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Thursday, June 2, 2011

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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Thursday, September 23, 2010

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

Sunday, March 25, 2012

School choice in San Francisco, reports on first year

I've written before about school choice in San Francisco, and about how Muriel Niederle and Clayton Featherstone led the effort by a group of our colleagues to design a strategy-proof choice algorithm (explained here at a Board meeting in 2010), based on transfer cycles ("top trading cycles" to game theorists...). The school board adopted the plan, but then the staff of the school district decided to implement it themselves, without making the details public. Fast forward to 2012, when the first children have been assigned by the new plan.

Rachel Norton's blog has a post about it here: They're out! School Assignment Letter 2012, and an earlier one here, with a link to a March 5, 2012 SFUSD report on Student Assignment. As in the previous SFUSD reports, this does not describe the choice algorithm, it only describes the "tie breakers" that are used whenever the algorithm would otherwise try to assign more students to a school than it has room for.

This outraged Stan Goldberg (who reports about SF schools as "Senior Dad"), and he posted a video about the lack of transparency called Assignment System Fraud?

He must be an influential guy, because this prompted SFUSD to post some new information, including this "fact sheet" dated March 23, called How does the student assignment computer program work?  It still doesn't come close to explaining the actual algorithm they use, but it does include a diagram of "transfer cycles."

Which raises a question. If they in fact implemented the plan we proposed and the Board adopted, you would think they would want to make this clear. The benefits of a strategy-proof assignment procedure can only be realized if parents know that they can safely list their true preferences.

On the other hand, if the algorithm isn't correctly implemented, or if some other assignment algorithm is implemented (whether or not it includes some use of transfer cycles) then it would most likely not be strategy-proof, that is, it might not be safe for parents to reveal their true preferences, and it might be in the interest of some to "game the system" in some way. That might account for a desire to keep the algorithm secret. (So might a desire to avoid revealing any inadvertent mistakes in implementation...)

I should say that SFUSD's brief description of their algorithm doesn't look to me like it describes one that is strategy-proof...:(On the contrary, it looks like it might be patched together from something like Boston's old immediate acceptance algorithm followed by some trading...but then again, it isn't a complete enough description to make me confident that it is a description of whatever they are in fact doing...)

Anyway, one point of this post is to say that, unlike the case of the systems in New York and Boston and the work that IIPSC is doing around the country, my colleagues and I don't know what algorithm SFUSD is using, even though we know what we proposed and the Board adopted. So...this post is a bit like the ads that sometimes appeared in the financial sections of newspapers when I was young, which, following a divorce, would announce that Mr John Doe was henceforth no longer responsible for any debts incurred by the former Mrs John Doe...

Sunday, April 17, 2022

Lowell High School principal resigns in San Francisco, in latest setback for elite high school

Elite public schools, which admit students by exam, are under attack in many places.

In San Francisco, that would be Lowell high school, whose principal has just resigned.  SFGate has the story.

Principal at Lowell High School abruptly resigns, rebuking SFUSD in resignation email  by Joshua Bote

"The principal of Lowell High School — the highly selective, highly controversial school at the center of this year’s San Francisco school board recalls — has resigned, rebuking the school district in a farewell email sent Wednesday.

...

“While I deeply appreciate you all for the community and support I have received in the last three years, the decision to leave SFUSD is solely based on my desire to apply my passion for education in a district that values its students and staff through well organized systems, fiscal responsibility and sound instructional practices as the path towards equity,” Dominguez wrote in the email.

"Statewide budget cuts, due in large part to decreasing student attendance, have hit San Francisco Unified hard this year, with Lowell being affected by a pause of funding to its Advanced Placement program — perhaps where the allusion to “fiscal responsibility” in Dominguez’s email comes from.

"In the past year, Lowell made national headlines when the decision to replace its GPA- and test score-based admissions policy with a districtwide lottery was approved by the previous school board, receiving criticism from parents who said that they were “caught off guard” by the decision. The move, intended to increase racial equity and diversity on campus, was put on hold by a San Francisco court in November 2021."

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Here are some earlier related stories about the troubles at Lowell and in SF:

More School Board Drama Looming, as Lowell High Sticks to Lottery-Based Admissions Another Year  2 DECEMBER 2021

"The SFUSD superintendent says there’s not enough time to implement a court order to re-vote on admissions changes at Lowell. That’s likely to further infuriate the alumni groups that sued the district to win that court order."

 ------------

The SF Chronicle covered the first act of this play in three acts:

S.F.'s elite Lowell High School would permanently switch to lottery admission under fast-track proposal  by Jill Tucker  Jan. 30, 2021

"San Francisco’s elite academic public high school would no longer admit students based on top grades and test scores, and instead use a random lottery system for admission, if the school board approves a measure fast-tracked for a vote."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

And here's an earlier post that touches on similar developments in Boston and NYC:

Monday, March 22, 2021

Friday, December 4, 2009

School choice in San Francisco, Chicago, and Cambridge MA

Changes in school assignment procedures are being discussed in San Francisco, Chicago, and even Cambridge, MA.

In San Francisco, the redesign is well under way, and the school board has a link to the redesign process: What Have We Done So Far.

An impresssive parent-organized blog outlines the San Francisco Student Assignment system, and the current process intended to reform it, initiated by the San Francisco Unified School District. One of the early posts assembles some of the relevant materials, including the SFUSD page about the Student Assignment Redesign (including some history and legal context), and the
SFUSD technical description of the current Student Assignment Process (which can now be found here).

Chicago has begun to rethink its school choice system; see New Proposed Admission Policy Information


In Cambridge, Parag Pathak proposed that a strategy-proof mechanism replace the old Boston-style mechanism (no longer used in Boston); see School Assigning Process Criticized--MIT professor presents a possible solution to the problem

Friday, May 19, 2017

School choice in San Francisco faces ongoing problems (and not just school choice)

The SF Chronicle has the story:

Why San Francisco needs a full-time school board
By Gail Cornwall, May 17, 2017  

"Ever wonder why the pace of change in public education falls somewhere between inching and crawling in arguably the most progressive, innovative city in the world? San Francisco Unified School District’s red tape and lack of resources are to blame, but there’s also a story of unpaid workers, organizational mutiny and missed opportunity.

Here’s an example: In 2009 the school board set out to redesign its method for assigning students to schools. Though the topic sounds dry, matching thousands of children to seats at more than a hundred programs — while taking into consideration parental preference, geography, diversity and more — involves the sexiest corner of economics: game theory.

Luckily, the board had the assistance of a group representing Harvard, Stanford, Duke and MIT. Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth, Muriel Niederle, Clayton Featherstone and others proposed helping to create, monitor and adjust a cutting-edge algorithm for free. In March 2010, the board voted unanimously to take the offer.

But that September, district staff sent Roth’s team an email amounting to “Thank you, goodbye.” District officials had decided to instead “develop software to implement the new design on their own,” Roth reported.

Today, the state of the district’s homegrown assignment algorithm, known to parents as “the lottery,” is described by board member Mark Sanchez as “broken” and “untenable,” and by board member Rachel Norton as “probably the biggest policy issue that our community engages with us on.”

Neil Dorosin directs the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice, a nonprofit Roth and his team formed. When I recently asked Dorosin what kind of personnel would be needed to create an effective school assignment algorithm, he said, “Either a mathematician or an economist who knows about algorithms, and … a software engineer who could operationalize it. I would be stunned if they have that.”

Those who shared these concerns back in 2010 called on district staff to explain themselves. Despite making a pledge to the board to disclose the algorithm developed in-house, by March 2012 staff still hadn’t issued “a complete enough description to [know] … if they in fact implemented the plan … the board adopted,” said Roth.

Lack of compliance with board directives sounds crazy, but Sanchez, who served on the board from 2001 to 2009 and won re-election in November, said it happens all the time. “There are so many examples,” he said.

How could that be possible? Because board members each receive “about $6K a year — and everyone has a full-time job doing something else — they’re just too busy to check in and cajole, Sanchez said. The only thing the board really can do, he said, is fire the superintendent when “a lot of that piles up.”

That’s why Sanchez and San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim have discussed putting forward a ballot measure to increase school board member compensation. Sanchez said it would give board members “the average beginning pay for a teacher in the Bay Area ... probably ending up at around $45,000” (drawn from the city’s budget, rather than the school district’s). Following the model adopted by Los Angeles in 2006, the full amount would be available only to those who forsake other employment, he said.

Meanwhile, parents fret over the lottery. The long, complex application process — where paperwork is submitted in person in January and decisions are issued in March, then again in May, through three more rounds of supplication and the first two weeks of school — fails low-income families who lack the time or bureaucratic savvy to effectively engage. Those who do manage to navigate the process, one emotional parent told the school board committee Monday night, often find the experience “time-consuming, frustrating and stressful.” Raman Khanna, a member of the Ulloa Elementary School PTA, referred to another outcome: professional “flight.” Because of the lottery, he said, “a lot of the colleagues that I talk to … leave the city or they go to private school.”

Roth’s and Dorosin’s organization has worked with cities across the country to use data and technology to improve school assignment. Dorosin said the nonprofit’s modest fees are often covered by outside grants and other funding. This March they invited SFUSD board members and district officials to reach out again.

The response? The board committee announced Monday it would “not be taking action,” and district staff proposed two timelines for reform: one would give the board two years to articulate a new direction for the assignment system; the other, labeled “if policy development moves quickly,” would still give them a full year to do so and then another 18 months for district staff to implement it. Tommy Williams, a parent who works for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said: “The fact that we’re talking about the 202[0] or 2021 school year is very frustrating.”

Board members could start meeting with national experts with just days’ notice to hash out a broad-strokes plan, but that won’t happen until the fall. “It’s clearly an urgent issue,” Sanchez said, “but it’s one of many, many things that we have to deal with. ... We had to hire a superintendent, and now we’re involved in negotiations for the contract so we wanted to focus on that.”

Rionda Batiste, co-chair of the district’s African American Parent Advisory Council, won many approving head nods at Monday’s meeting when she said: “I don’t understand why this is something that cannot happen simultaneously.”

“If we really wanted to speed things along,” Sanchez told me, “we’d have more meetings. Intuitively, we all know [paying board members] would make things move faster.”


Nationally, school board compensation is all over the board. Connecticut pays nothing, while Florida’s lowest paying county, as of 2014 reportedly offered $24,290 a year. According to the National School Boards Association, approximately 75 percent of small-district school board members serve as volunteers while around 40 percent of large-district ones receive a “modest salary.”

This divide makes sense, because there’s much more work to be done in a district with 50,000 students than one with only a few hundred. When being an effective board member requires a full-time commitment from someone who must already work full-time elsewhere, “it’s a structural problem,” Sanchez said.

A second one resurfaced at Monday’s meeting. Orla O’Keefe, the district’s chief of policy and operations, told the board: “We need a larger number of staff with the technical skills and knowledge needed to complete assignment runs,” including to “[e]xplore leveraging district ... online registration functionality with a potential online application pilot.” In other words, while the board takes its time deciding what major changes to make, district staff propose once again building in-house. Meanwhile, a Nobel Prize-winning economist — and the tools his team has honed — wait in the wings.

Maybe instituting board salaries can buy our elected representatives the time they need to pursue public-private partnerships that bring expertise and manpower to the task of matching students with schools. Hopefully, this time it will be with the support of district staff, such as newly anointed Superintendent Vincent Matthews who, calling the meeting “democracy in action,” said Monday he’s “looking forward to moving this forward.”

Until then, Sanchez said, “It’s in a holding pattern.”

Thursday, February 18, 2010

SF School Board Meeting, Feb 17: new choice system


At the latest public meeting of the San Francisco Board of Education (last night, Wednesday, Feb. 17), the commissioners and the public were engaged in a detailed discussion of the algorithms and priorities being proposed for the new school choice system.

Muriel Niederle explains and answers questions about the new Assignment with Transfers school choice plans being proposed (with variations for elementary school, middle school, and high schools). She comes on just after minute 36 of this video of the 3 hour meeting, and her presentation, interspersed with questions and answers, continues for a little over an hour (to minute 1:39), although she's back answering questions at the end again. Also presenting the general plan and answering questions is Orla O'Keefe, the SFUSD official leading the effort to design the new school choice system.

There's something very encouraging about seeing the public policy discussion focusing on choice systems that are non-wasteful (Pareto efficient, for you economists), strategically simple for parents (so that truthful preference revelation is a dominant strategy), and flexible (so that the school board can tweak the system in years to come without harming the first two properties). The 'political' issues are the priorities that different children have at different schools.

Another attractive aspect of the proposal (discussed by Ms. O'Keefe following Muriel's presentation) is that data would be collected each year for continual monitoring of how the choice and assignment system is working.

The discussion touches on a number of interesting questions. (Even if the algorithm makes truthful preference revelation the best strategy, there are still issues of checking e.g. addresses in any system in which priorities at schools depend on home address...). But it looks like SF is well launched on adopting a sensible, workable, well thought out and flexible framework.

Monday, March 20, 2017

Congestion in SF public school choice

One thing that computerized school choice is supposed to do is reduce congestion that sometimes stops school districts from matching students to schools in a timely way. San Francisco has a computerized system, but they are nevertheless running into congestion this year. SFGate has the story:
High anxiety as SF public school assignments run late, By Nanette Asimov

"A school district glitch has parents biting their nails in San Francisco this week.
Thousands of dollars are on the line for families that are prepared to lay out hefty deposits for private schools by this week’s deadlines — but hope they won’t have to if they can get into a public school of their choice.
The trouble is, the San Francisco Unified School District may not be able to tell them about their public school options, from elementary through high school, before private-school down payments are due Wednesday through Friday. The district missed its March 17 deadline for sending out school-assignment letters because of “unforeseen staffing emergencies,” said spokeswoman Gentle Blythe.
“We have people who haven’t slept in days” trying to make sure that 83,000 school options for 14,000 students are all correct, Blythe said, adding that she can’t reveal more about the problem because of employee confidentiality.
...
"The deadline for private high school deposits is Wednesday at noon for parents applying for financial aid and Friday at noon for those paying full price. Private elementary and middle schools have a Thursday deadline. And although most private schools coordinated their deposit due dates with the public school district this year, the district’s glitch has thrown the careful planning into disarray."
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Update: SF school-assignment letters to be mailed out Monday night  By Nanette Asimov Updated 4:19 pm, Monday, March 20, 2017

"The San Francisco district sends out public-school assignments by U.S. mail because “the letters provide the documentation families need to register at school sites and serves to further verify their address,” spokeswoman Gentle Blythe said.
However, parents facing an imminent private-school deadline who haven’t gotten a letter by Tuesday can email enrollinschool@sfusd.edu.
“We will do what we can to help you after March 21,” says a notice on the district’s website."

Thursday, July 3, 2014

San Francisco may re-emphasize neighborhood schools in their school choice plan

From the SF Chronicle: Plan's goal: Get S.F. families into neighborhood school

"Unlike families who live in the suburbs, San Francisco residents don't automatically get assigned to the school near their homes.

"The system is built on decades of desegregation efforts and the idea of equal access to all schools.

"It requires families to submit a list of schools that they want their children to attend. If a school has enough spots for the families who want in, there are no issues. But if a school has fewer seats than families who listed it, a complicated tie-breaker system kicks in.

"Siblings of students get the first available seats. Then, families living in census tracts where students post the lowest test scores - which the district calls CTIP, for Census Tract Integration Preference - get second priority. Those in the school's attendance area are third, followed by everyone else.

"Schools like Clarendon, with high test scores, low student poverty and experienced teachers, fill up with siblings and CTIP families, leaving few or no seats for students who live in the neighborhood.

"Norton and Fewer want to flip things so attendance area comes before CTIP, giving higher priority to families who live nearby than to those living in presumably disadvantaged neighborhoods.

"The CTIP tie-breaker, introduced three years ago, was supposed to help diversify schools without specifically using race.

"It didn't work.

"All the board members appreciate diversity and want to eliminate racial isolation in our schools," Fewer said. "We just don't know if the CTIP preference is doing this. It's time to revisit it."


"Data from the past three years show 28 schools - a quarter of all campuses - are still racially isolated, meaning that 60 percent of enrollment is a single ethnic group.

"Instead of creating a big melting pot in schools, a CTIP address has become a golden ticket for families who wanted to attend the city's most popular schools, Norton said. It has also created demand for housing in CTIP areas, with real estate agents promoting those neighborhoods and people lying about their address to get an advantage.

"And even if a family living in a CTIP area were wealthy, it would not matter - they would still get the same high-priority status as someone living in poverty.

"There was no means test, said McCarthy, whose children were assigned to Sanchez Elementary, more than 2 miles from home.

"Someone that makes half a million a year that just bought a $2 million home in the Mission" has a better chance at Clarendon, she said. "That's unfair that they can kind of trump us."

"The CTIP wasn't intended to give an unfair advantage or attract people to buy or rent in certain neighborhoods, Norton said.

"People are making really big life decisions so they can be in a CTIP zone," she added. "That makes me very uneasy."

"In addition, African American and Latino families are less likely to participate in the first round of the school assignment lottery than white or Asian families, which again raises the question of whom the CTIP preference is serving."
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Background material: from SFUSD (San Francisco Public Schools).  Student Assignment and Enrollment Reports