Diversity and Transportation in School Choice

择校的多样性和交通

• 批准号: 1426566
• 负责人: Parag Pathak
• 金额: $ 30.29万
• 依托单位: National Bureau of Economic Research Inc
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-08-15 至 2020-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1426566&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Diversity; Transportation; Choice

This award funds theoretical and empirical research on school assignment mechanisms found in many US cities. School choice programs aspire to weaken the link between the housing market and access to good schools. Given existing evidence that, all else equal, students prefer to attend schools close to home, choice systems struggle to avoid scenarios where neighborhoods with good schools fill up only with students who live nearby, shutting out those who live in other parts of town. Opening up schools to pupils throughout the district, however, requires that the district to absorb transportation costs, spending funds which may otherwise be used to educate children. The projects outlined here are unified by their focus on ways to resolve conflicts between increasing access, ensuring diversity, and assigning students close to home. One strategy districts use to adjudicate claims between those from inside and outside the neighborhood is to apply a neighborhood priority for only a fraction of school seats. The PIs develop theoretical results on matching algorithms with slot-specific priority structures to cover this scenario. They also investigate whether mechanisms with richer message spaces, such as allowing students to be considered for schools either with or without busing, would accommodate a reduction in transportation costs. Finally, another important aspect of these choice plans involves developing the set of schools an applicant may rank. For instance, it may be possible to define choice menus in a flexible way so that students have options close to home and each student also has access to high quality schools. A plan with these features was recently adopted in Boston in 2013 based on our earlier work. Another project examines whether flexible choice menus provide a satisfactory compromise using data from the new choice system. The research will compare the newly submitted choices under the new choice menus to earlier forecasts in a genuine out-of-sample validation that will inform the strengths and limitations of counterfactual analysis based on structural demand models.

该奖项资助了对美国许多城市的学校分配机制的理论和实证研究。择校计划希望削弱住房市场和进入好学校的机会之间的联系。鉴于现有证据表明，在其他条件相同的情况下，学生更喜欢上离家近的学校，选择系统难以避免这样的情况：拥有好学校的社区只招满了住在附近的学生，而把住在城镇其他地区的学生拒之门外。然而，向整个学区的学生开放学校，要求学区承担交通费用，花费本可用于儿童教育的资金。这里列出的项目是统一的，他们的重点是如何解决增加机会、确保多样性和分配学生离家近之间的冲突。各区在评判社区内外学生的要求时采用的一种策略是，只对一小部分学校席位申请社区优先。pi开发了与插槽特定优先级结构匹配算法的理论结果，以涵盖这种情况。他们还调查了具有更丰富的信息空间的机制，例如允许学生被考虑进入有或没有公共汽车的学校，是否会降低交通成本。最后，这些选择计划的另一个重要方面涉及制定申请人可能排名的学校。例如，可以以灵活的方式定义选择菜单，这样学生就可以在家附近选择，每个学生也可以进入高质量的学校。在我们早期工作的基础上，2013年波士顿最近采用了一个具有这些功能的计划。另一个项目检查灵活的选择菜单是否使用来自新选择系统的数据提供了令人满意的折衷方案。该研究将比较新选择菜单下新提交的选择与早期预测的真正样本外验证，这将告知基于结构需求模型的反事实分析的优势和局限性。