School Choice Mechanisms

National Bureau Of Economic Research Inc, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This award funds research on centralized school choice mechanisms. The goal is to better understand how students and parents make choices about which schools to attend, and how their choice processes interact with the rules that districts use to assign students to schools to affect family welfare and academic achievement. Many school districts in the US offer families the option to participate in school choice programs. Districts that offer choice must pick between a number of possible mechanisms that use families' choice applications together with random lotteries and coarse priorities to assign students to schools. Recent work has shown that which mechanism best depends on which schools families prefer, on the relationship between families' preferences and their priorities at different schools, and on how well families understand the school choice process. This award will fund a household survey of (the parents of) actual and potential school choice participants. Survey participants will answer questions about district schools and about their understanding of the school choice process. The PIs will combine results of the survey with data on student outcomes and models of family behavior to understand how students from different demographic groups make choices under one common assignment mechanism, and how these choices would change if they had more information about the choice process or if the rules of school choice mechanism were modified to reduce the scope of strategic behavior. Their findings will provide insight into how the decisions districts make about the way school choice works affect outcomes of policy interest, including student test scores. They will also help guide changes to school choice policies in future years. This project makes three technical contributions. The first is to integrate survey data on students' elicited preferences over schools and subjective expectations about the school choice process into an estimable empirical model of school choice in the context of a non-strategy proof school choice mechanism. The survey data allow the PIs to separate students' beliefs about admissions probabilities from their preferences over schools under relatively weak assumptions about student behavior. Second, comparing counterfactual predictions of behavior based on model estimates to those observed under randomized informational interventions or policy changes will provide a strong test of the accuracy of model predictions. To the extent our model passes this test, additional simulations will provide valuable evidence on the effects of future interventions in other contexts. Third, using administrative data on academic achievement in addition to school assignment, this project will link the choices districts make in school choice mechanism design to outcomes of direct policy interest such as test scores and high school graduation.