I had a chance to express my thoughts about public school choice at the Wake County Board of Education meeting last Friday, April 23. I was invited to the meeting by John Tedesco; I had met with Mr. Tedesco once a few weeks ago.
Here is a brief summary of my comments:
I am not a party of interest in the debate and I am not associated with any side in the debate either. My research focuses on student assignment in pubic school choice programs and I would be happy to offer my academic expertise to WCPSS on the improvement, redesign and implementation of a student assignment whenever it is needed.
My main comment is on public school choice.
There will always be some conflict between district policies and some parents’ preferences. Every assignment plan is prone to political pressure by such parents. It is important to identify that point as one of the major sources of the current change in Wake.
Public school choice, in my opinion, may minimize the extent of conflict by incorporating parental preferences into assignment while giving the district tools to implement its policies.
It has to be noted at the outset though that choice may yield segregated schools in socioeconomically segregated districts. Charlotte-Mecklenburg provides a good approximation to Wake. A recent study shows that parents in Charlotte-Mecklenburg tend to prefer schools with higher concentration of their own race. This partly explains why almost half of the schools in Charlotte-Mecklenburg were racially segregated after the introduction of the new choice plan in 2002-03 (see page 14 of this WakeEd Partnership report).
However, appropriate breaks and controls can be embedded into a choice system in order to avoid segregation while giving, for example, some priority in assignment to students at their neighborhood schools. It is important to note that guaranteed neighborhood assignment is also likely to yield segregation along the socioeconomic and racial lines of neighborhoods.
A public school choice plan has three components:
1) Demand data: Parents rank schools in order of preferences during application.
2) Assignment priorities: Various priorities can be designed to meet different policy goals. Neighborhood priority for certain percentage of seats gives parents a fair chance at their neighborhood schools. Priority for the rest of the seats can be given to students from NCLB schools. Socioeconomic balance can be targeted through choice by giving priority to low-income students for certain percentage of available seats.
3) Assignment algorithm: A carefully designed assignment algorithm tries to assign as many parents as possible to one of their higher choices while implementing the assignment priorities set by the district.
For instance, Boston Public Schools (BPS) tries to achieve socioeconomic and racial diversity while providing parents with priority for 50% of available seats at their neighborhood schools. See more details here.