Posts about School Choice

Risk-averse parents may enter dozens of lotteries. As a result, each school's applicant list is inflated by these extra "safety school" applications. The school has no way of knowing which family on their list is serious about enrolling in their school, even after the lottery is conducted. Since every child can only attend one school, then it's mathematically true that every school will have dozens of phantom applications.

Based on public school choice systems I've studied around the country, most of the real sorting happens after the lottery. School operators spend all spring and summer working down their list contacting "next in line" parents once they learn that students accepted through the lottery are not in fact planning to enroll.

How hard they work to inform each replacement child's family before they move on determines the makeup of the incoming class. School operators can work extra hard to get "desirable" students or even submit to the will of the pushy parent who spends the most time checking in, thereby subverting the intent of open admissions.

Even if the schools do not play games, they must contend with an unstable student count and a miserable months-long process of juggling lists. Who loses in all this? Schools, parents, and most of all students whose parents are not savvy, persistent, or lucky enough to work the system.

Fortunately, the solution is rather simple. Centralize the admissions process so there is a single application that parents fill out, a central (but not exclusive) clearinghouse for information about school options, and a single multi-school lottery that aggregates preferences and gives every family a fair shot at their most- (and second-most, third-most, etc.) preferred school.

Once you have one-stop shopping for the application and notification process, you can realize other benefits, like a highly visible Parent Welcome Center, where parents can turn for information about the schools, much the way our Board of Elections provides voter guides. Parents can be counseled on the options and how to create a rank-ordered list of preferred schools and how to get a good shot at their favorites.

So why don't we have a system like this? The DCPS out of boundary system is centralized. The charter schools, however, have not really organized themselves to get it done. It's obvious why they might be hesitant. The one thing they all have in common is that they value their autonomy. But even autonomy-loving charter schools should be able to see the benefits of collective action in this case.

Enrollment trends and anecdotes we pick up on the playgrounds and listservs make us wonder: How much of this is changing?

DC has a vibrant system of charter schools, which are autonomous, tuition-free public schools. DC also has a school district whose leadership has been in the national news for hard-charging reform for over three years. Both the charters and DCPS have attracted hundreds of millions of dollars from private philanthropy.

The aggressive facilities modernization of DCPS has included several flashy projects that are visible from the street, not to mention the improvements behind the scenes. The "state" of DC is one of 12 to win a Race to the Top funding from the feds, a $75 million grant. We just had a Mayoral campaign in which both major candidates pledged to continue aggressive school reform, with the only differences being who and how to implement it.

As DC improves its schools, we should ask what, exactly, do parents look for in schools?

In the mid-90s I wrote a doctoral dissertation using econometric methods to estimate the value that urban parents placed on elementary school options. Based on their revealed preferences from school lottery data, how much farther would they send their kindergartner to attend a school with a special language immersion program? What effect does the racial composition of a school have on parents' likelihood of choosing it for their own child?

How do they trade off distance and quality? Is there a tipping point when they switched from walkable distances to bus-rides? How do these individual preferences aggregate to affect racial segregation? What if you change the rules that constrain parental choice of schools?

I found that factors that were easy for me as a researcher to observe, as well as for parents to observe, like race and distance, were important. Looking at each race/ethnicity separately, all families had a preference for schools where their own group was represented, but according to my estimates each group (white, black, Asian/Hmong, and Native American) had a "bliss point" that was over 30% or 40% but well under 100%. In other words, everyone had both an own-race preference, but also a taste for diversity. (For smaller groups it was harder to achieve statistical precision in determining how strong that taste was or where the bliss point lay).

Distance was critical. Nobody wants to put their six year-old kid on a bus for an hour twice a day, right? Evidence suggested that there were parents who were wiling to pass by half a dozen schools on the way to one with a special program. Fast forward 15 years and I am married, we have a 6 year-old, and that is exactly what we do for an international baccalaureate school with Chinese immersion.

There was insufficient data to distinguish between the hypothesis that students were attending a school for its special program or to be with other kids like themselves. For example, if a school offers instruction in Native American Ojibwe language, does that explain why so many Native Americans cross town to attend, or is it because they want to be in a school with other Native Americans, or both?

Since then there have been some interesting research papers demonstrating further how school quality and race and ethnicity factor into residential and school choices.

The larger lesson for us is that where schools are located and what goes in them educationally will affect who attends them, which will in turn critically impact the city's social makeup and fabric. And our tax base. They affect how we are distributed within the city, but across the region as well.

Almost six years ago my wife and I joined a group of parents who started our own public school through the chartering mechanism and many of our friends and neighbors have used the DCPS Out of Boundary choice system or moved to a particular DC neighborhood to select a traditional DCPS school.

I see anecdotally that more and more families are changing the question. Instead of "How long can we stand to stay here?" it's "Which DC school is right for our child?" and "How long a commute to school can we handle?"

Maybe the big quality-of-life question is about transportation after all.