Showing posts with label New Orleans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New Orleans. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 15, 2024

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” 

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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.


Wednesday, December 9, 2020

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

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Sunday, May 12, 2013

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


Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

A look back at school choice in New Orleans

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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
 

Wednesday, April 5, 2017

Top Trading Cycle algorithms in School Choice

Here is some theory of top trading cycles, together with our experience from school choice in New Orleans.

And here:
Minimizing Justified Envy in School Choice:The Design of New Orleans’ OneApp

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

March 2017

Abstract: In 2012, New Orleans Recovery School District (RSD) became the first U.S. district to unify charter and traditional public school admissions in a single-offer assignment mechanism known as OneApp.  The RSD also became the first district to use a mechanism based on TopTrading Cycles (TTC) in a real-life allocation problem.  Since TTC was originally devised for settings in which agents have endowments, there is no formal rationale for TTC in school choice.  In particular,  TTC is a Pareto efficient and strategy-proof mechanism,  but so are other mechanisms.  We show that TTC is constrained-optimal in the following sense:  TTC minimizes  justified  envy  among  all  Pareto  efficient  and  strategy-proof  mechanisms  when each school has one seat.  When schools have more than one seat, there are multiple possible implementations of TTC. Data from New Orleans and Boston indicate that there is little difference across these versions of TTC, but significantly less justified envy compared to a serial dictatorship

Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Charter schools and school choice

Souls, a journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, has a special issue on New Orleans schools.

Souls
  • Taylor & Francis
  •  

Souls

A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society

ISSN
1099-9949 (Print), 1548-3843 (Online)


The papers are by and large critical of recent reforms, including school choice.  New Orleans Recovery School District has mostly charter schools.
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And here's a paper just published in the AER that looks at the effects of charter schools, using the fact that some non-charters have been taken over, which changes the selection criteria (students already in a takeover school are grandfathered in...)

American Economic Review 2016, 106(7): 1878–1920
Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Joshua D. Angrist, Peter D. Hull and Parag A. Pathak
Charter takeovers are traditional public schools restarted as charter schools. We develop a grandfathering instrument for takeover attendance that compares students at schools designated for takeover with a matched sample of students attending similar schools not yet taken over. Grandfathering estimates from New Orleans show substantial gains from takeover enrollment. In Boston, grandfathered students see achievement gains at least as large as the gains for students assigned charter seats in lotteries. A non-charter Boston turnaround intervention that had much in common with the takeover strategy generated gains as large as those seen for takeovers, while other more modest turnaround interventions yielded smaller effects.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

A look back at school choice in New Orleans

Here's an article discussing IIPSC's work in New Orleans, in the Fall issue of Education Next:

The New Orleans OneAppCentralized enrollment matches students and schools of choice, By Douglas N. Harris, Jon Valant and Betheny Gross

"In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans families could choose from an assortment of charter, magnet, and traditional public schools. The city initially took a decentralized approach to choice, letting families submit an application to each school individually and allowing schools to manage their own enrollment processes. This approach proved burdensome for parents, who had to navigate multiple application deadlines, forms, and requirements. Moreover, the system lacked a mechanism for efficiently matching students to schools and ensuring fair and transparent enrollment practices. The city has since upped the ante with an unprecedented degree of school choice and a highly sophisticated, centralized approach to school assignment.

"Today, New Orleans families can apply to 89 percent of the city’s public schools by ranking their preferred schools on a single application known as the OneApp (see Figure 1). The city no longer assigns a default school based on students’ home addresses. Instead, a computer algorithm matches students to schools based on families’ ranked requests, schools’ admission priorities, and seat availability. Experience with the OneApp in New Orleans reveals both the significant promise of centralized enrollment and the complications in designing a system that is technically sound but clear to the public, and fair to families but acceptable to schools. The OneApp continues to evolve as its administrators learn more about school-choosing families and school-choosing families learn more about the OneApp. The approach remains novel, and some New Orleanians have misunderstood or distrusted the choice process. The system’s long-term success will require both continued learning and growth in the number of schools families perceive to be high-quality options."

see also Opening Doors: OneApp Improves Enrollment Process but Shows Need for More Good Schools

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Universal enrollment--some benefits in New Orleans school choice

An editorial in the Times-Picayune remarks on some of the benefits of having school choice using a universal enrollment system that allows all schools to be applied to with one application. Before that was in place, there were questions about whether some charter schools were filling their places selectively, but that seems to have been resolved by the current system.
Principals' confessions to manipulating enrollment prove importance of OneApp: Editorial

"It's no surprise that some New Orleans principals try to manipulate which students they get even though their schools are supposed to be open to any child. But a new study by the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans quantifies how prevalent the practice has been. One-third of 30 public school principals surveyed during the 2012-13 school year admitted that they contrived to get higher-achieving studentsenrolled over other students. Eight of those 10 schools had no special entrance requirements and were supposed to take any student on a first come, first served basis.
To avoid students they didn't want, principals said they pressured some children to transfer, kept quiet about open seats, accepted only the best students as mid-year transfers and held invitation-only recruitment events. Neither the schools nor the principals were named in the study.
Before 2012, it was easy for a school to exclude students it didn't want. After the old public school system was mostly replaced post-Katrina by independent charter schools, children could attend any school in the city. But there was no universal enrollment system, which meant families had to apply at individual schools. If a school didn't want a child, all it had to do was claim there were no spots available.
That was a bad approach. It was a hassle for parents to go from school to school to put in multiple applications. And, as the Education Research Alliance study shows, students didn't always have a fair shot of getting into the school they wanted and should have been able to attend.
The state-run Recovery School District rolled out OneApp, a computerized enrollment system, in February 2012. That allowed parents to fill out one application and rank several school choices.
OneApp that year didn't include any of the traditional or charter schools that remained under the Orleans Parish School Board's control post-Katrina. But the wrangling wasn't confined to those schools. Five of the principals who told researchers they excluded students were under the Recovery School District.
OneApp has been refined since 2012. And researcher Huriya Jabbar said, "I don't think it's possible for schools" to do now what the principals described in the study."


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And here's the story about the study: New Orleans school principals tried to pick students, study says, while here is a blog post that critiques it: EDUCATION RESEARCH ANNOYANCES IN NEW ORLEANS--THREE QUESTIONS RAISED BY ERA'S LATEST STUDY ON COMPETITION AMONG NOLA SCHOOLS

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

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."
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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.

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

A new Johnny Appleseed of school choice--Gabriela Fighetti joins IIPSC

The Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice (IIPSC) has announced a new hire, Gaby Fighetti. There's a brief announcement on the IIPSC webpage, and Neil Dorosin writes as follows:

"I am thrilled to announce that Gabriela Fighetti is joining our team at IIPSC! We have known Gaby for many years, most recently through our partnership during her tenure at the Louisiana Recovery School District where she led the effort to design and implement OneApp, a model system that continues to inspire people in cities across the United States. Gaby will bring her substantial skills and expertise to cities across the country as they update their enrollment and choice systems. She is a brilliant and thoughtful person, and she will make IIPSC better as we continue to support this critically important work.
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Gabriela Fighetti joined the Recovery School District in July 2011. She is responsible for developing enrollment policies and systems to ensure equitable access to the portfolio of school options in New Orleans. As part of this work, Fighetti manages the implementation of OneApp, the New Orleans Public School Enrollment Process, the process by which over 10,000 students apply annually to attend nearly 90% of the public schools in New Orleans.

Prior to joining the RSD, Fighetti worked for the New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE). During her seven year tenure at the NYC DOE, Fighetti held numerous leadership roles in the Division of Portfolio where she managed the enrollment projections process for the system of 1,700 schools, and the facilities and expansion plans of charter school operators. Fighetti studied at Columbia University, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree at Barnard College and a Master of Arts degree in public administration at the School for International and Public Affairs. "
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Gaby's story is a little bit like Neil's. Neil was the director of high school operations for the New York City Department of Education when Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag Pathek and I helped design their high school choice system. Neil saw what well-organized school choice can do, and founded IIPSC with our support, to sow the seeds in other cities.

Gaby oversaw IIPSC's work in New Orleans, and is joining IIPSC to keep planting those apple seeds...

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

School choice in New Orleans: schools have big strategy sets

In New Orleans (as in New York City), some schools have big strategy sets. The Times-Picayune reports: Two New Orleans high schools said they were 'full' -- then enrolled more students

graphic-enroll-oneapp.jpg
"the data raises troubling questions about whether these two schools are truly "open admission" campuses or are secretly cherry-picking students. "I think it's a fact that school leaders of certain schools are deciding who gets a seat, and I don't think that's serving students well," said Caroline Roemer Shirley, head of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools.
McMain Principal Bridgette Frick admitted taking in more freshmen after officially declaring the class full. She said she let in students who came to sign up at the school in July, after McMain was freed from OneApp.
So, too, did McDonogh 35 Principal Gerald DeBose. He said the school independently boosted ninth-grade enrollment beyond its initial number to offset an unexpected loss of students in 10th and 11th grade.
The Orleans Parish School Board allowed the schools to fill any open seats on their own over the summer. However, Recovery School District data show they were overenrolled well before then."
...
"In most parts of the country, charters run their own application lotteries. But suspicions arose in New Orleans that the lack of oversight left room for individual schools to prioritize some applicants over others, even though almost all are "open admission," meaning they have no stated entry requirements. 
...
"The state Recovery School District introduced OneApp in 2012 to address these and other issues. It applies to all New Orleans public schools in both the state-run district and about half of those overseen by the separate Orleans Parish School Board. The exceptions, for now, are Orleans Parish School Board charters that choose not to participate until their charters come up for renewal.

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

New Orleans School Choice in the WSJ

 School choice in New Orleans is the subject of this WSJ story, which focuses on the search for good school places, and how choice helps...

Inside the Nation's Biggest Experiment in School Choice

"Denver, Chicago and Cleveland have embraced school choice on a smaller scale, but none give as much freedom—to parents and campuses—as New Orleans does: About 84% of its 42,000 public school students attend charters, the largest share of any district in the U.S."

Sunday, May 12, 2013

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

New Orleans families should get their choice list in by the deadline of May 24 (don't wait til the last minute).  In the meantime, the Times-Picayune recaps last year's experience: Ben Franklin Elementary, McMain top OneApp choices for 2013-14

"In their first year in the unified New Orleansschool enrollment system, the five Orleans Parish School Board direct-run schools punched above their weight. Going into the 2013-14 school year, Ben Franklin Elementary was the most popular choice for younger students and McMain was the most popular high school, according to new OneApp data provided to NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. 


"OneApp, now in its second year, aims tostreamline the school enrollment process in New Orleans' decentralized, two-district system. Families fill out one application and a computer algorithm matches students to open seats, by random lottery plus a few priority factors such as having a sibling in a school or, for the elementary years, geographic catchment area.

"All the schools in the city participate except for OPSB's popular charters and a handful of state-authorized charters that can take students from outside Orleans Parish. TheRecovery School District started the program and continues to lead it."

Friday, February 15, 2013

School choice in New Orleans, evolving

Here's an article from the Times-Picayune about school choice in New Orleans, which will be expanding to include more schools.   One of the paramount issues is communicating effectively with parents.

New Orleans parents need easier access to school choices: John Ayers

"Efforts to include more schools in OneApp, along with improved communication about the application and enrollment process, are critical steps toward a successful school choice system in New Orleans.

"But we can do more.

"In order for school choice policy to be effective, it must respond to the way in which parents navigate the school system, what they value and desire in schools, and how they feel about the education their children are receiving. First, it is critical that the application process be streamlined to include all schools, including School Board charter schools. Additionally, the districts must invest in ongoing clear communication with parents and through parents, recognizing that parents rely most on information from each other.

"Of course, choice among limited high-quality options may not feel like choice at all. New Orleans must continue to focus on improving the quality of its public schools to ensure all parents have access to great school choices close to home. Until then, school choice will do an inadequate job providing parents with access to the best schools for their children. Markets are never perfect, but we can make this one better."

Thursday, September 27, 2012

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

Progress is being made: New Orleans school officials push holdout charters to join single-application process

"After years of complaints from parents over how complicated it can be to register a student in New Orleans public schools, the city's top education officials have come tantalizingly close to bringing every school within one streamlined enrollment system. A single obstacle remains: persuading a dozen or so independent charter schools -- including four selective magnet schools whose limited seats are especially prized -- to join a common application. It's a turning point that will affect how thousands of pupils go about choosing a school and help shape a first-of-its-kind public education system, potentially knitting back together an enrollment process balkanized by the momentous changes that took place after Hurricane Katrina.

"The charter schools in question are the 12 that fall under theOrleans Parish School Board, the elected body that lost control of most city schools to the state-run Recovery School District after the storm, along with three charter schools in New Orleans -- known as Type 2 charters -- that are authorized by the state board of education and accept students from around the state.

"In a rare joint interview this week, officials with the School Board and the Recovery District said they are deep into conversations with each of those schools about joining the OneApp; all of them are governed by independent charter boards that will make the decision for each school."

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Miscellaneous School choice in the news

Here are some stories that I marked but never got around to blogging about...

Denver:DPS busts parents lying for seats

"DPS officials confirmed this week they’re analyzing address anomalies to root out people misleading the district about their home addresses as a way to ensure placement of their children in coveted schools, such as East High School, the Denver Schools of Science and Technology, and Bromwell, Steck, Stapleton and Cory elementary schools."
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New Orleans:
Recovery School District school assignments appealed by about 5 percent of students

"About 5 percent of the 32,000 students assigned to public schools this year through the Recovery School District's new central enrollment system appealed their assignment, district officials said Tuesday. Of those, about 69 percent got into one of their top three choices of school after the district reconsidered their case.

"On the other hand, about 31 percent of the roughly 1,400 students who appealed got matched to a school that they hadn't ranked on their application at all, meaning about 430 families are likely still feeling frustrated.

"We need more good and great schools to give parents more options," Recovery District Superintendent Patrick Dobard said. "That's what we look at these numbers as speaking to."

"This spring marked the first time that the Recovery District has offered one application, known as the OneApp, for a slot at any district school. In the past, each of the city's independent charter schools, which make up most of the district, handled enrollment on their own, presenting parents with a sometimes frustrating search for an open seat. None of the district's schools have traditional neighborhood attendance zones.

"With the OneApp in place this year, the district took in about 25,000 applications. Technically, everyone is required to turn one in, whether they plan on staying at the school they already attend or not. Overall, the district assigned 32,000 students to schools, keeping those who didn't turn one in at their current schools and manually assigning those who didn't turn in an application but were scheduled to finish their school's last available grade -- eighth graders slated to move on to high school, for instance."
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Orleans Parish School Board approves resolution moving toward common enrollment

"The city's local school board made a formal commitment Tuesday to work with state officials on a common enrollment process for all of the city's public schools. It's a step that could simplify life for families in a city where parents have both the burden and opportunity of choosing a school on their own, rather than letting geography decide.

"But negotiations between local and state education officials, as well as the independent charter schools that now predominate in New Orleans, may still have far to go before a common enrollment system is in place.

"In a unanimous vote, the Orleans Parish School Board approved a resolution promising to work toward joining the so called OneApp, a central enrollment system deployed for the first time this year by officials at the Recovery School District, the state agency that has governed most of the city's public schools since shortly after Hurricane Katrina.

"Bringing all, or at least the vast majority, of the city's public schools into one enrollment system would mark a significant reversal. In Katrina's wake, the state swept most schools into the Recovery School District and began handing over the reins of individual schools to independent charter operators that handle their own process for enrolling students, drawing applicants from across the city rather than a single neighborhood. The School Board, left with about 17 campuses, is now a majority charter district as well, leaving parents with a patchwork of varying applications and deadlines.

"Responding after years of complaints about the complexities of the new system, the Recovery District put all of its traditional and charter schools into the same enrollment system this year. Experts from Duke, Harvard and MIT, helped engineer a computer-driven matching scheme that assigns students based on their top choices, the school their siblings attend, their proximity to the campus and a randomly assigned lottery number.
The School Board, which governs a district encompassing about a quarter of the city's public school students and all of the city's magnet schools, sat the OneApp's first round out, concerned about ceding further authority to the state without being assured of a fair process.

"Quiet negotiations between the two districts have yielded an apparent compromise. As it's spelled out in the School Board's resolution, the board will be taking over management of the OneApp itself, although when and on what terms isn't clear, leaving room for any potential agreement to fall apart.

"Officials from either district tell slightly different versions of how they see a merger of enrollment systems playing out. In an interview on Tuesday, Recovery District Superintendent Patrick Dobard said he's hoping to incorporate School Board campuses into the OneApp as early as next year -- before the Recovery District would be ready to hand over the keys of that system for the School Board to run. Dobard said any transition toward School Board control of the OneApp would likely be settled with some type of written contract, likely years down the road and as a part of a broader discussion of bringing all of the city's schools back under some type of unified governing body.
"We don't have to be the long-term manager," Dobard said. "But we would likely have to some kind of memorandum of understanding."

"Thomas Robichaux, the School Board's president, however, said Tuesday, "It's our intention to manage it right away, or at the very least to be the joint manager."

"The School Board's 11 independent charter schools -- publicly funded but operating autonomously in a contract with the district -- may present another hurdle. Robichaux has said that the district cannot force those schools into a common enrollment process, so officials will have to negotiate with each of them.

"One other caveat, even if the Recovery District and the School Board succeed in unifying their enrollment, will be the city's so-called Type 2 charters, authorized by the state and operating outside the jurisdiction of either district. Recovery District officials have said they would like to include Type 2s in the OneApp as well, but there has been no public move in that direction.

"Still, Dobard said he's optimistic about getting a deal done, with the School Board at least. Recovery District officials say there are technically problems to overcome. They will need a new computer algorithm to incorporate the selective admissions requirements at some School Board campuses. But none of it is beyond working out. "
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Washington D.C.


Create one single lottery for charter and non-charter schools

"The current application process for DC's charter and non-charter public schools is a chaotic mess that confuses parents and hurts education for students. DC could fix many problems by creating a centralized lottery process for all public schools, charter and non-charter.
"Steve Glazerman called for a centralized application for charter schools in 2010. Since then, DC Public Schools (DCPS) instituted a common application for the District's specialized high schools.
This is a great step, but it could go a lot further to include charter schools and traditional neighborhood schools at all grades. It wouldn't be hard; the company that operates whose software enables the centralized application for DCPS application-only high schools is currently implementing a centralized application for charters and non-charters in Denver.
District officials generally agree. Scheherazade Salimi, Senior Advisor to the Deputy Mayor for Education, says that "a common application is something the Deputy Mayor would like to explore in partnership with DCPS and [the Public Charter School Board]."
In a centralized application, parents would select several schools, rank-ordered by preference. They would select charters and non-charters, and could conceivably select up to 12, 15 or 20 schools.
A single lottery would select applicants one by one, and assign each to the first school on his or her list with an open slot. This is similar to how many colleges assign dorm rooms, for instance.
This type of centralized application would have many benefits over the current system.
Parents are more likely to get into their top choice schools.
When parents apply to schools now, they apply for DCPS schools using a centralized application, and apply to each charter school separately. Pre-K programs have lotteries for all children, while students in 1st grade and older enter lotteries only for out-of-boundary DCPS schools.
As a result, one applicant in Capitol Hill could be waitlisted at a nearby charter that was their top choice and accepted into a Columbia Heights charter that was their 2nd choice, while a Columbia Heights family that preferred the nearby charter could be waitlisted there but accepted to the Capitol Hill charter school.
The result is that neither child can go to his or her top choice charter, and both families are making unnecessary drives to get the kids to school.
Spots at competitive schools won't be locked up by parents who don't plan to send kids there.
Schools hold their lotteries in the spring for spots in the fall. In the current system, if a child gets accepted to multiple charter schools and/or an out-of-boundary DCPS school, parents might tell each school that the child will attend in the fall.
When they decide which school to attend, they inform the schools at some point in the summer or they just don't show up for the schools they didn't select. There's no deposit or penalty, so they don't pay a cost for this, but other families lose out who might have taken the slot but had to make a decision earlier to go elsehwere.
Some parents do this to give themselves more time to research the schools; some want to wait until school starts to assess the facilities of charter schools that were still preparing their facilities in the spring.
When a student attending an out-of-boundary DCPS school gets into a different out-of-boundary DCPS school, the principal of the first school "releases" the student before they can secure their spot into the new school. Charter schools have no such process.
Squatting on multiple school slots is unfair to everybody. When children accepted through the lottery don't show up in the fall, principals have to scramble to contact any remaining applicants on their wait list. Squatting also leads to the next problem.
Principals could provide better estimates of enrollment for funding purposes.
One of the most common grievances from charter advocates is that DCPS principals overestimate their enrollment to receive extra funding.
DCPS schools project fall enrollment in the spring and these projections determine funding for the following year. If the actual enrollment is lower, DCPS' budget doesn't shrink. But charter schools receive funding quarterly based on their actual enrollment. If a charter school's enrollment declines, it loses money.
Some principals might be doing this on purpose, but it's also difficult for DCPS principals to accurately estimate enrollment for the following fall when applicants hold a spot at their school while they spend the summer deciding whether to attend charter schools.
A centralized application would eliminate much of this problem. Each school, DCPS and charter, would know that every child on its list isn't going to suddenly go elsewhere in the DC system. They could go to private school or move to another jurisdiction, but that applies to a smaller number of children.
Charter principals wouldn't be able to "skim the cream."
Charter school critics often complain that charter school principals find ways to weed out students during enrollment who may be harder to educate. The lottery initially fills all charter school slots randomly, but as parents of children who got in on the lottery tell the school that they won't be taking the slot, the charter itself contacts applicants off of their wait list.
There are opportunities for principals to intentially or unintentionally abuse this system. For example, principals can give an applicant more or less time to respond and claim the slot before they move on to the next child. They might give more "desirable" children more time than others.
A charter school in New York was put on probation last year for weeding out applicants in the enrollment process. While there hasn't been a specific accusation like this against any DC charter school, a centralized application system could remove this because students would be assigned to a single school.
We would have data on capacity needs at all grades, especially pre-K.
District officials say that DC has achieved universal pre-K, but the city's auditor of pre-K capacity disagrees. Who is right? We won't know until we have data on the actual demand for pre-K.
A centralized application for pre-K, including all of the pre-K programs, would generate this data. It would then be easy to compare the number of total children applying against the number of public pre-K slots.
The data wouldn't be perfect, as some parents apply to DCPS pre-K programs as a backup to their private pre-K applications, while other parents miss the pre-K lottery (in February) but still want to send their children to pre-K. But it would be far better than the current audit, which effectively measures nothing.
All students would start school on time together.
One of the unintended consequences of the plethora of charter school choices is that schools don't really know who will show up for school in September. This is largely due to parents holding spots through the summer for multiple schools but only sending their kids to one school.
The result is that classroom compositions are in flux throughout September and October as principals contact students off the wait list to fill suddenly vacated spots. This is challenging for teachers and ultimately hurts students' education.
District education officials and the State Board of Education can start pushing toward a single lottery right away. An education committee in the Council, as many have suggested, could also help move this forward.

Friday, May 11, 2012

New Orleans school choice goes live

Recovery School District says new pupil enrollment system is getting the job done

The state-run district that governs most of the public schools in New Orleans has finished assigning more than 25,000 pupils who turned in applications for seats at one of 67 campuses this spring, declaring its new central enrollment system a success. Recovery School District officials said Wednesday that of the 3,841 students looking for a kindergarten or ninth-grade seat -- broadly speaking, those entering the system for the first time or making the transition to high school -- 84 percent got into one of the first three choices they ranked on their application. About 76 percent got their top choice.
lafayette-academy-janet-wolfe.jpgView full sizeAmong elementary schools, Dr. Martin Luther King Charter School, Lafayette Academy and Martin Behrman were the most popular. Janet Wolfe was photographed teaching her second-grade class at Lafayette Academy in October.
Of the 19,896 looking for a place in the other grades, about 73 percent got one of their top three choices. And 59 percent got their first choice.
On the other hand, almost 16 percent of students heading into kindergarten or the ninth grade didn't get any of the choices they ranked, along with 26 percent of students in other grades. Because there are a limited number of seats in any given school and some schools are more popular than others, it was inevitable that some students would have to stay put where they already attend or be manually assigned by the district.
State officials said that in those cases, they assigned students to open seats using random lottery numbers, giving preference to those living closer to one school than another. A little more than half of the students who didn't get any school that they ranked will remain in the school they already attend.
The data also suggested that only a fairly narrow set of public schools in New Orleans have built a strong enough reputation to draw big applicant pools. The state said that on average, families ranked only 2.6 elementary schools and 2.4 high schools, even though they could have ranked as many as eight.
"It says two things," concluded Gabriela Fighetti, the Recovery District's director of student enrollment. "There are some schools that families really want to go to -- and we really need to keep improving our full range of schools so that families have more options."
diagram-enrollment-041512.jpgView full size
Overall though, state officials are pointing to these numbers as a sign that the district's new central enrollment process, which made its debut this year, is working.
The state moved to centralize enrollment this spring after years of complaints from parents about the difficulty of finding a school in a city where so many independent charter schools have been handling the process on their own. In past years, families who wanted to try for a spot at more than one charter school -- charters now educate close to 80 percent of the city's public school students -- had to fill out separate applications and hope that one of their choices had an open seat.
Now the district is assigning seats based on how families rank their top choices, their proximity to the school and a random lottery number.
Families are being notified this week where their children will attend in the fall. Anyone can appeal their assignment, and given the significant number of pupils assigned a school they didn't ask for, that could prove a contentious, emotional process.
"If you're asking if there were wrinkles, absolutely," said Vera Triplett, CEO of the New Beginnings charter school network. "There were kids who weren't assigned to any of their choices, kids who didn't get into a school where their sibling goes, that kind of thing."
Triplett added: "I think a lot of it will be ironed out after it's brought to the district's attention."
Still, the district isn't in a position to give every family what it wants. Seats are limited, and if parents ranked only the more popular schools, they were more likely to be disappointed.
The Recovery District released a list of the top three most popular schools for different grade levels on Wednesday, but officials had not compiled complete rankings for every school in the city. Those in the top three tended to be schools with better performance scores from the state, as measured by test results and other factors.
Among elementary schools, Dr. Martin Luther King Charter School, Lafayette Academy and Martin Behrman topped the list. For just those students entering kindergarten, however, schools that are a part of the KIPP charter network proved the most popular, with KIPP Central City, KIPP McDonogh 15 and KIPP Believe in the top three slots.
Lake Area, Sophie B. Wright and Sci Academy were the top secondary schools among all applicants, while those entering the ninth grade most often chose Lake Area, Sci Academy and KIPP Renaissance.

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See these previous posts on IIPSC projects.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

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

New Orleans launches its new school choice process