School choice in San Francisco: plans and politics happen at different speeds

 A report  in PNAS last week on a long-running study of school choice proposals in San Francisco came out almost simultaneously with an announcement that San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) plans to largely step back from school choice and revert to a system of neighborhood schools determined by students' home addresses. Below are the PNAS paper, the SFUSD announcements, and then some links to the history of school choice in SF.

I. Lo, K. Mentzer, M. YahyazadehJeloudar, H. O’Connell, J. Monardo, & I. Ashlagi, Designing school choice for diversity in the San Francisco Unified School District, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 123 (45). November 2, 2026, e2524796123, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2524796123 (2026). 

 "Abstract.  More than 65 years after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling that school segregation is unconstitutional, public schools across the United States are again experiencing rising segregation. In districts like San Francisco, efforts to implement district-wide choice policies have largely failed to reverse these trends. Since 2019, we have collaborated with the San Francisco Unified School District to design a student assignment policy meeting the district’s goals of diversity, predictability, and proximity. We use optimization techniques to develop policies restricting choice to zones. We compare these to district-wide choice policies by estimating a choice model using historical application data and simulating assignment. Our results show multiple policies can reduce school segregation while preserving varying degrees of proximity, choice, and predictability. Zone-based policies with reserves reduce the concentration of racial minority students in high-poverty schools and maintain proximity, but reduce choice. District-wide choice with reserves and distance-based priority can further reduce segregation, but at the cost of predictability. Tradeoffs are necessary as no policy dominates another policy. In addition, we show that spatial segregation indices capture average patterns in these tradeoffs but miss important variation revealed by our simulation framework. Our work informed the design and approval of a zone-based policy in San Francisco in 2020, and supports ongoing policy implementation."

 

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Oct. 20, 2026 Message from SFUSD Superintendent Dr. Maria Su to Families: Link to this section

Historic Step Toward a Great Neighborhood School for Every Student 

Oct. 13, 2026 Press Release:  Link to this section

San Francisco Board of Education Approves Resolution to Move SFUSD Toward Neighborhood-Based Student Assignment System

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Introduction:  Link to this section

SFUSD is changing how students are assigned to elementary schools. On October 13, 2026, the Board of Education voted to replace the current lottery with a neighborhood-based system. Under the proposed policy, every family would be guaranteed a seat at a school near home, no matter when they apply. Families could still apply to citywide programs, such as language programs and K-8 schools. We are making this change because families have told us the current process feels complicated and unpredictable. Where your child goes to school should not come down to luck.

The Board’s vote sets a direction. It is not the final policy. Over the next few months, we will meet with families in their schools and neighborhoods, in many languages, to work out the details. The Board will hold its final vote on April 13, 2027. Nothing changes for current families. The new system will start with students who enroll in the 2028-29 school year.

A new assignment system is only part of the work. Every child deserves a strong school close to home, so we also plan to invest in schools in every neighborhood, starting with those that have been the most underserved.

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San Francisco has been considering and tinkering with school choice for a long time, during a period in which other kinds of political turmoil rocked SF and its schools.  Here (mostly from 2010) and here are some of my earlier posts on school choice in SF. 

The Milken Institute Review on blood and plasma, and altruism (with art work)

 You can  be paid to donate blood plasma, and still be an altruist.

Issue four, 2026 of the Milken Institute Review, excerpts the chapter on blood supply from my book Moral Economics. 

The last quoted line of the  chapter is  "Health care that's good enough for the rich shouldn't be repugnant for the poor."

Peter Passell, the long-time editor of the review, writes

"Nobel Prize winners in the sciences can justifiably lay claim to mind-bending insights and stunning discoveries that change our lives. Readers may be excused, though, for wondering whether the same can be said about the achievements honored by the Nobel in economic science, which generally excite only the nerds among us. ¶ Not so for the work of Alvin Roth, a Stanford University economist whose deep dives into how markets function earned him a trip to Stockholm in 2012. He pioneered changes in what are called “matching markets” – work that has revolutionized the process for matching kidney donors and recipients. ¶ In his new book Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work,* Roth dissects markets in which the legitimacy of voluntary transactions is widely disputed. Here, we excerpt the chapter on the market for human blood, where millions of patients’ lives depend on sources of blood that cannot legally be purchased. It’s a tale that’s going to surprise you.

— Peter Passell, Published October 30, 2026 "

*Copyright © 2026 by Alvin E. Roth. Reprinted by permission of Basic Venture, an imprint of Basic Books Group, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc., New York, NY. All rights reserved. 

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It turns out that Peter excerpts my books as fast as I can write them:)

Tuesday, October 27, 2015 Chapter 4 of Who Gets What and Why, in the Milken Institute Review (with art work...) 

https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/who-gets-what-and-why 

 

William Nordhaus (1941-2026) and Jim Andreoni (1959-2026)

 I returned from a long trip and an arduous conference last week to learn that two important economists had passed away, Bill Nordhaus, who won a Nobel, and Jim Andreoni, who could have.

Nordhaus' work on climate change was prescient, and is well known.  Here's the Nordhaus obit from Yale:

William Nordhaus, Nobel laureate who integrated economics and climate change, devoted Yale citizen  Oct 31, 2026  By Penelope Laurans  

"William Nordhaus ‘63, Sterling Professor of Economics who won a Nobel Prize in 2018 for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis, died Oct. 30 at age 85. 

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Jim Andreoni was a multi-talented scholar of public goods, well known in the experimental economics community.  The work that in my mind made him a Nobel candidate was his work on different forms that altruism can take.

Two of his papers that I really like are 

Andreoni, James. "Impure altruism and donations to public goods: A theory of warm-glow giving." The economic journal 100, no. 401 (1990): 464-477.

and

James Andreoni, Justin M. Rao, and Hannah Trachtman, Avoiding the Ask: A Field Experiment on Altruism, Empathy, and Charitable Giving. Journal of Political Economy 2017 125:625-653. 

The first of those, a theory paper, I think of as one of the foundational papers about effective altruism, but from the point of view that much altruism is not primarily of the effective sort.

The second paper is an experiment that I'll present to my class today, in Jim's memory. 

 

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 Vigorous, personal disagreement about what constitutes altruism in organ donation and transplantation was what made my Geneva conference so arduous (and what makes the kinds of controversial markets I discuss in Moral Economics so controversial:).

Monday, October 26, 2026 Brocher conference on boundaries for incentives in organ donation Oct 27-29 in Geneva

(No description of the conference has been posted yet, but it was hot and heavy, and everyone was an altruist...) 

  

happy post-Halloween

In our garden:

Sports, ethnicity, and the urban geography of basketball

 I'm just back from an unexpectedly grueling trip, and hope to resume semi-daily blogging.  This story caught my eye: basketball has been an inner city game in the U.S., in part because basketball courts can be set up very inexpensively in urban parks, and not so expensively in gyms.  So inner city kids are disproportionately represented among the most talented players.  But who those kids are has changed over time.

The WSJ has the story: 

When Jews Ruled the Basketball Court.  Six players on the New York Knicks’ inaugural roster were Jewish.  By Michael Freund 

 "It was Nov. 1, 1946, and Ossie Schectman of the New York Knicks took a bounce pass and scored on a two-handed underhand layup. Schectman, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, had just scored the first basket in NBA history.

...

"Six members of the Knicks’ original roster, including Schectman, were Jewish. That was no coincidence. For much of the early 20th century, basketball was widely regarded as a Jewish game.

"The reason can be traced to the immigrant neighborhoods of New York and Philadelphia. Millions of Jews arrived from Eastern Europe beginning in the 1880s, often settling in neighborhoods with little open space and scant money to spend on recreation. Baseball required a field and equipment. Basketball needed little more than a ball, a hoop and a schoolyard. "

Brocher conference on boundaries for incentives in organ donation Oct 27-29 in Geneva

 I'm on my way to the Brocher Foundation, near Geneva, for a conference organized by Swisstransplant (SWT) and the Declaration of Istanbul Custodian Group (DICG), on

 Constructive dialogue interrogating boundaries for incentives in organ donation  

"The shortage of organs available for transplantation poses a major challenge to healthcare systems. Some proposals aim to introduce incentives to encourage organ donation. This workshop examines the ethical implications of these strategies and discusses acceptable limits for promoting donation while respecting human dignity." 

Economics competition for high school and middle school students in Italy

Yesterday,  Tito Boeri, David Card and I attended the  award ceremony of the EconoMia and EcoQuiz competitions for high school and middle school students in Italy.

 At the Intesa Sanpaolo skyscraper, the award ceremony of the EconoMia and EcoQuiz competitions, as part of the International Festival of Economics. 

Here we are with the high school students whose essays received awards.