The Boston Public School Match

By Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag A. Pathak, Alvin E. Roth, Tayfun Sönmez. 2005

645 citations recorded by the source corpus.

After the publication of “School Choice: A Mechanism Design Approach” by Abdulkadiroglu and Sonmez (2003), a Boston Globe reporter contacted us about the Boston Public Schools (BPS) system for assigning students to schools. The Globe article highlighted the difficulties that Boston’s system may give parents in strategizing about applying to schools. Briefly, Boston tries to give students their firstchoice school. But a student who fails to get her first choice may find her later choices filled by students who chose them first. So there is a risk in ranking a school first if there is a chance of not being admitted; other schools that would have been possible had they been listed first may also be filled. Valerie Edwards, then Strategic Planning Manager at BPS, and her colleague Carleton Jones invited us to a meeting in October 2003. BPS agreed to a study of their assignment system and provided us with micro-level data sets on choices and characteristics of students in the grades at which school choices are made (K, 1, 6, and 9), and school characteristics. Based on the pending results of this study, the Superintendent has asked for our advice on the design of a new assignment mechanism. This paper describes some of the difficulties with the current mechanism and some elements of the design and evaluation of possible replacement mechanisms. School choice in Boston has been partly shaped by desegregation. In 1974, Judge W. Arthur Garrity ordered busing for racial balance. In 1987, the U.S. Court of Appeals freed BPS to adopt a new, choice-based assignment plan. In 1999 BPS eliminated racial preferences in assignment and adopted the current mechanism.

Subfields: Building and Construction, Economics and Econometrics, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6e7d41274ecaa4d131aafc0409635720842466d7

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Citations in the corpus

The Speed of Learning in Noisy Games: Partial Reinforcement and the Sustainability of Cooperation (2006, positive): “It has been customary to model the payoffs in games as expected payoffs of one sort or another, at least since the axiomatization of expected utility by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern (1944).(4) The results of the present paper will suggest that, since variance in early experience can change”
Pairwise kidney exchange (2005, neutral): “[2] for some examples.”
Games of school choice under the Boston mechanism (2006, neutral): “, next any feasible (2, n) match, next any feasible (3, 1) match, .”
The Revealed Preference Theory of Stable and Extremal Stable Matchings (2010, neutral): “Econometrica, Vol. 81, No. 1 (January, 2013), 153–171”
The Combinatorial Assignment Problem: Approximate Competitive Equilibrium from Equal Incomes (2010, neutral): “5 See Sönmez and Ünver (2011) for a survey treatment and Chen and Sönmez (2002), Abdulkadiroğlu, Pathak, and Roth (2005), and Abdulkadiroğlu et al. (2005) on applications to housing markets and school choice.”