado Education News, by Charlie Brennan: Streamlined DPS enrollment in works

"Denver Public Schools is planning to streamline its enrollment system and will ask – but not require – all students to choose their schools beginning as soon as fall 2012.

"Under the proposed plan, families for the first time would be able to use one form to apply to traditional DPS schools, magnets or charter schools, and all applications would be on the same deadline.


"Families not wishing to participate would be assigned to their neighborhood school by default, as always. District officials say people exercising choice should find this new system easier to navigate.

"Superintendent Tom Boasberg said the change is really simply one of “mechanics.”

“For those families who do exercise choice, it will be a system that is more equitable, more efficient and more transparent,” Boasberg said.
...
"District officials say the plan’s main purpose is to streamline and unify the district’s current patchwork and often confusing systems of school choice. During the 2010-11 school year, 53 percent of DPS students attended schools outside their assigned attendance area. This includes charter schools.


"Dorosin said he knows no other major urban district that uses one application form for district schools and charter schools.

"The proposal would continue guaranteed enrollment in neighborhood schools as well as priority status for those with siblings already attending a school.

"Board member Mary Seawell has met with Dorosin and said she supports the change, if it will put all district families on a level playing field when choosing schools.

“To me, it is really about, is our system working and is it fair? Is there equity for all kids? And I’ve learned that it isn’t fair, and we need to be fair,” she said.
...
"In the 2004 New York system Dorosin helped design, eighth-graders were asked to rank up to 12 schools in order of preference, while schools ranked applicants without seeing how those students ranked the schools. A computer then compared rankings, using an algorithm originally created to match medical residents with hospitals.


"New York and Boston did not include its charter schools in the choice process as Denver will. New York implemented the plan only for high school students. Denver will do it systemwide, as has Boston. New York did away with wait-lists, Denver will not.

"For 2010-11 in New York, of 78,747 students who applied, the computer placed 83 percent of the students with one of their top five choices. Another 7 percent matched to schools further down their preference lists.

"However, roughly 10 percent of the city’s eighth-graders were matched with none of their listed choices.

“That just means they didn’t get matched in the first round,” said New York City Department of Education spokesman Matt Mittenthal. “We’re currently in a supplementary round, so the process is not by any means over. There’s always a period for appeals but after the supplementary round, they are essentially given one assignment.”

"Mittenthal added there are “hundreds of appeals every year.”

"Dorosin said technical aspects of the Denver program are still under development. Using a formula to match students to schools prevents savvy parents from gaming the system at the expense of less sophisticated families, he said.

"While Dorosin said the New York and Boston models hold lessons for Denver, DPS spokesman Vaughn underscored a fundamental difference in what’s contemplated here.

“We do think it’s good to encourage families to think proactively about their choices, but in no way is any part of this mandatory,” Vaughn said.

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

School assignment as viewed by families over time, when sibs are given priority

As I've noted before, demand for pre-kindergarten increases when pre-k kids are guaranteed spots at kindergarten, since it gives families a way to increase their chances in the school choice game. That is, families can change their priority at the kindergarten they want if they succeed in enrolling their child in that school's pre-k.

Two recent papers model some of the timing issues facing families thinking about school (or daycare) placement, when there are preferences for incumbent students, and the siblings of incumbent students. Needless to say, mechanisms that are strategy proof for static choice problems are no longer strategy proof when the strategy sets are expanded to take account of the dynamic problem. Both papers will be presented at the July 11 - 15, 2011: International Conference on Game Theory at Stony Brook.

The papers are:

The Daycare Assignment Problem, by John Kennes, Daniel Monte and, Norovsambuu Tumennasan
(HT: EL)

Abstract

"In this paper we introduce and study the daycare assignment problem. We take the mechanism design approach to the problem of assigning children of different ages to daycares, motivated by the mechanism currently in place in Denmark. The dynamic features of the daycare assignment problem distinguishes it from the school choice problem. For example, the children's preference relations must include the possibility of waiting and also the different combinations of daycares in different points in time. Moreover, schools' priorities are history-dependent: a school gives priority to children currently enrolled to it, as is the case with the Danish system.

"First, we study the concept of stability, and to account for the dynamic nature of the problem, we propose a novel solution concept, which we call strong stability. With a suitable restriction on the priority orderings of schools, we show that strong stability and the weaker concept of static stability will coincide. We then extend the well known Gale-Shapley deferred acceptance algorithm for dynamic problems and we prove that it yields a matching that satisfies strong stability. We show that it is not Pareto dominated by any other matching, and that, if there is an efficient stable matching, it must be the Gale-Shapley one. However, contrary to static problems, the Gale-Shapley algorithm does not necessarily Pareto dominate all other strongly stable mechanisms. Most importantly, the Gale-Shapley algorithm is not strategy-proof. In fact, one of our main results is a much stronger impossibility result: For the class of dynamic matching problems that we study, there are no algorithms that satisfy strategy-proofness and strong stability. Second, we show that, due to the overlapping generations structure of the problem, the also well known Top Trading Cycles algorithm is neither Pareto efficient nor strategy-proof. We conclude by showing that a variation of the serial dictatorship is strategy-proof and efficient.

and

Dynamic School Choice by Umut Dur, a student at UT Austin, who I heard in Montreal...
Abstract:
"Both families and public school systems desire siblings to be assigned to the same school. Although students with siblings at the school have a higher priority than students who do not, public school systems do not guarantee sibling assignments. Hence, families with more than one child may need to misstate their preferences if they want their children to attend to the same school. In this paper, we study the school choice problem in a dynamic environment where some families have two children and their preferences and priority orders for the younger child depend on the assignment of the elder one. In this dynamic environment, we introduce a new mechanism which assign siblings to the best possible school together if parents desire them to attend the same school. We also introduce a new dynamic fairness notion which respects priorities in a dynamic sense. Finally, we show that it is possible to attain welfare gains when school choice problem is considered in a dynamic environment."


Jacob Leshno, who will be at the Stony Brook conference, writes to me about these papers as follows.


"The incentive problems in the daycare problem are akin to the incentive problems of the Boston mechanism. In the Boston mechanism changing your report changes your priority (the Boston mechanism is equivalent to DA where priorities are changed so students who ranked a school as their k-th choice get higher priority than student who rank the school > k). In the daycare problem your report changes your priority since priorities are history dependent (for example, kids are guaranteed to be allowed to stay where they first got admitted). Misreporting preferences to get a more advantageous priority can be a profitable manipulation, and these manipulations will probably still persist even when the market becomes large."

Neighborhoods matter in school choice

 Here's a working paper that observes that assignments of places to pre-kindergarten students remains strongly influenced by where the children live, even in the presence of a school choice system.  I.e. many pre-kindergarten students go to neighborhood schools.

Distance to Schools and Equal Access in School Choice Systems, by Mariana Laverde

 Abstract: This paper studies the limits of school choice policies in the presence of residential segregation. Using data from the Boston Public Schools choice system, I show that white prekindergarteners are assigned to higher-achieving schools than minority students, and that cross-race school achievement gaps under choice are no lower than would be generated by a neighborhood assignment rule. To understand why choicebased assignments do not reduce gaps in school achievement, I use data on applicants’ rank-order choices to estimate preferences over schools, and consider a series of counterfactual assignments. I find that half of the gap in school achievement between white and Black or Hispanic students is explained by minorities’ longer travel distance to high-performing schools. Differences in demand parameters explain a smaller fraction of the gap, while algorithm rules have no effect."

From the conclusions:

"The salience of travel costs shows a first-order channel for why neighborhoods matter, highlighting how the effective provision of public goods can be affected by geography at very granular levels. In some way these results are not surprising. Most, if not all, of the papers that study school demand agree that distance is a key factor in parental choices. This paper takes this observation one step further and quantifies how much this cost limits the effectiveness of school choice policies in equalizing access to high-achieving schools. The results show that even in a generous choice environment where parents face minimal restrictions to their choices and free transportation is provided, distance can contribute greatly to inequity and that the design of the assignment algorithm can do little to break structural place-based inequities. This finding is not only relevant for the pre-kindergarten population. Not only we know that early investments can have lasting impacts on adult outcomes, but also, choice systems are typically designed to grandfather students into subsequent grades within a school. Then, even if travel costs are lower for older children, early assignments are held for several years after. In consequence, inequities in pre-kindergarten extend well after that period."

Rethinking school competition in Sweden

There are calls for reforming Sweden's system of competition and school choice among lightly-regulated private schools. The Guardian has the story: Sweden urged to rethink parents' choice over schools after education decline--OECD recommends comprehensive reform including revised school choice arrangements and more effective regulation

"Sweden has been urged to halt the steep decline in the international ranking of its schools by taking action to limit parents’ and pupils’ right to choose.

A report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development(OECD) recommends “a comprehensive education reform” to restore the Swedish system to its previous standards.

"Andreas Schleicher, director of the OECD’s education directorate, was scathing about the country’s “disappointing” performance, saying he had once viewed Sweden as “the model for education”.

“It was in the early 2000s that the Swedish school system somehow seems to have lost its soul,” he said at a press conference in Stockholm. “Schools began to compete no longer on delivering superior quality but on offering shiny school buildings in shopping centres, and I think that’s the issue we are really seeing.”

"The call for “revised school choice arrangements” will have resonance in the UK, where the coalition government’s programme to launch free schools funded by public money was in part inspired by Sweden.

"Since the 1990s, Sweden has allowed privately run schools to compete with public schools for government funds. Critics on the left blame the voucher system for declining results, saying it has opened the door for schools more interested in making a profit than providing solid education. Conservatives say students have been given too much influence in the classroom, undermining the authority of teachers.

"The OECD report says: “Student performance on the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) has declined dramatically, from near the OECD average in 2000 to significantly below average in 2012. No other country participating in Pisa saw a steeper decline than Sweden over that period.”

...

"The report blamed the system of school choice for the failure of almost half of children from immigrant backgrounds (48%) to make the grade in mathematics.

"Rather than recommending rolling back Sweden’s system of free choice and competition in schools, however, it suggests that the country “revise school choice arrangements to ensure quality with equity”.

"That would involve limiting the independence of free schools from local education authorities by bringing in new national guidelines to allow municipalities to “integrate independent schools in their planning, improvement and support strategies”.

"The report also recommends helping disadvantaged families make better school choices, so that their children, as well as those from middle-class families, apply to the country’s more popular, better performing schools.

"Finally, it suggests that municipalities restrict the ability of some parents to choose their children’s schools by introducing “controlled choice schemes that supplement parental choice to ensure a more diverse distribution of students in schools”.

School choice: what makes schools popular in Boston

One of the benefits of a strategy-proof school choice mechanism is that it yields meaningful data on parent preferences.  The Boston Globe has a story describing some of those preferences, as revealed through the rankings of schools submitted for the school choice algorithm. (The reporter, Akilah Johnson, thinks that some good schools are being missed, and that the poorest families often fail to participate in the school choice system.)

Popularity matters in school lottery: The district’s hidden gems struggle to gain attention from parents.

""The principal of Higginson-Lewis K-8 School and one of her first-grade teachers stood amid a swirl of school-shopping families at the Showcase of Schools, waiting to deliver their sales pitch.
...
"It’s like being a Hilton Hotel in between two Ritzes,’’ Simmons, the first-grade teacher, said of the schools to her right and left, Hernandez K-8 and Kilmer K-8, both with more applicants than prekindergarten seats. The inverse is true at Higginson-Lewis, making it one of the least sought-after schools in Boston - at least according to a school district tally akin to a judge’s score sheet.

"The city uses a lottery system that was intended to give all students access to high-achieving classrooms, regardless of neighborhood or life circumstance. But families fixate on a collection of well-known, fiercely sought-after schools, largely ignoring those with lesser reputations. And over the past two decades, popularity has often become a proxy for quality, making it even harder for schools to get off that second rung.

"Popularity is driven by parents with time, inclination, and sometimes the means to enter the school lottery early, armed with information and expectations. Their preferences create a system of prized schools, and those in low demand - schools whose reputations have suffered because they are in higher-crime neighborhoods, serve predominantly poor students, and have, in some cases, test scores lower than average.
...
"Each year, the district creates a “demand report’’ to help inform parents’ decisions. It shows how many parents listed a school among their top three picks. Parents look at the list and seize on schools they like, but also immediately see the schools they want to avoid, schools they often know little about.
...
"The answer lies in who is, and who is not, choosing a school and when they choose. Popular schools have become synonymous with the choices of white middle-class families, principals and families say. And the demand report reflects the choices of families who choose early.

"Oliver said parents of color and those in low-income communities “don’t always go in to make choices when the lottery starts. We have a lot of people who can’t make a commitment until June or even Labor Day.’’
...
"The lottery system was created in the name of giving parents more choice. Still, Boston’s dreams of equal access to quality remain deferred, with many of the least-selected schools lacking racial and economic diversity. The Higginson-Lewis has only 10 white students in a school of about 425, and Marshall has just eight white students in a school of 713.

“People will come to visit and they will say: ‘How many white students are in the class? I don’t want my child to be the only one,’ ’’ said Oliver, the Higginson principal.
...
"Middle-class parents often aren’t willing to send their children to a school next to Malcolm X Park in Roxbury or on a street sandwiched between Geneva Avenue and Bowdoin Street in Dorchester, where neighborhood violence has, at times, landed on the school’s doorstep.
...
"School choice is “pretty complicated stuff, and people are always eager to come up with pretty simple solutions,’’ said Curt Dudley-Marling, a Boston College professor who studies patterns of school failure and success. “It always seems to me that it’s rigged for parents who have the most resources.’’

"Not all families have the benefit of active parent groups that organize school tours to help families vet their options, which in Boston could mean as many as 20 public school options, not including charters. Single parents, families new to the country, parents of disabled children, or families struggling with the demands of life often are unable to investigate every option.

“I can’t imagine they have time, much less the resources, to go to fairs and all these things,’’ Dudley-Marling said. Instead, they, like most people, default to what they have heard within their circle of influence."

Deferred acceptance in Ghanian school choice

Kehinde Ajayi, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, is studying school choice in Ghana. She recently sent me a 2005 document from Ghana's (then) Ministry of Education and Sport "that the government produced when the Computerised School Selection and Placement System (CSSPS) was initially introduced."

It describes a version of a deferred acceptance algorithm (a clearinghouse algorithm that has been discovered a number of times and places, but that game theorists associate with Gale and Shapley 1962), and describes an essential feature, which is that if student A would have displaced student B at school S had he ranked school S first, he will also displace student B at school S even if he ranks school S second (or lower). This is what makes it safe to list schools in your true order of preferences.

"4.2 Displacement
a. Selection on Merit
The computer places all qualified candidates into their first choice schools using the ranking order. The aggregate score of six subjects of each candidate is used to do the ranking.
b. Displacement of 1st choice candidates by 2nd choice candidates as a matter of merit or better performance
The ranking may displace 1st choice candidates with 2nd choice candidates; this will be on merit and not choice. The following table is an illustration:
"Kwasi and Kofi make the following choices of schools and programmes.
...[Table showing that Kwasi, with an aggregate 'score' of 400 ranks Anglican as his second choice, while Kofi, with a score of only 350 ranks Anglican as his first choice...]
"Suppose the cut-off for Science Programme for Opoku Ware is 420 and that for Anglican School is 350, Kwasi is sent to Anglican to compete with first choice candidates for science Programme because his aggregate score is just below the cut-off for Science Programme for Opoku Ware School. Kwasi is then sent to Anglican to compete with the first choice science candidates. Since Kwasi’s aggregate score is higher than that of Kofi’s, Kwasi will then displace Kofi."

Report on Denver School Choice--first year

A Denver organization, A+ Denver,  reports on the first year of Denver's new school choice system, which seems to have gone well.

Evaluation of Denver’s SchoolChoice Process for the 2011-12 School Year
Prepared for the SchoolChoice Transparency Committee at A+ Denver
by Mary Klute, U. of Colorado, Denver

and

Assessment of Assignment Tool
by Dr. Gary Kochenberger, U. of Colorado, Denver

See also Diving deep into SchoolChoice by Robert Reichardt 
"The new choice process consolidated over 60 different processes into one.  A computer program was used to assign students to schools based on student preferences, number of available seats, and school preferences (e.g. siblings, residents, or auditions for Denver School of the Arts). A second round  is open now through August 31, 2012 for students who are not happy with their current assignment or did not enter the first round.

"A Transparency Committee of DPS administrators and principals along with community stakeholders was selected by A+ Denver to receive and interpret an evaluation report on thecomputer program used to make the assignments and a second on the information created by the choice process.  A+ Denver also provides spreadsheets of choice data by school.  

...

"The choice process worked. DPS was able to collect over 20,000 hand-written choice requests and implement a complex computer program to assign students to schools.

"There are huge differences in demand for schools. The differences are largest in high schools: Denver School of Science and Technology, Stapleton, had 8.2 first choice requests per available seat compared to Denver Online High School which had .01 first choice requests per seat.  This is a difference of 82,000%."

Denver school choice is an IIPSC project, see my earlier blog posts.