It can be hard for parents to assemble information about schools

Here's a critique of the NYC high school choice system, from a former Dept of Ed administrator who now runs a public- and private-school admissions consulting firm that helps parents navigate the system. He calls for better advising...

Why high school admissions actually doesn’t work for many city students — and how it could
by Maurice Frumkin on August 7, 2015

"It was my pleasure to read Professor Alvin Roth’s recent piece on why New York City’s high school admissions process now works most of the time. And as the city’s former deputy director of high school enrollment and a current admissions consultant who has helped thousands of families navigate the process, I see his observations play out every day.

Given how massive the New York City process is, the mechanism of assigning students to schools after families have made their choices does, indeed, work well. But the process by which those choices are made remains complicated, and very much depends on expertise or the ability to spend an excessive amount of time understanding how it works. Many students still go without either.

...

"Part of my role at the DOE was to train middle school counselors, whose workloads, savvy, and degree to which their students’ parents were engaged in the process varied widely. Over time, many counselors have developed into admissions experts who do an outstanding job informing their families. A Manhattan school counselor entering her third year recently told me, though, that it was a challenge for her to become familiar with schools beyond the “brand name” schools that everyone talks about.

"It’s a problem Roth acknowledges. “Although it’s great to have a marketplace that gives you an abundance of opportunities, these may be illusory if you can’t evaluate them, and they can cause the market to lose much of its usefulness,” he writes.

 ...

"I speak with families every day who are convinced that although there are 5,000 applicants to a selective program with 100 seats, an offer is inevitable because their child meets the published selection criteria. They will, therefore, list fewer choices – and often only choices that represent the most sought-after, screened programs."

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I'm reminded of this earlier post, and the advice I gave to "Jimmy," who had suffered from just this mistake...

Saturday, May 7, 2011

High school choice in New York City: some advice for next year

New York City’s high school admissions process: an excerpt from Who Gets What and Why, in Chalkbeat

Chalkbeat has a brief excerpt from my new book, Who Gets What and Why:

Here's the link to what they have to say (or rather what they have me saying, in an excerpt from Chapter 9 "Back to School"):
Why New York City’s high school admissions process only works most of the time

Below are two paragraphs from the excerpt, concerning Neil Dorosin, who worked for the NYC Department of Education at the time, and is now the Johnny Appleseed of school choice as the director of the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice (IIPSC):

One reason that principals gained confidence was that DOE staffers did a good job communicating to them how the new system would work. Crucial in that effort was Neil Dorosin, the DOE’s director of high school operations. The task of informing everyone about the new algorithm fell to Neil and his colleagues in the Office of Enrollment Services. Among those he had to educate was his ultimate boss, Chancellor Joel Klein.

“One day I got called down to talk to him,” Neil recalls. “He was upset because he had a friend whose child didn’t get into their first-choice school. The friend had a cousin whose child had gotten into the school, and it was their last choice. I had to explain why the system had to function that way” (i.e., to make it safe to list true preferences).

The Amsterdam court rules on school choice

Hessel Oosterbeek sends the following update on the school choice court case seeking to allow the exchange of school places that were allocated by a deferred acceptance algorithm with multiple tie breaking.  He writes: 

"Attached is a link to the decision of the judge in Amsterdam. Important considerations for the judge are that: i) trading would harm students who have a higher position on the waiting lists, and ii) allowing trade this year makes the system unusable in the future. The judge also writes that the rules were clear.

Overall it reads that the judge is well informed."

Google Translate allows you to make reasonable sense of the judge's decision in English...
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Here is a blog post, also in Dutch, but Google Translate does a good enough job so that you can see that this is a pretty detailed discussion of various algorithms, strategy-proofness, the judge's decision, etc. It seems that the public discussion is going on at a pretty high level: 
Schoolstrijd in Amsterdam
Waarom ruilen niet mag, ook niet als beide partijen er beter van worden
(School Fight in Amsterdam

Why should not change, even if both parties are better off)

School choice in Amsterdam goes to court over tie-breaking

Hessel Oosterbeek sends me this article in Dutch about the very current controversy playing out in Amsterdam over this year's school choice results:

Het beest in de Amsterdamse ouder is los,
which Google Translate renders as
The beast in Amsterdam's parent is loose

Some background to the current controversy can be found in a paper by Oosterbeek and his coauthors which was influential in the Amsterdam school choice design (which used student-proposing deferred acceptance with multiple tie-breaking):

"The performance of school assignment mechanisms in practice," by Monique de Haan, Pieter A. Gautier, Hessel Oosterbeek, and Bas van der Klaauw.

Abstract: "Theory points to a potential trade-off between two main school assignment mechanisms; Boston and Deferred Acceptance (DA). While DA is strategyproof and gives a stable matching, Boston might outperform DA in terms of ex-ante efficiency. We quantify the (dis)advantages of the mechanisms by using information about actual choices under Boston complemented with survey data eliciting students’ school preferences. We find that under Boston around 8% of the students apply to another school than their most-preferred school. We compare allocations resulting from Boston with DA with single tie-breaking (one central lottery; DA-STB) and multiple tie-breaking (separate lottery per school; DA-MTB). DA-STB places more students in their top-n schools, for any n, than Boston and results in higher average welfare. We find a trade-off between DA-STB and DA-MTB. DA-STB places more students in their single most-preferred school than DA-MTB, but fewer in their top-n, for n ≥ 2. Finally, students from disadvantaged backgrounds benefit most from a switch from Boston to any of the DA mechanisms"

The city of Amsterdam adopted multiple tie-breaking, with the consequence that some post-assignment trades now seem possible between students.  And this is where the beast in Amsterdam's parents (some of whom are lawyers) has been loosed. Here's Google Translate again, on the news story:

"Moreover, there is a side effect that parents can not stomach: a class can sit next to each other two children who are both disappointed in the school they were assigned, whereas if they would swap, both overjoyed to be made ​​with a spot on their favorite school. A child who is placed in a school where he really did not want it (tenth place on his preference list), through an exchange would nevertheless may still end up at No. 1. And yet you can not. There is, every year it again what in Amsterdam that the beast in the parent disconnect when it comes to the choice of school of the child.
...
"A father of a girl who wants to be very happy in music and dance, with a spot on the Geert Groot School, turned to Sprenkeling for an exchange. To facilitate this exchange, harnessed the lawyer with 32 other parents a lawsuit against the dome of high schools Osvo. The aim is to consider the new placement system this year as a test. Only next year should really not be exchanged. "

I understand from Hessel that a judge is expected to rule soon on whether families may exchange school places...

Unravelling of magnet school enrollment in Cincinnati: 16 days in a tent

Here's a story about a devoted dad in Cincinnati who slept outside of a school for 16 days, along with many other parents, to preserve his place in line for a kindergarten enrollment...

Waiting For Kindergarten
I slept outside for 16 days to enroll my son in Fairview-Clifton Elementary School

And some history:
"When there are more kids than spots in a popular school, how do you decide which kids get in?

CPS has tried to answer this question several times. In the 1990s, families enrolled in magnet programs via Super Saturday. CPS kept the enrollment locations (CPS schools) secret until the early morning on the last Saturday in January. After announcing the locations, lines formed quickly and schools accepted kids on a first-come, first-serve basis. Parents enlisted family and friends to patrol the city in cars so that the closest car could dash to the signup once revealed. Cars were manned in pairs, so that the passenger could get out and get in line without hunting for a parking spot. They communicated via pagers, walkie-talkies, and cellphones if they were lucky. There was more than a few fender benders in the process. Some families tried to guess the system, staking out schools for signs of “activity”, like building lights and cars.

Super Saturday ended sometime around 2000. For several years, parents enrolled their kids by taking a tour of the school and submitting a waiting list application up to 12 months before the first day of school. Your spot was not guaranteed however, and students were accepted partially on the basis of race and gender. Parents usually knew their result by December. Interestingly, this method was simple, straightforward and did not require waiting in line. However, due to demand from parents who wanted more control over their kids’ futures, as well as court decisions that outlawed the demographic basis of enrollment, CPS went to a first-come, first-serve enrollment around 2007. That first year, parents camped out in line for 24 hours.

To address the inherent unfairness in a totally first-come, first-serve enrollment method, CPS went to a hybrid system. Since 2011, 30% of open spots went to winners of a lottery system, with the rest still allocated via line. Families were eligible for the lottery only if their neighborhood school was underperforming."



HT: Pete Troyan

Indianapolis schools discuss universal enrollment

Market design first steps: Report: IPS, Indy Charter Schools Should Use Same Enrollment Application

"A report out this week is urging the Indianapolis Public Schools district and city charter schools to consider partnering on a one-stop-shop approach for enrollment.

What the report found, basically, is enrolling in an Indianapolis public school -- be it IPS or a charter -- can be bewildering process for parents to navigate.

Students applying to an IPS magnet school have a different steps of enrollment based on whether they are new or returning to the district.

Some charters require in-person applications while others allow online submissions. The deadlines for all public city schools are not the same.

“If you think about applying for college, trying to navigate different deadlines and applications -- that is what it looks like for parents now in Indy,” said Caitlin Hannon, executive director of Teach Plus in Indianapolis which commissioned the a study of enrollment processes for IPS, charter schools and their authorizers.

The report, written by the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice, says the IPS enrollment system and efforts by the city and local nonprofits to promote school options still leave parents and others confused.

Nathan Ringham, an IPS parent quoted in the report, said there is no one source to review deadlines, requirements or other issues related to enrollment.

“I shouldn’t have had to go to the state department of education to figure out the birth date cutoff for kindergarten,” he said. “I shouldn’t have to go to one page to see how we enroll as a new student and then another to see how to enroll in a magnet.”

In addition, enrollment projections by schools have been below target in past years because schools are unsure where students will attend until the school year begins. When teachers are hired months earlier based on flawed enrollment projections projections, they wind up being transferred to other schools or seeking another job, according to the report.

The institute and recommends that the city to consider a so-called common enrollment process. So rather than apply for multiple schools, a parent could fill out one application and rank their preference.

Cities, including Denver and New Orleans, offer a variation of the one-application approach that also provides information about each school, such as academic performance, so parents can compare schools.

“If the first choice is an IPS school and second is a charter and third is another charter -- that is fine,” Hannon said about how a common application would be filled out. “Then all of those would go into a lottery process where an algorithm is built and people are given their preferences by the way they have listed them and based on the requirements of each school.”

Data that could be collected in an open enrollment, Hannon said, could be used to identify whether a charter school is "creaming" -- taking the best students who apply -- or if students from one part of the city are seeking schools outside their neighborhood boundries. 

IPS Superintendent Lewis Ferebee has recently said he is open to discussing the common application."

IIPSC: the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice

Over at the Dell Foundation (which funds a lot of work on public school choice), they have a Q&A on school choice and enrollment: Neil Dorosin and Gaby Fighetti from The Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice

"The Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice (IIPSC) is a nonprofit organization with a mission to support groups of people in cities in designing and implementing school choice and enrollment processes. They work with consortiums of people in cities to bring them through a process they call market design: creating a group of policies and operations that, when taken together as a whole, govern the way kids apply to and are accepted to schools.

IIPSC is hosting a conference on May 20, 2015 where education leaders from all over the country will gather to immerse themselves in unified enrollment theory and practice. Practitioners from cities that have already implemented or are implementing unified enrollment – Cleveland, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, New Orleans, New York City, Newark, Oakland, and Washington DC – will be on hand to share their knowledge and experiences. The goal is for all participants to emerge from the conference with a concrete set of knowledge and tools to use in advancing this critical work in their own cities.

Neil Dorosin is the Executive Director and Gaby Fighetti is the Deputy Executive Director of IIPSC. Read more about their work below.

...

How has IIPSC effectively launched this current reform movement with unified enrollment?

Neil: IIPSC principals first worked together in New York City in the very early Joel Klein years, and in this environment there were almost no charter schools. This illustrates that the ideas within unified enrollment are not specific to any particular type of school- charter schools, district schools, non-public schools, etc. They are ideas that allow administrators to serve families better. To bring efficiency, equity, and transparency to enrollment and choice systems.

When we began working with Denver we realized that what we were doing requires district and charter sectors to work together in a whole new way, and these changes are fundamental to the way cities manage school choice and then hopefully implement portfolio reform strategy. We are committed to political neutrality and always make sure that people in cities know that our work is meant to advance healthy choice processes, not to advance any political position. We love the fact that people in cities all over the country now see the ideas and guiding principles of unified enrollment systems as things that they believe in and want to advance in their cities.

Tell us about the team who helped design the unified enrollment system.

Neil: Al Roth shared the Nobel Prize in economics for applying matching theory science to solve real world problems. Most famous examples include the Medical Residency match (matching residents and hospitals), kidney donor exchange programs (identifying compatible pairs of donors and recipients from VERY long waitlists, and saving many lives), and for unified enrollment work.Parag Pathak was his student, and is now a full professor at MIT. Atila Abdulkadiroglu co-wrote the seminal paper on the market design approach to school choice in 2003 and joined Al and Parag in the first schools project – in New York City in 2003. Al, Parag and Atila are all now members of our advisory board and active participants in our projects with cities.

It turns out that matching science can be adapted to solve these and other problems, and to make people’s live better in real and meaningful ways. We are motivated by this every day."

School Choice: video of an interview I did in Israel

Here's an interview I did while in Israel in April, mostly about school choice (but also about some of my personal history, game theory, etc.) It starts at minute 4:00 of this news broadcast, and goes until minute 12:45...

Rethinking school competition in Sweden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

EduAction conference in Israel

Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, and me, yesterday.

I just returned from the EduAction conference in Israel, where I got to talk to the Jerusalem mayor, Nir Barkat about school choice, and to hear about the school choice program he implemented when he became mayor.

Jerusalem Conference on Education and Economics, April 29

I'm on my way to Israel, to participate in a conference on Education and Economics.

The webpage, in Hebrew, is here: כנס ירושלים לחינוך וכלכלה, 29.4  (Jerusalem Conference on Education and Economics, April 29)

I will participate late in the day, in a conversation with the mayor of Jerusalem, followed by the President.

19:00: Nobel laureate in economics for 2012, Professor Alvin Roth , a conversation with the Mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat , education and implementation of economic theories in the public sector.

19:30: Address by President Reuven (Ruby) Rivlin
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I gather that this last session may be carried on Channel 2, although I expect that my conversation with the mayor will be conducted in English. (I also expect that it will focus on school choice.)
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Update: here's the coverage from the Jerusalem Post
Dovrat worries Education portfolio has become a booby prize

The Stable Marriage Problem and School Choice, at the American Mathematical Society--column by David Austin

The American Mathematical Society has a column by David Austin on The Stable Marriage Problem and School Choice 

He writes:
"This column will present the game-theoretic results contained in the original Gale-Shapley paper along with Roth's subsequent analysis. Pathak calls the deferred acceptance algorithm "one of the great ideas in economics," and Roth and Shapley were awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics for this work...

He gives a straightforward mathematical treatment of some of the main theoretical results, in context:

"Using ideas described in this column, economists Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag Pathak, and Alvin Roth designed a clearinghouse for matching students with high schools, which was first implemented in 2004. This new computerized algorithm places all but about 3000 students each year and results in more students receiving offers from their first-choice schools. As a result, students now submit lists that reflect their true preferences, which provides school officials with public input into the determination of which schools to close or reform. For their part, schools have found that there is no longer an advantage to underrepresenting their capacity.

The key to this new algorithm is the notion of stability, first introduced in a 1962 paper by Gale and Shapley. We say that a matching of students to schools is stable if there is not a student and a school who would prefer to be matched with each other more than their current matches. Gale and Shapley introduced an algorithm, sometimes called deferred acceptance, which is guaranteed to produced a stable matching. Later, Roth showed that when the deferred acceptance algorithm is applied, a student can not gain admittance into a more preferred school by strategically misrepresenting his or her preferences."

- See more at: http://www.ams.org/samplings/feature-column/fc-2015-03#sthash.LoiUEphE.dpuf