Education Week - December 4, 2013 - 12

DIGITAL DIRECTIONS > Tracking news and ideas in educational technology
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Cities Turn to Custom Software to Match Students, Schools
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in Philadelphia, Washington, and
a third city, likely Detroit. A fourth
city could soon follow.
"School choice exists in most cities.
It can either be organized and facilitated,
or it can be the Wild West,"
said Joe Siedlecki, the program and
policy officer for the foundation's
U.S. education team.
While IIPSC's initial efforts in-
cluded only district-managed
schools, the group's focus now is
on creating "universal enrollment"
programs that bring district and
charter schools together in one
centralized school assignment system.
Proponents say that rationalizing
the mechanisms that govern
messy school choice marketplaces
can help fix a host of problems,
including opaque rules that unfairly
benefit middle-class families,
sometimes-sneaky admissions practices
at charter schools, and long
student waiting lists that hinder
both families' and schools' ability
to plan.
Because the assignment systems
generate reams of data on parental
demand for different schools and
programs, they are also seen as a
pillar of the "portfolio" approach to
district management, in which families
are offered an array of education
options that may be expanded
or closed based on performance and
other factors.
But there is some evidence that
algorithm-based school assignment
doesn't help more disadvantaged
children actually gain access to
better schools, and some observers
worry that such systems force
parents to make choices without
adequate information.
In some cities, universal enrollment
has also sparked opposition
from advocates for regular public
schools.
"We've become obsessed with mov-
ing children around rather than investing
in schools to improve them,"
said activist Helen Gym, a founder of
the group Parents United for Public
Education, based in Philadelphia. "I
think that's a bad approach."
Allocating Scarce Resources
Mr. Dorosin of IIPSC described the
field of "market design" that underlies
the institute's work in lay terms:
Some scarce goods, like expensive
women's shoes, can be distributed by
selling them to the highest bidder, he
said. But others-human organs, for
instance-cannot.
"We truly believe
that we've figured
out a system for
doing this so parents,
schools, and the
education reform
movement all win."
NEIL DOROSIN, Executive Director,
Institute for Innovation in Public School
Choice
The latter is not an abstract ex-
ample. IIPSC's board chairman, Alvin
E. Roth, a professor at Stanford
University who won a Nobel Prize
in economics in 2012, designed an
overhaul of the nation's system for
matching the limited number of
kidneys donated each year to the
much longer list of those who need
a transplant.
To match students with seats
in public schools, IIPSC creates algorithms
that draw from three
sets of data: The schools' families
actually want their children to attend,
listed in order of preference;
the number of available seats in
each grade at every school in the
system; and the set of rules that
governs admission to each school.
Selective magnet schools might
screen for test scores, for example,
while charters may give preference
to low-income families or to the
children of their board members.
Most systems prioritize giving siblings
the opportunity to attend the
same school, and different schools
offer dozens of other types of preferences.
Fitting all the pieces together
makes for an extremely complicated
logic problem.
IIPSC software doesn't guarantee
that every family or school will
get exactly what it desires, said
board member Atila Abdulkadiroglu,
an economics professor
at Duke University. But the algorithm-building
process "helps
us to identify the trade-offs,
determine what is achievable,
and come up with the optimal
compromise."
The benefits are evident in
the 1.1 million-student New
York City school system, where
in 2004, Mr. Dorosin, then the
district's director of high-schooladmissions
operations, helped
lead the nation's first adoption
of an algorithm-based school assignment
program. The focus was
on district-run high schools.
Entering the 2013-14 school year,
three-quarters of the city's 75,000plus
rising 9th graders now receive
one of their top three high school
choices. Only about 1,000 students
have to be manually placed outside
of the algorithm-matching process,
via administrative assignments.
That's way down from 30,000 annually
before the switch, when a
murky "gray market" of high school
choice flourished.
In addition, student waitlists
have been eliminated, meaning
that schools can begin allocating
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12 | EDUCATION WEEK | December 4, 2013 | www.edweek.org
their budgets, hiring staff members,
and planning programs-and
that all families know where they
stand-much earlier in the selection
process.
"Previously, those who knew how
to work the system were able to
get a number of options, and others
were left behind," said Robert Sanft,
the CEO of the New York district's office
of student enrollment.
Denver Reaps Benefits
Since the Denver school system
paid IIPSC $350,000 in 2011
to help design its new student assignment
system, formally known
as the SchoolChoice program, the
88,000-student district has reaped
similar rewards, said Shannon
Fitzgerald, Denver's director of
choice and enrollment services.
Now, there is a single application
process for all district and charter
schools, compared with 64 separate
processes in 2010-11. Just over 88
percent of participating students
were assigned to one of their preferred
school options for this fall,
Ms. Fitzgerald said. And now, she
said, the district knows how every
child got placed in each seat in the
city-a major problem in years
past.
"There [used to be] a lot of blind
spots," she said. "For roughly onefourth
of our kindergarten kids,
nobody could really account for how
they got into their seats."
From a technical standpoint,
implementing Denver's new assignment
system was relatively
easy, she said. It took a total of four
months for IIPSC and district technology
staff members to create a
custom algorithm and the software
to run it. There was a monthlong
whirlwind of quality-control tests.
The biggest "hiccups," Ms. Fitzgerald
said, were related to data entry.
The far greater challenge, she
said, came on the front end. District
leaders went on a summerlong
"road show" to sell the plan
to worried parents and skeptical
charter operators, some of whom
were reluctant to cede control of
a process so fundamental to their
operations.
"It speaks volumes to the collaborative
relationships we have in Denver
with our charters that they were all
able to put aside their desire to do
what's best for their school alone
and to see how this could benefit the
greater community," Ms. Fitzgerald
said.
Now in its third year, Denver's
SchoolChoice program costs an estimated
$575,000 annually to support.
The troubled school choice and assignment
system currently in place
in Philadelphia seemed like a prime
target for a similar overhaul.
In 2012, the 131,000-student Philadelphia
district identified "significant
barriers to entry" at dozens of city
charter schools, including one that
made its application available on only
one day each year, requiring families
to attend an open house at a subur-
ban country club to obtain a copy.
And in 2010, Research for Action,
an independent nonprofit education
research organization based in
the city, found that blacks, Latinos,
males, and special education students
fared far worse than other
groups at every stage of the city's
high-school-selection process. All
told, the researchers found, just 45
percent of Philadelphia 8th graders
who completed a high school application
in the fall of 2006 ultimately
enrolled in any of the district high
schools to which they had applied.
Eager to address those problems,
Mayor Michael A. Nutter led a delegation
of city education leaders on a
visit to Denver in January of 2012.
Lori A. Shorr, the mayor's chief education
officer, said the group got in
touch with Mr. Dorosin shortly after
its return. Preliminary work began
late last year, Ms. Shorr said, and
the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation
awarded its grant to IIPSC not
long after.
The consultants' efforts in the District
of Columbia, funded by the same
pot of money, have proceeded quickly.
Officials there announced last month
that all of Washington's regular public
schools, which serve 45,000 students,
and a majority of its charters
would move to a unified system to assign
students to schools for next fall.
But the work in Philadelphia
has run into significant stumbling
blocks.
The school district, beset by a financial
crisis, has yet to sign on, and
leaders of two major charter school
coalitions have balked at the plan,
according to Mr. Dorosin.
And when activists caught wind
that the Philadelphia School Partnership,
a nonprofit that has been
leading the city's push for universal
enrollment, sought to include
Catholic schools in a new studentassignment
system that would be
operated by a private entity, a firestorm
ensued.
"It's an extreme proposal that goes
further than what any other city
has done," said Ms. Gym of Parents
United for Public Education.
Skeptical of Algorithms
Despite the problems Research
for Action documented in Philadelphia's
existing system, the group's
executive director, Kate Shaw, is
also cool to the idea of universal
enrollment. Adopting such a program
would amount to little more
than "a technical improvement in
the process," she said.
Ms. Shaw pointed to a recent
study by researchers at New York
University that found the concentration
of at-risk students in lowperforming
New York City schools
had not changed appreciably since
the adoption of an algorithm-based
assignment system. While 8th graders
from all backgrounds are now
getting matched to their top high
school choices more often, it found,
the most-disadvantaged students
have either remained ineligible for
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