Diversity and Transportation in School Choice

该奖项资助对美国许多城市的学校分配机制进行理论和实证研究。 学校选择计划旨在削弱住房市场与进入好学校之间的联系。 鉴于现有的证据表明，在其他条件相同的情况下，学生更喜欢在离家近的地方上学，选择系统很难避免这样的情况，即好学校的社区只有住在附近的学生，而把住在城镇其他地区的学生拒之门外。 然而，向整个地区的学生开放学校需要该地区承担交通费用，花费本可用于教育儿童的资金。 这里概述的项目是统一的，他们的重点是如何解决增加访问之间的冲突，确保多样性，并分配学生离家近。 地区用来裁决社区内外的要求的一个策略是，只对一小部分学校席位实行社区优先。 PI开发了具有特定于插槽的优先级结构的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是否有校车接送，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开发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，以便学生在离家近的地方有选择，每个学生也有机会进入高质量的学校。 2013年，在我们早期工作的基础上，波士顿最近通过了一项具有这些特征的计划。 另一个项目研究是否灵活的选择菜单提供了一个令人满意的妥协，使用新的选择系统的数据。 该研究将在真正的样本外验证中将新选择菜单下新提交的选择与早期预测进行比较，这将告知基于结构性需求模型的反事实分析的优势和局限性。

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.