From tuition vouchers for private schools to charter schools to voluntary transfer programs within and between public school systems, school choice has been at the center of the school reform debate for two decades. But with the voucher movement unable to sustain much momentum, charter schools still serving a small percentage of the nation’s students with mixed results, and the public school choice system in the federal No Child Left Behind Act plagued by low participation rates, the public school selection system in two cities, New York and Boston, stands out as a model strategy for harnessing the power of the marketplace to better serve students’ diverse educational interests and needs and to stimulate improvement through competition for students.
The New York school system sponsors choice on a scale unprecedented in public education by requiring each of its 80,000 eighth-graders to select schools. And, along with the Boston school system, which has also made choice mandatory, it has adopted computer software that allows it to place students in the schools on their lists far more efficiently and fairly than most public school choice programs. Each year, students choose a dozen schools from among hundreds of high school programs and rank them 1 to 12 in order of preference. This past spring some 63,000 of the city’s 81,000 new high school students gained a place at one of their top three choices, and over 80,000 students—99 percent of the incoming high school class—were set to attend a school they selected.
Mandatory school choice systems using the new student-school matching systems adopted in New York and Boston would be an attractive addition to any system attempting to allocate scarce seats in good schools in an equitable way, and they could improve both the quality and equity of court-ordered school choice programs in place in Denver, Minneapolis, Seattle, and other cities that continue to use an inferior matching model.
More broadly, the mandatory school choice that has emerged in New York and Boston could be the cornerstone of a different model of public school governance, one featuring an entrepreneurial system of schools run by a range of organizations vying for students under a fair and efficient system for matching students to schools. Cities like New Orleans and Washington, D.C., for example, have large segments of their students voluntarily attending schools of choice, but no centralized system to place them. Instead, schools are trusted to recruit and enroll students independently, while parents are left to navigate the choice process alone, circumstances that increase the likelihood of only the most active and knowledgeable parents getting their child placed in one of their top choice schools.
Read more about how how New York and Boston implemented new matching systems to combat these problems in our latest “Ideas at Work,” or listen to a podcast with two economists who helped create the new systems.
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5/11/2012 | Kevin Carey talks to Salon about the government's role in rising student debt.
5/8/2012 | Kevin Carey discusses the problem of rising tuition and student loan interest rates with The Nation. 
5/4/2012 | Stephen Burd talks to Education Week about student loan debt and help from Congress.
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Ceolaf: We address NYC’s transportation advantage in the report. We write, “The success of the New York and Boston choice systems—which, by requiring students to select their schools, puts so many students in motion—depends heavily on the presence of extensive transportation systems. Because the New York choice program serves high school students, it can provide them with passes for the city’s sprawling public transportation system. The challenge is greater in Boston, where young children are involved. The city supplies high school students with pre-paid public transportation passes. But students in kindergarten through eighth grade ride a fleet of 600 yellow school buses that consumes 8 percent of the school system’s budget and is inherently less efficient than if students attended their neighborhood schools. School officials field many complaints from the public about nearly empty buses traversing the city every day, says Chin, the Boston Public Schools’ assistant chief operating officer. Transportation, says Payzant, is “the big conundrum. It’s tremendously expensive.”
In addition to speaking with families making choice decisions, our paper was really meant to explain how these large choice systems work. While other cities may have choice systems in place, they do not contain all the elements, including transportation and a new matching algorithm, that we found in NYC and Boston.
Wow. This post is shocking. Absolutely shocking. There just are too many fundamental problems with it.
First, it is far easier for NYC to have massive school choice because of the coverage of its public transit system. The subway system combined with the buses makes it plausible for virtually any students to get to a number of different schools in reasonable amount of time. This is also a function of the city’s population density, which pushes schools closet together. So so many schools and so many schools fair close, and an enviable public transit system, NYC can do things that other cities cannot.
On a more fundamental level, I would suggest that choice as not quite been at the center of the school reform debate for two decades. We’ve seen testing, standards, frameworks, curriculum, teacher quality and instruction at the center. There are some who have cared quite a bit about choice, and keep pushing it. But it never quites gets to the center, and never gets the kind of momemtum that this post implies it might or ought ot have. Certianly, one ought to learn something from the failure of choice to catch on for most parents, policy-makers or educators. The fact is that what parents rightfully REALLY care about is their children’s education, which means what happens in classrooms. People get passionate about curriculum and instruction. Idiologues on both sides get passionate about choice.
This disconnect — that between what happens to kids in classrooms and choice — becomes all the more clear when you look at the research into how parent make choices about where their kids go to school. Choice is never going to be at the center of the debate because parents generally don’t really see it as being a vehicle for pushing instruction — which, at the end of the day is all that really matters.
And last, I don’t understand how any education writing could seriously believe that 8th graders drive the decision-making when selecting schools in a choice model. In a better world they might. And certainly some already do. But these are generally decisions made by parents and families, not just children. Moreover, even if they were made by 8th graders, would that even be a good thing? What kinds of criteria would they use?
It’s hard to take seriously such pleas for more choice models when their authors do not appear even to understand how these programs really work for real kids in real families in real town and real schools.
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