School Choice by Atila Abdulkadiroglu & Tommy Andersson

Here's a big new survey on school choice theory and practice:

School Choice  by Atila Abdulkadiroglu & Tommy Andersson, NBER working paper 29822

DOI 10.3386/w29822 ISSUE DATE March 2022 (forthcoming in the Handbook of the Economics of Education vol. 6).

Abstract: School districts in the US and around the world are increasingly moving away from traditional neighborhood school assignment, in which pupils attend closest schools to their homes. Instead, they allow families to choose from schools within district boundaries. This creates a market with parental demand over publicly-supplied school seats. More frequently than ever, this market for school seats is cleared via market design solutions grounded in recent advances in matching and mechanism design theory. The literature on school choice is reviewed with emphasis placed on the trade-offs among policy objectives and best practices in the design of admissions processes. It is concluded with a brief discussion about how data generated by assignment algorithms can be used to answer contemporary empirical questions about school effectiveness and policy interventions.

Some paragraphs from the conclusions:

"Parental choice over public schools has become a major part of education reform around the world. In the US alone, the proportion of the largest 100 schools districts with parental choice over public schools doubled between 2000 and 2016 (Whitehurst, 2017). Currently, parents in Belgium, England, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Wales, and Northern Ireland have the right to or must choose a public or a private school at the primary, lower and upper secondary levels for their children. In fact, for the upper secondary level, only six European countries (Denmark, Greece, France, Cyprus, Malta and Turkey) do not have any type of school choice program and, instead, assign students to schools based on their place of residence (European Commission, 2020). Consequently, the demand for rigorous solutions for student assignment has been growing. Each school-choice program comes with its own institutional and political constraints, which opens the door for further research. In fact, most of the theoretical literature on school choice is motivated by real-life problems identified in the field.

...

"This chapter has focused on student assignment in school choice by taking preferences and priorities as exogenous. An equally important question concerns the welfare consequences of school choice. In particular, the models in the literature ignore probably one of the most important aspects of school choice: access to a school is determined not only by the ability to list the school in the application form, but also by admissions policies, such as neighborhood priority, and by means for traveling to the school. This makes both preferences and priorities endogenous. While wealthy families can choose affluent neighborhoods with good schools before going through the formal choice process, low income families are shut out of such residential choice. The matching models of school choice regularly ignore housing markets, families’ endogenous housing decisions and their impact on welfare. Recent advances in this direction have been made by studying school choice with competitive housing markets and a continuum of students. For example, in a fairly general model, Grigoryan (2021) offers a convincing theoretical argument in favor of school choice by showing that low income families are better-off under deferred acceptance in comparison to solely residence-based school assignment even when applicants are granted neighborhood priorities in deferred acceptance. Much work is still to be done both theoretically and empirically on that frontier.

...

" data generated by assignment algorithms can be used to answer most pressing empirical questions on school effectiveness and policy interventions.29 Seats in a school choice program are rationed by admissions priorities, such as neighborhood priority for pupils living within a certain distance from school, lotteries, student rankings at the school which may be based on an entrance examination, academic records, interviews and other criteria. Such rationing creates quasi-experimental variation in school assignment at unprecedented levels that can be used for credible evaluation of individual schools and of school reform models, such as charters, small schools, and voucher programs. A recent literature focuses on research design with data from centralized admissions and develops econometric techniques."

Updated citation: Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Tommy Andersson, Chapter 3 - School choice, Editor(s): Eric A. Hanushek, Stephen Machin, Ludger Woessmann, Handbook of the Economics of Education, Elsevier, Volume 6, 2023, Pages 135-185,

A hard (theoretical) look at school choice, in the AER by Chris Avery and Parag Pathak

 What are some of the difficulties that might hamper school choice from achieving educational equality (or at least substantially reducing inequality)?  Here's a model by Chris Avery and Parag Pathak.  The theoretical intuitions of top experts in college and school assignments are the sort of thing that can keep you awake at night.  In a sentence, if school choice narrows the quality gap between the best and worst municipal schools, it may also narrow the gap in housing prices, and higher housing prices at the low end may drive poorer families to move to other school districts, just as lower quality at the high end drives richer families to suburbs with excellent schools. ("White flight" has been the subject of many papers, so the issue being raised here is that an improvement at the low end of school quality may also raise prices of less expensive housing and drive out poorer residents.)

The Distributional Consequences of Public School Choice  by Christopher Avery and Parag A. Pathak AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW, VOL. 111, NO. 1, JANUARY 2021, (pp. 129-52)

"Abstract: School choice systems aspire to delink residential location and school assignments by allowing children to apply to schools outside of their neighborhood. However, choice programs also affect incentives to live in certain neighborhoods, and this feedback may undermine the goals of choice. We investigate this possibility by developing a model of public school and residential choice. School choice narrows the range between the highest and lowest quality schools compared to neighborhood assignment rules, and these changes in school quality are capitalized into equilibrium housing prices. This compressed distribution generates an ends-against-the-middle trade-off with school choice compared to neighborhood assignment. Paradoxically, even when choice results in improvement in the lowest-performing schools, the lowest type residents need not benefit."

"Our analysis contributes to a recent literature on school choice mechanisms, which has focused on the best way to assign pupils to schools given their residential location in a centralized assignment scheme. In particular, research has examined the best way to fine-tune socioeconomic or income-based criteria in choice systems. Cities have now experimented with complex school choice tie-breakers in an effort to achieve a stable balance (Kahlenberg 2003). 17 By incorporating feedback between residential and school choices, our model suggests that analysis of school assignment that does not account for possible residential resorting may lead to an incomplete understanding about the distributional consequences of school choice.

"A common rationale for school choice is to improve the quality of school options for disadvantaged students. But, our analysis shows that feedback from residential choice can undercut this approach, for if a school choice plan succeeds in narrowing the range between the lowest and highest quality schools, that change should compress the distribution of house prices in that town, thereby providing incentives for the lowest and highest types to exit from the town’s public schools. This intuition extends to the idealized case of a symmetric model of many towns and partisans, where each town adopts school choice and all schools within a given town have the same quality. Although there is an equilibrium in this idealized model where schools in all towns have the same quality, this equilibrium would likely be unstable, and instead we would expect to observe an equilibrium with differentiation of school qualities and housing prices across towns. That is, the within-town diversity observed in equilibrium under neighborhood assignment could be replicated in cross-town diversity under school choice.

A broader implication of our model is that systemic changes beyond the details of the school assignment system may be necessary to reduce inequalities in educational opportunities."

Top trading cycles (and recollections of New Orleans), in AER:Insights, by Abdulkadiroğlu, Che, Pathak, Roth and Tercieux

A decade ago I was part of the team that designed the new school choice system for the New Orleans Recovery School District.  On the District side, the effort was led by Gabriela (Gaby) Fighetti. The design team was organized by the (then) Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice (IIPSC), led by Neil Dorosin. The heavy lifting on the design was done by Atila Abdulkadiroğlu and Parag Pathak.  Until the district expanded and developed more complex requirements for expressing priorities (and we had to switch to a deferred acceptance algorithm) the design was based on a top trading cycles (TTC) mechanism. It was the first time I know of that TTC was adopted and deployed in a widely used market design. It came to be called OneApp (since it replaced the old system of applications to each school with one application followed by the matching algorithm).

Some of the data from that system make their way into this new (primarily theory) paper, about some of the distinctive virtues of top trading cycles. The paper itself is a merged effort between the New Orleans design team, and work on TTC initiated separately by various combinations of Che, Tercieux and Abdulkadiroğlu.

Efficiency, Justified Envy, and Incentives in Priority-Based Matching†

By Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Yeon-Koo Che, Parag A. Pathak, Alvin E. Roth and Olivier Tercieux, 

American Economic Review: Insights, December, 2020, 2, (4), 425–442.

Abstract: Top Trading cycles (TTC) is Pareto efficient and strategy-proof in priority-based matching, but so are other mechanisms including serial dictatorship. We show that TTC minimizes justified envy among all Pareto-efficient and strategy-proof mechanisms in one-to-one matching. In many-to-one matching, TTC admits less justified envy than serial dictatorship in an average sense. Empirical evidence from New Orleans OneApp and Boston Public Schools shows that TTC has significantly less justified envy than serial dictatorship. 

The first footnote of the paper suggests something of it's long history, and says in part:

"This paper supersedes “The Role of Priorities in Assigning Indivisible Objects: A Characterization of Top Trading Cycles,” cited by others as Abdulkadiroglu, Atila, and ˇ Yeon-Koo Che (2010) or Abdulkadiroglu, Atila, ˇ Yeon-Koo Che, and Olivier Tercieux (2010), and “Minimizing Justified Envy in School Choice: The Design of New Orleans’ OneApp” (2017) by Abdulkadiroglu, Atila, ˇ Yeon-Koo Che, Parag A. Pathak, Alvin E. Roth, and Olivier Tercieux. Roth is a member of the scientific advisory board of the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice (IIPSC). IIPSC was involved in designing OneApp in New Orleans. Abdulkadiroglu, Pathak, and Roth also advised Boston Public Schools and New York City’s Department of Education on designing their student assignment systems, discussed herein. This article does not represent the views of the New Orleans Recovery School District or any other school district."

And here's a paragraph that offers a different kind of historical context:

"In 2011–2012, the New Orleans Recovery School District pioneered a unified enrollment process called OneApp, integrating admissions to all types of schools under a single offer system. Officials identified three major priority groups: sibling, applying from a closing school, and geography. The discussion about mechanism centered on the trade-off between efficiency and eliminating justified envy, and eventually TTC was selected based on the desire for “as many students as possible to get into their top choice school” (New Orleans Recovery School District 2012a). Vanacore (2011) and Vanacore (2012) provide additional details."

In conclusion:

"In the field, there is growing momentum for DA over TTC (see Abdulkadiroglu 2013 and Pathak 2017). This trend may be driven by a first-mover advantage of DA and its use in other contexts. New York City and Boston adopted DA in 2003 and 2005, and DA is widely used in residency matching (Roth and Peranson 1999). In 2013, New Orleans also switched from TTC to DA. One of the most important reasons for this switch involved challenges in explaining how TTC handles priorities.  Under DA, officials could explain that an applicant did not obtain an assignment at a higher ranked seat because another applicant with higher priority was assigned to that seat. At the time of the change, a clear explanation of how TTC reflects priorities was not available.

"It remains to be seen whether TTC will be used in the field again. But policymakers cannot ignore efficiency, which TTC delivers but DA does not. For this reason, TTC should remain a serious policy option. Our formal results may make it easier to explain how TTC incorporates priorities. It’s possible that TTC would have been chosen in some settings with knowledge of this result, and at the very least, advocates now have a new argument in its favor."

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Some long ago posts on school choice in New Orleans:

Saturday, November 19, 2011

School choice in New Orleans

Thursday, February 2, 2012

School choice design in New Orleans Recovery School District

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

New Orleans launches its new school choice process

Tuesday, April 17, 2012 

School Choice in New Orleans with top trading cycles

Friday, May 11, 2012

New Orleans school choice goes live

Thursday, September 27, 2012

New Orleans School Choice: bringing one application process to all schools

Friday, February 15, 2013

School choice in New Orleans, evolving

Sunday, May 12, 2013

Looking back at the first year of New Orleans' One App school choice system

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

New Orleans School Choice in the WSJ

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

School Choice Index from Brookings

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

A look back at school choice in New Orleans

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†Code for: Efficiency, Justified Envy, and Incentives in Priority-Based Matching

Principal Investigator(s):  r Principal Investigator(s) Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Duke University; Yeon-Koo Che, Columbia University; Parag Pathak, MIT; Alvin Roth, Stanford University; Olivier Tercieux, Paris School of Economics

 

Seattle backs away from transparent (strategy-proof) school choice

It appears that, after a decade of using a school choice system based at least in part on a deferred acceptance algorithm, in the course of making some other changes, Seattle schools may have backed into using a non-strategy-proof immediate acceptance algorithm instead.

Here's a Q&A on How to Rank Schools for the Seattle Public Schools Choice Process for 2010-2011

"My true first choice option school is very popular and hard to get in to. If I list it first on my School Choice form, am I throwing away my chances of getting in?

"For the 2010-2011 school year, you would not be throwing away your chances.

"This year the district is using what it refers to it as the Barnhart/Waldman processing algorithm, named after the school board members who suggested it. It is more properly called the Gale/Shapley “Stable Marriage” algorithm. This algorithm is well studied and understood by computer scientists and mathematicians. It has been specially designed so that there is never an advantage to listing your school choices in any order other than your true preference. The Gale-Shapley paper referenced below is highly recommended. It is well written and does not require special software or mathematics skills to understand. In addition to being used for school assignments in many districts, a variation of this algorithm is used for the yearly matching of graduating medical students to residency programs.

"Note that this will change when the NSAP is complete. The final plan calls for using a simpler algorithm in which families who list a school as their first choice have priority over families who list the school second choice or later. This can result in cases where your best chance for getting into one of your choices is to “lie” and list your second choice first."
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And here's an analysis by a concerned parent, Chris MacGregor, who happens to be a software engineer and took the trouble to examine the school district's school choice algorithm source code: Serious Problem With New Student Assignment Plan
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It sounds like the plan may have been passed hastily, with the change in algorithm being a detail in a more politically charged discussion: Student-assignment plan passed behind closed doors.
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Here's some background on school choice in Seattle, in the form of court documents from 2001, about the use of race as a tie-breaker in school assignment.
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Here's a 1998 story about the adoption of the deferred acceptance algorithm, with some discussion touching on strategy-proofness and making it safe to submit true preferences: New Student-Assignment Plan Set
"The change, devised by board members Scott Barnhart and Nancy Waldman, will extend the district's "hold harmless" rule to all choices. Currently, when students apply to alternative schools, they don't lose their place in line for a regular school.

But, when students apply to popular regular schools and don't get in, the computer bumps them down the list until it finds a school with a vacancy - even though they may have siblings in their second-choice school or may live right across the street.

Barnhart and Waldman's system will ensure that more students get their real second choice and eliminate bumping down to lower and lower choices, which has discouraged parents and driven some to send their children to private schools, according to Waldman.

At last night's meeting, Waldman said that had happened to her.

Space wasn't available at her first-choice kindergarten, so her daughter was assigned to a school Waldman hadn't even listed. So, Waldman put her daughter in private school for three years."

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Note that Scott Barnhart is a medical prof at U. of Washington, who was matched to a number of residency positions, and so would have been familiar with the medical match.
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And here's a 1996 story (short on detail, but gives some of the political atmosphere) about the run-up to the adoption of the deferred acceptance algorithm that is apparently on its way out: Vote On Reform Plan -- School Board To Tackle Student-Assignment System
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For those of you new to discussions of making school choice simple and safe for parents to reveal their preferences over schools, see the papers here about New York and Boston, and see the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice which has more recently been involved in the design of school choice programs in Washington D.C., Denver, and New Orleans.

HT: Parag Pathak

Advice for Wake County schools

It sounds like the troubled Wake County school system is about to get some advice on school choice.  But, to the extent that you can judge from a newspaper story, they may not be looking for the right kind of advice, or in the right places (more about right places at the end...)

Here's the problem. Suppose you want a school choice plan, and would like to be able to say that it results in lots of families getting their first choice. That might be hard, if the most popular schools are overdemanded.  But you could adopt a choice procedure that is punitive to those who fail to get the school they list as their first choice. That would present families who liked overdemanded schools with a risky decision, and the safe choice would be to choose a school (e.g. their local school) that they could be pretty confident of getting into, and saying that was their first choice. When parents feel compelled to play it safe this way, it looks like they are getting their first choice, even though they aren't really. Once upon a time that was how schools were chosen in Boston, and that kind of system is still used in some places, including Cambridge, MA.

So, here's the news story that makes me worry about this.

Idea intrigues Wake school board factions
"A controlled choice model for Wake would create a dozen or more attendance zones, each of which would reflect the makeup of Wake County - no rich zones or poor zones, said Massachusetts education consultant Michael Alves, who's helped design dozens of such systems nationally.

"Parents would be able to choose from a wide range of school offerings in their zone, with a lottery to make another choice when schools are too crowded or apply to a countywide system of magnets, Alves said. He will be in Raleigh on Tuesday for a presentation before the board committee charged with developing a new plan. Parents would not be guaranteed of getting their first choice, but in systems that use controlled choice, such as Lee County, Fla., and Cambridge, Mass., a large majority do.

"We've been looking at a number of plans from a number of districts across the country," board chairman Ron Margiotta said Wednesday. "He's very close to what we have in mind, to my understanding."

Here's some background on School choice that pays attention to making it safe for families to reveal their true preferences. Which brings me to where the Wake County school board can look for advice. 

One of the world's experts on the design of school choice systems is Atila Abdulkadiroglu, who is a professor at Duke, in Raleigh NC, the largest city in Wake County. So he's on location.  Here is Atila's blog on school choice.

Here are my previous posts on Wake County: School choice in North Carolina, School choice gets contentious in Wake County, NC

Followup on school choice in San Francisco

My previous post on how school choice is faring in San Francisco was called  School choice in San Francisco: a promise of transparency.  That promise still hasn't been fulfilled.

The idea was that, after the adoption by the school board of a New school choice system in San Francisco, SFUSD decided to implement the new, strategy-proof  "assignment with transfers" choice system itself (San Francisco school choice goes in-house).

School Board member Rachel Norton wrote in a November 9, 2010 blog post that
"Staff did pledge to make the documentation of the algorithm requirements and process flows public by February; I will continue to push to make the assignment algorithm itself open source."

While SFUSD has prepared a number of documents since then, none of them seem to contain a description of the SF school choice algorithm as actually implemented by the staff. All I can find are descriptions of the priorities used for tie-breaking if more children than can be accommodated by a school would otherwise have been assigned there, but no description of the process by which they would have been assigned before tie breaking has to be invoked.

The latest document of that sort, via Rachel Norton's June 1 blog post, is here: Board of Education Policy.
On page 7, under the heading "Method of Allocating Seats," the document states "The SFUSD will replace the diversity index lottery system with an assignment with transfers algorithm that uses school requests from families and the preferences outlined in this student assignment policy."
However the document doesn't describe the assignment with transfers algorithm at all, just the tie breaking priorities.

So...I'm still in the dark about whether SFUSD has actually implemented the choice system the Board adopted, and I bet SF parents and board members are too.
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Read more »

School Choice and Education Reform at Brookings

The Brookings Institute hosts a session on School Choice and Education Reform, featuring Joel Klein, who was chancellor of New York City schools when the high school choice plan there was revamped.

"Large numbers of parents choose where their children are educated by moving to a school district or neighborhood that gives them access to good public schools, but school selection through residential choice is not an option for parents who are poor or unable to relocate. These parents are forced to take whatever is available to them through their local school district, and the schools that serve them do not have to worry about competition. While some districts are satisfied with this status quo, others have embraced policies that make school choice widely available and expose schools to the consequences of their popularity.

"On November 30, the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings will host a discussion exploring the critical role of school choice in the future of education reform. Senior Fellow and Brown Center Director Russ Whitehurst will preview the Education Choice and Competition Index – an interactive web application that will score large school districts based on thirteen categories of policy and practice – and announce the Index’s initial rankings of the 25 largest school districts in America. 

"Following his remarks, Joel Klein, the executive vice president of News Corporation and the former New York City Schools chancellor, will deliver a keynote address offering his reflections on the successes and challenges surrounding the expansion of public school choice in New York City"
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The Brookings Institute has also published a companion website and report: The Education Choice and Competition Index: Background and Results 2011. The report contains a ranking of school choice plans around the country.

One of the criteria is the "Assignment Mechanism

Our framework places considerable emphasis on the processes by which students are assigned to schools, treating it as a major category for evaluating choice and competition.  The antithesis of choice is an assignment mechanism based on residence, with little or no chance of parents being able to enroll their child in a school other than the one in their neighborhood. In contrast, the paragon of assignment systems is one in which students are assigned to schools through an application process in which parents express their preferences and those preferences are maximized.  We score districts based on where they stand with respect to these two poles. "

The report is here: The Education Choice and Competition Index: Background and Results 2011.

And it's conclusion (drumroll....) is

"The high score overall goes to New York City, with Chicago in second place.
Both received letter grades of B. The low score goes to Orange County, Florida,
which received a grade of  D. New York  performed  particularly  well in  its
assignment mechanism,  its provision of relevant performance data,  and  its
policies and practices for restructuring or closing unpopular schools.  Chicago, in
contrast to New York, has more alternative schools, a greater proportion of
school funding that is student-based, and superior web-based information and
displays to support school choice.  If the best characteristics of Chicago were
transferred to New York and vice versa, both would receive letter grades of A."

School choice and medical residency matching in Forbes

I was in New York City yesterday for an IIPSC-organized conference on school choice, and it was a nice coincidence to see that Forbes had an article on school choice and other matching processes, that mentions IIPSC.

Prerna Sinha writes about deferred acceptance algorithms, in the medical match and in NYC high school choice: Quantifying Harmony: The Matchmaking Algorithm That Pairs Residents With Hospitals, Students With Schools

"In 2003 Professor Roth (Stanford), who has played a major role in the dissemination of the deferred acceptance algorithm, worked with Atila Abdulkadiroglu (Duke) and Parag Pathak (M.I.T.) to replace the broken high school match system that was previously in place in New York City.Roth realized similar to a stable marriage or residency-student match, a high school-student match would work if individuals and schools were permitted to select alternative options after their most preferred options were rejected.

He is confident that the deferred acceptance algorithm provides a significant improvement over the system that was previously in place, but he believes the school choice system could work better. He clarified, “... there is a problem with how to disseminate information to families about schools.” He also suggested that there would be less congestion and it would be a more efficient process if all charter schools and private schools participated too.
...
 Roth continues to work closely with Neil Dorosin, who was the director of high-school admissions in New York City at the time of the redesign. Dorosin is now the Executive Director of Institute of Innovation in Public School Choice (IIPSC), and Roth sits on the advisory board. IIPSC is a team of specialists in the design and implementation of enrollment and school choice systems. The organization helps communities integrate the latest market design research and technology to solve school choice problems.

Roth calls Dorosin the “Johnny Appleseed” of getting systems like the one in NYC into New Orleans, Denver, and Washington.

Dorosin told FORBES, “Public school choice, this two sided matching market where there are two interested parties (schools and students), exists all over the country, in every big city and most small cities too. In most cases the systems that are set up to organize that two sided matching market, unintentionally, are failing. Failing the kids and the families that are supposed to use them, failing the systems of schools that are supposed to be administering them.”

Private dealings between parents and schools, limited resources and information for some parties, and congestion caused by lack of centralized communication are examples of market malfunctions that lead to disorganized systems.

According to Dorosin, the market design approach (deferred acceptance) addresses the central problem of matching students with schools: high school seats are a scarce resource that needs to be allocated efficiently and transparently in a manner that allows students and parents to feel safe when participating.

Parents and students need to feel safe in listing their preferential choice of schools, free of fear that ranking School A as a top choice will hurt their chances of getting into School B, their second choice. Efficiency involves getting optimal results on the first try and avoiding numerous offers or back and forth between parties. Transparency would allow lottery numbers, school information, and reports about outcomes to be easily accessible by all in a centralized location.

Dorosin says, “These are the elements that lead to a better system. We call this universal enrollment.”

The deferred acceptance algorithm, which is the basis of Dorosin’s universal enrollment concept, has a proven track record with the students of New York City and medical residents across the country. It may yet have applications beyond those it has now. At the very least, you can expect urban districts around the country and possibly around the world to continue to adopt some of the principles."

NYC school choice--cost overruns

David Chen in the NY Times has an article on cost overruns for the new school choice system which includes the high school choice system that Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag Pathak, and I helped design. (This is a good place to point out that we did our work pro bono--we didn't charge a penny. What we did get was the relevant choice data and the freedom to use it when we published papers based on our work.) More on our collaboration with NYC Dept of Ed, and our interaction with one of their software vendors, after the Times story, at which point I'll also draw some lessons about software vendors for school districts interested in designing better school choice systems. The article makes clear that the new high school choice system in NYC is viewed as a great success, but that the city had big problems with its software contractors.

Cost Overruns Found in Technology for Placement of High School Students

"For the last several years, the city’s Department of Education has boasted about its record of placing students in the high schools of their choice, thanks to a new computerized process. But if the ends were successful, the means were anything but, according to the city comptroller.

"In an audit released Thursday, the comptroller, John C. Liu, criticized the department’s handling of the finances of the computer system, which is modeled after a system that matches medical school graduates with residency programs.

"Instead of adhering to its original contract of $3.6 million for the system’s development, the audit found, the department spent $13.5 million. Then the original project was deemed insufficient and it had to be scrapped and the city had to spend an additional $9.4 million — and counting — for a new system.

"The gulf of more than $19 million between expected and projected costs reflected “poor planning” and raised concerns, the comptroller’s office said, about “similar cost overruns” for all technology projects.

"The city’s original contract was with Spherion, a company whose reputation was sullied in December when several of its consultants were indicted by federal prosecutors. The consultants were accused of concocting an $80 million corruption scheme related to another technological initiative, an automated payroll system called CityTime. The city hired a new vendor for the Education Department in 2008.

"In a letter to Cathleen P. Black, the schools chancellor, H. Tina Kim, the city’s deputy comptroller for audits, wrote, “Clearly, savings could have been achieved with better planning and coordination.”
...
"In response to the audit, city officials said that fast-moving changes in facets of education had necessitated upgrades — at additional costs — to the computer system. The program had to accommodate middle-school choices, prekindergarten admissions and programs for gifted elementary-school children.

"Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld, a spokesman for the Education Department, said: “Before this administration, we had a high school admissions system that was rife with political patronage and too often gamed by the well-connected, leaving students with the most need behind. Thanks to our policy changes and investments, we have greatly expanded equity and choice for all of our families, and provided more high-quality opportunities on a scale larger than any other city in the country.”

"With the advent of mayoral control of the schools shortly after Mr. Bloomberg took office in 2002, the Education Department overhauled the nerve-wracking and lotterylike process by which students were admitted to high schools. In the past, students could select only five schools, but some students were admitted to more than one, leaving the city’s best students to mull over their options after applying. But under the new High School Application Processing System, students are allowed to list 12 choices, and are matched to just one school.

"For the 2010-11 school year, 52 percent of the roughly 80,000 high-school-bound students who applied were matched to their first choices; in 2004, by contrast, that figure was 33.6 percent.

"In 2005, Joel I. Klein, then the schools chancellor, praised the new system, saying “this process, frankly, was a long time quite broken.”

"The original contract was amended eight times between 2003 and 2008, adding almost $10 million in costs, chiefly to adjust to changes in school policies. And those amendments, according to Ms. Kim’s letter, “reflect poor planning” and “appear to be an admission that the changes that occurred in D.O.E. were not expected or considered” in developing the new system.

"By 2008, the city had concluded that it needed a new vendor to develop a new and more flexible technology system, and hired Vanguard Direct Inc., under a contract expiring in 2013. "

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The story reminds me of how in 2003, when I was first contacted by Jeremy Lack at the New York City Department of Education and asked to design a choice process, the city had already contracted with Spherion to be its software provider. It quickly became apparent that Spherion's core competence was getting contracts with the city. There were a number of indications that they were going to be difficult to work with. Two incidents stand out in my memory.

First, Spherion had prepared a plan that called for programming lots of modules to knit together different aspects of school choice. I recall a conference call in which several Spherion people participated together with Jeremy Lack, me and Parag Pathak, in which Parag and I pointed out that the (deferred acceptance algorithm) architecture we proposed would require vastly less programming to accomplish than the original contract allowed for. One of the Spherion people pointed out that, in that case, a contract modification would have to be negotiated, at additional cost to the city.

Second, the way the project progressed is that, as we agreed on particular design elements, Parag and Atila would each program a version (in Matlab and Perl, respectively) that they would check against each other by running test problems, and the algorithm would be passed on to Spherion. At one point we asked Spherion how they were planning to check that their programming was accurate, and they replied that checking the software wasn't called for in the contract (and, besides, they explained, there was a logical inconsistency in the notion that you could check the accuracy of software, since you would have to design software to do that, and that software would have to be checked...). So Parag and Atila did the software checking too.

Of course we programmed only the fun stuff, the choice algorithm, and a delivered system has to have lots of data entry and processing software, so that preference lists can be entered by middle school guidance counselors, etc. Still, I'm staggered by the cost figures reported by the Times. It's hard to imagine that a gold plated system, with 100% profit margins for the contractors, couldn't have come in at 10% of the reported cost.

Part of the problem, I suspect, is that the contract with Spherion didn't give the software to NYC, but left it with Spherion which was supposed to run the match, which I think increased charges each year. When we subsequently helped Boston redesign its school choice algorithm (with Tayfun Sonmez now also playing a critical role on the team), we worked in a similar way, but Boston ended up owning the software and running the match itself. This is a better financial/ownership model.

Neil Dorosin, the NYC DOE official who had the hands-on responsibility for implementing the new high school match, subsequently left the DOE to form a non profit institute to help school districts implement choice plans, the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice (IIPSC). Atila, Parag and I are on his Board. Building on his considerable NYC experience, Neil probably now knows as much as anyone about the details of building a school choice system, and how the parts fit together, based on his experience not only in NY but in school districts around the country with whom he's been in contact.


Here's a paper in which the NYC high school choice system is described in detail, along with some details of its performance:
Abdulkadiroglu, Atila , Parag A. Pathak, and Alvin E. Roth, "Strategy-proofness versus Efficiency in Matching with Indifferences: Redesigning the NYC High School Match,'' American Economic Review, 99, 5, Dec. 2009, pp1954-1978. And here are the AER links at which you can access the Appendix and Download the Data Software

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."

School Choice in New Orleans with top trading cycles

Something exciting is happening in New Orleans Recovery School District: a novel school choice algorithm is being tried out for the first time. And it's being rolled out with some pretty good communications to the community. Here's a story by Andrew Vanacore in The Times-Picayune yesterday: Centralized enrollment in Recovery School District gets first tryout

The newspaper story even comes with a graphic meant to convey an important piece of the top trading cycle algorithm:

"Somewhere inside the jumble of narrow beige corridors on Poland Avenue in the Upper 9th Ward, in the state-run Recovery School District's headquarters, someone will hit a button on a computer in the next few weeks, and presto: Almost all of the roughly 28,000 students in New Orleans who applied for a seat this fall at one of the district's 67 schools will be assigned a place. With that final keystroke, the school system will move for the first time from a frustrating, ad-hoc enrollment process handled at individual campuses to one centralized at district offices.


"Every child will get a spot. But because schools don't have an infinite number of seats and some schools will doubtless prove more popular than others, not every family will get their top pick. More than likely, some small percentage won't get any of the eight choices they ranked when they filled out their application earlier this year.

"So it's worth considering: Who will decide the fates of these 28,000 students? In a district unique for giving children the right to pick the school they attend, instead of the right to attend the school down the street, who decides what's fair?

"The short answer is nobody, or at least nobody with a pulse. As the technical experts working with the Recovery District explained to a group of community groups and reporters last week, a computer algorithm will go to work trying to match every student with a school that's as high on their list as possible. Students with siblings at a particular school will get a first shot at open seats at that school, followed by those living nearby. But much will hinge on a randomly assigned lottery number.

"This, officials say, will give the greatest possible number of students as close to their top choice as possible in a way that's fair and transparent.

"For parents, there are some key ideas to keep in mind. The experts who developed the algorithm -- folks from Duke, Harvard and MIT -- say there is no way to game the system. If what you really want is a seat at KIPP Renaissance High School, you should not rank Sci Academy first, thinking that you're more likely to get your second choice. Ranking KIPP as your top choice gives you your best shot at getting in. 

"There's also no way to lose a seat that your child already has. If a second-grader at School A applies for a transfer to School B and doesn't win a spot, he will automatically remain where he is.

"For now, there's no way of telling which percentage of families will get their top choice, but a small number will almost certainly get none of the eight schools they ranked on their application. That's simply because they were unlucky in the assigning of lottery numbers, picked eight very popular schools or both.

"Until all of our schools are equally amazing, not every family is going to get everything they want," said Neil Dorosin, founder of the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice, which helped develop the new process."

...

"Another important caveat: The 17 schools that are still overseen by the Orleans Parish School Board will not be included. "That's the missing link, " said Debra Vaughan, a researcher at the Cowen Institute. It means students who want to reach for a spot at one of the city's prestigious magnet schools still have to navigate two separate enrollment systems. The Recovery District and the School Board have been in talks but haven't reached an agreement on how to merge the systems."

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

Previous posts on New Orleans schools (most recent first):

New Orleans launches its new school choice process

School choice design in New Orleans Recovery School District

Centralized enrolment in New Orleans public schools

School choice in New Orleans

MIT School choice summit: Nov. 13

A big group of academics and practitioners involved in school choice will gather in Cambridge to take stock of what we have learned, and still hope to learn, about school choice.

MIT SCHOOL ACCESS AND QUALITY SUMMIT 2018

"November 13, 2018 | Cambridge, MA
The MIT School Access and Quality Summit will focus on school enrollment strategies that can increase access and generate data to improve portfolio planning and the measurement of school effectiveness. Researchers will present new findings on the impact of policy interventions, and policymakers will share their experiences with implementation. Through these conversations, we hope to spark long-term partnerships between researchers and practitioners, and prompt continuous interaction between rigorous research and policy design, implementation, and evaluation."

Tuesday, November 13

9:00 AM  Welcome and Introduction
Ian Waitz, Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate and Graduate Education, MIT

9:15 AM  Leveraging Enrollment Mechanisms to Evaluate Impact
Joshua Angrist, Director, School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative
Parag Pathak, Director, School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative

9:45 AM  Simplifying Enrollment in Chicago: A First Look at the Adoption of GoCPS
Lisa Barrow, Senior Economist, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
Tony T. Howard, III, Executive Director of Enrollment and Education Policy, Chicago Public Schools

10:45 AM  Break

11:00 AM  Keynote
Richard Carranza, Chancellor, of New York City Department of Education

11:30 Taking Stock of School Choice Reforms
Neil Dorosin, Executive Director, Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice

12:00 PM  Working Lunch

Case Consultancies
Introduction by Carrie Conaway, Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education

1:30 PM  Improving School Quality in Camden
Paymon Rouhanifard, Former Superintendent, Camden City School District

2:00 PM Evidence on the Determinants and Consequences of School Choice from Washington DC
Steven Glazerman, Senior Policy Fellow, Mathematica Policy Research
Dallas Dotter, Researcher, Mathematica Policy Research
Claudia Luján, Deputy Chief, Strategic School Planning and Enrollment, District of Columbia Public Schools

3:00 PM  Break

3:15 PM  Leveling the Playing Field for High School Admissions in New York City
Sarah Cohodes, Assistant Professor of Education and Public Policy, Columbia University
Nadiya Chadha, Director of High School Admissions Research and Policy, New York City Department of Education

4:15 PM  Developing a National Research Agenda for Access and Choice
Douglas Harris, Director, The National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice

***********
Update: here's a Nov. 20 news report from MIT following the conference:
Exploring school choice
MIT School Access and Quality Summit brings policymakers, educators, and researchers together to examine strategies and ways to measure effectiveness.

Interviews with school choice stakeholders

 Here's a paper about school choice in New Orleans, organized around interviews with New Orleans "Experts and Administrators" on the one hand and "Activists and Educators" on the other. 

Akchurin, Maria, and Gabriel Chouhy. "Designing Better Access to Education? Unified Enrollment, School Choice, and the Limits of Algorithmic Fairness in New Orleans School Admissions." Qualitative Sociology (2024): 1-43.

Abstract: "Economic sociologists have long recognized that markets have moral dimensions, but we know less about how everyday moral categories like fairness are reconciled with competing market principles like efficiency, especially in novel settings combining market design and algorithmic technologies. Here we explore this tension in the context of education, examining the use of algorithms alongside school choice policies. In US urban school districts, market design economists and computer scientists have applied matching algorithms to build unified enrollment (UE) systems. Despite promising to make school choice both fair and efficient, these algorithms have become contested. Why is it that algorithmic technologies intended to simplify enrollment and create a fairer application process can instead contribute to the perception they are reproducing inequality? Analyzing narratives about the UE system in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, we show that experts designing and implementing algorithm-based enrollment understand fairness differently from the education activists and families who use and question these systems. Whereas the former interpret fairness in narrow, procedural, and ahistorical terms, the latter tend to evaluate fairness with consequentialist reasoning, using broader conceptions of justice rooted in addressing socioeconomic and racial inequality in Louisiana, and unfulfilled promises of universal access to quality schools. Considering the diffusion of “economic styles of reasoning” across local public education bureaucracies, we reveal how school choice algorithms risk becoming imbued with incommensurable meanings about fairness and justice, compromising public trust and legitimacy. The study is based on thirty interviews with key stakeholders in the school district’s education policy field, government documents, and local media sources."

"Designing and implementing algorithm-based UE systems entails complex moral and political considerations, including questions about how to operationalize what is fair when giving priority to some students over others. The designers and supporters of these systems argue that, by automating and randomizing assignments to oversubscribed schools, UE algorithms are not only efficient, but also impartial and, therefore, value-neutral. Yet as policy instruments, their use is explicitly predicated on normative grounds: centralized enrollment platforms seek to make choice more transparent and fair, which in practice means weakening the influence of social privileges in access to educational opportunities. But even if UE systems constitute powerful technologies that deliver simple and efficient enrollment across the board, providing greater access to school choice, is it possible that they still end up eroding public trust and contributing to the perception they are reproducing inequality? And if so, why?

,,,

"We argue that a crucial reason why technically irreproachable policy instruments like UE algorithms may fall short of eliciting sufficient moral consensus and become enmeshed in political disputes is that core values like fairness are defined and interpreted differently across the contexts where such instruments are created and used.

...

"We examine the multivalent meanings of algorithmic fairness through a study of OneApp, the unified enrollment system developed more than a decade ago in New Orleans, Louisiana (NOLA).Footnote1 Well-known as a national exemplar of market-based school reform, New Orleans is unique in that all the city’s public-school students now attend charter schools, a radical experiment widely celebrated by the school reform movement that has nevertheless elicited heated debate. Our study shows that a paradigmatic clash has emerged between how fairness in the enrollment process is understood “from above” and “from below.” Fairness tends to be interpreted in narrow, procedural, and ahistorical terms by education experts who design and shepherd UE through implementation, even if many do imbue UE with the normative purpose of limiting the influence of social privilege in access to school choice. By contrast, education activists tend to evaluate fairness with consequentialist reasoning and in terms of broader conceptions of justice rooted in addressing the history of socioeconomic and racial inequality in New Orleans, and the unfulfilled promise of access to quality schools for all. From a top-down perspective, then, UE algorithms are seen as a positive step towards making the school system a more equitable marketplace. In this view, an algorithm-based enrollment system plays a critical role in the democratization of choice. Seen from below by those left out, however, the same algorithms legitimize an inherently unjust market system where chance still determines (unequal) access to educational opportunity. Moreover, the fact that parents need to participate in an algorithmic process instead of directly enrolling their kids in a good-quality neighborhood school signals the absence of real equity.

...

"promoting choice options such as charter schools has yielded benefits to both students who enroll in them and—via competitive effects—those who attend schools nearby (Berends 2015; Jabbar et al. 2022) in some (but not all) cases. On the other hand, researchers have also warned that choice policies can exacerbate existing inequalities, insofar as access to valued information, social networks, and resources are crucial for capitalizing on the new opportunities that become available in a more competitive marketplace

...

“market design” is perhaps the specialization area that most enthusiastically embodies the “performative” aspect of economics practice—the idea that economists not only describe markets but also perform them through sociotechnical devices (Caliskan and Callon 2009; Callon 1998; MacKenzie and Millo 2003).  ... For too long, the design of “fair”, “efficient”, and “transparent” UE algorithms has remained a technical matter in the hands of experts, not an object of study worth analyzing from sociological, political, or even philosophical standpoints.

...

"Interviews consisted of a semi-structured component following an interview guide and a component relying on vignettes designed to compare how our interviewees conceptualize fairness across the same four scenarios. After the first part of the interview, we typically took turns reading vignettes aloud and asking the same set of follow-up questions to our respondents. For example, the first scenario describes Malcolm, a hypothetical student whose family uses OneApp to apply to elementary school and he gets his fifth-choice school, which is rated a C. We then ask respondents to evaluate whether Malcolm has been treated fairly, gradually adding new information about his socioeconomic status, racial background, and disability status.

...

"In this study, we do not rely on statistical sampling logic and do not seek to make generalizable claims about perceptions of fairness regarding OneApp among all administrators or all NOLA families using this UE system. Instead, we aim to show how studying an algorithmic tool reveals how experts and community leaders embedded in the same education policy field have different ways of conceptualizing and talking about fairness. 

...

"For instance, when we described the experience of a hypothetical student, Malcolm, whose parents used OneApp to apply to elementary school last year, many respondents rejected the notion of procedural fairness outright. In the scenario, Malcolm and his family had secured a spot in a school with the letter grade C that was their fifth preference. When we asked our respondents whether Malcolm had been treated fairly, one respondent from an education justice organization replied, “No, I don’t think it’s fair and it makes me wonder what is a better way because [the explanation we hear is], ‘We need more quality seats.’ I’m like, ‘Oh really? How are we going to get there?’ Because we want more quality seats” 

#########

The article goes on to point out that the school district hasn't published the algorithm code or flow charts, which adds to suspicions of unfairness.  My inclination is that such things should be in the public domain, which might help the discussion focus on the very different issues of how schools are assigned, and why not all schools are first rate.

San Francisco school choice goes in-house

Those of you who have been following school choice developments here know that, for the past year,  Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Clayton Featherstone, Muriel Niederle, Parag Pathak and I have been helping the San Francisco Unified School District design a new school choice system, which was adopted by the SF School Board last March.

The original plan was that we would continue to offer our services free of charge to implement the software, and then help monitor the effects of the new choice system.

Last week we heard from SFUSD staff that, because of concerns about sharing confidential data for monitoring the effects of the new system, they have decided to do further development in-house, and so will develop software to implement the new design on their own.

The SFUSD staff  have  been left with a sufficiently detailed description of the "assignment with transfers" design the Board  approved to move ahead with it if they wish. But it will take a good deal of care in implementing the new algorithm in software if its desirable properties--strategic simplicity and non wastefulness--are to be realized. (Both of these features were lacking in the old SFUSD assignment system, the one to be replaced.)

Below are links to some of the key developments before last week.

Here is a post with a link to the video of Muriel Niederle presenting the new design that the Board ultimately voted to adopt: SF School Board Meeting, Feb 17: new choice system.
And here is a link to the slides she presented, giving a description (with examples) of the new choice algorithm: Assignment in the SFUSD, and discussions of the features that make it strategically simple, non wasteful, and flexible.

In March 2010 the San Francisco Board of Education unanimously approved the new system. In their March 2010 press release (now here), the SFUSD reported (emphasis added):

"The choice algorithm was designed with the help of a volunteer team of market design experts who have previously been involved in designing choice algorithms for school choice in Boston and New York City. Volunteers from four prominent universities contributed to the effort, including Clayton Featherstone and Muriel Niederle of Stanford University, Atila Abdulkadiroglu of Duke University, Parag Pathak of MIT, and Alvin Roth of Harvard.
“We are pleased that the district has decided to adopt a choice architecture that makes it safe for parents to concentrate their effort on determining which schools they prefer, with confidence that they won’t hurt their chances by listing their preferences truthfully,” said Niederle and Featherstone, the Stanford research team."

A very simple description of the basic assignment with transfer algorithm is given on page 370 of this paper (where it is called "top trading cycles"). Much of the SFUSD school Board debate has focused on what priorities to implement. What is described on page 370 is a simple version of the underlying choice engine into which the priorities go (with a somewhat different description than in Muriel's slides). The priorities can depend on any characteristics of the students (e.g. previous schools, or siblings, or home zip code) or of the school (e.g. neighborhood or historical student composition). But to keep the process strategically simple--to make it safe for families to rank schools according to their true preferences--the priority of a student at a school cannot depend on how that student ranked that school. (If you happen to be the programmer asked to implement this, drop me a line if you run into trouble:)

Some related developments can be followed on the blog of SF Board of Education member Rachel Norton, including this September 15 post on delay in the implementation of the middle school assignment plan: Recap: Assignment committee recommends delay

General background on the theory and practice of designing school choice algorithms can be found here, and my earlier posts on San Francisco schools are here.

Update, 9/30/10: many comments followed the link to this post at The SF K Files
Update 10/2/10: Rachel Norton, the SF Board member/blogger gets emails asking if the new system will be strategy proof, and she says it will be: Reader mail: questions on student assignment

School Choice Index from Brookings

The Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings has published
The 2014 Education Choice and Competition Index

Here is their list of school districts that are "leaders in choice"

The report says in part:

"The Recovery School District in New Orleans scores well on nearly all of the components of the ECCI. In particular, there is high availability of choice, with nearly 80% of schools being charters, a supply of affordable private schools, vouchers for private school attendance available from the state, and virtual education provided through Supplemental Course Academy/Course Choice. The school assignment process maximizes the match between parental preference and school assignment through an ideal computer matching algorithm. There is no default school assignment (everyone must choose), a common application for traditional public schools and charters, and information on school performance that includes test results for children attending private schools. Information on school performance is clearly presented with support for parents in understanding and navigating the choice process. Transportation expenses to schools of choice are covered through free public transportation tokens or yellow bus service.

"New York City (NYC) also repeats its position in second place overall and in first place among the 100 largest school districts.2 NYC scores particularly well with respect to its choice process, policies for closing unpopular schools, and information provision to parents and students.

"New Orleans, NYC, Denver, and new to our list of top performers this year, Newark, standout in their use of a centralized computer-based algorithm to assign public high school students to schools in such a way as to maximize the match between student preferences and school assignment, conditional on any admission requirements exercised by the school. Students apply once and receive one offer, assuming they can match with one of the schools they have listed among their choices. New Orleans, Denver, and Newark include charter schools in their single application process, whereas NYC does not."
***********


Although the report doesn't mention The Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice (IIPSC), this is quite a compliment to IIPSC, since, of those top-10 cities, New Orleans, Newark, Washington DC, and Denver are among the cities in which IIPSC has helped design Uniform Enrollment school choice systems. And New York and Boston are the school districts which initiated the market design contribution to school choice, and in which the IIPSC principals got our start, before IIPSC was formed.