The Boston Public School Match

In Boston, there are no guaranteed neighborhood schools for families, due to a model of choice that dates back to the city's infamous desegregation effort in the 1970s. Today, every family wishing to enroll their child in a Boston Public School must formally register and then rank their preferred school choices from a list designed to give every family access to "quality schools close to home." Due to the complexity and compulsory nature of the process, all families must visit a district registration site, known as Welcome Centers, to formally register for and make their school selections. While much is known about the modern-day persistence of segregation in schools, as well as the conditions that shape family preferences and participation in school choice, less is known about how institutional practices outside of schools also contribute to the enduring inequalities in public education. This dissertation project delves into that black box of school choice: the bureaucratic details, practices, and processes that make up school selection, registration, assignment, and enrollment. Through a mixed-methods project that includes a multi-sited ethnography, fifty interviews with district staff, a multilingual survey of over 5,000 registering families, and complemented by administrative data, I interrogate seemingly-neutral bureaucratic procedures, tools, and resources to reveal how institutions reproduce broader social inequalities. I argue that districts shape families' access to school choice and experiences in registration sites and facilitate the unequal sorting of families before they are finally assigned to schools. I find that raced, classed, linguistic, and gendered inequalities are mirrored in the everyday implementation of school choice policy in practice. This dissertation project is comprised of three empirical articles. In the first article, I examine the conditions and consequences of pre-registration; how it shapes the waiting, service, and citizenship of clients in the registration sites. I find that pre-registration operates as a tool, a spatial logic, and a moralized value system that allows for efficient and racialized sorting of time and space in the centers. The second article examines the contexts that enable or constrain staff dissemination of information to families, as well as the resulting information gap. Despite their intention to help families make well-informed choices, workers are both limited in their access to and complicit in limiting information that would help inform parents' school choices. Ultimately, the absence of institutional interventions to address known information gaps protects the racial segregation of schools and harms both the highest need families and the staff of color who serve them. Finally, the third article looks across a range of district efforts to decrease families' administrative burdens. The accumulation of these initiatives produces "white noise" which drowns out the particular needs of poor, non-English speaking, immigrant families of color, thus compounding disadvantage for structurally marginalized registering families. This research makes important empirical and theoretical contributions to sociological studies of race, school choice, organizations, and public policy. This project shows how policies, even those designed by or within progressive organizations, may perpetuate or increase existing inequalities. Theoretically, I confirm that organizations are racialized even when they focus on equity, hire diverse staff, and espouse racially progressive values. Empirically, I examine the underlying institutional mechanisms that make up the more mundane implementation of policies to show how they consistently reproduce broader racial inequalities. In other words, the process perpetuates structural inequalities despite changes in staff or even broader assignment policies. This project, while focused on one school district's current assignment plan, has important lessons for the bureaucratic implementation of a wide range of choice and public policy efforts. While resources or initiatives may be intended for all, they operate as a racial alibi that excuses and legitimates racialized outcomes.

A central issue in school choice is the design of a student assignment mechanism. Education literature provides guidance for the design of such mechanisms but does not offer specific mechanisms. The flaws in the existing school choice plans result in appeals by unsatisfied parents. We formulate the school choice problem as a mechanism design problem and analyze some of the existing school choice plans including those in Boston, Columbus, Minneapolis, and Seattle. We show that these existing plans have serious shortcomings, and offer two alternative mechanisms each of which may provide a practical solution to some critical school choice issues.

How can access to public elementary schools of variable quality be justly distributed within a school district? Two reasonable criteria are: (a) that children should have equal opportunity to attend high-quality schools, and (b) school assignment policies should foster an overall increase in the number of high-quality schools. This article analyzes Boston Public Schools’ new school assignment plan in light of these criteria. It shows that Boston Public Schools’ plan violates equal opportunity by giving middle-class families privileged access to existing high-quality schools. Boston Public Schools arguably panders to more-advantaged families, however, in order to pull them into the system and deploy their economic, political, and social capital to increase the total number of high-quality schools. Is this ethically defensible? To answer this question, we need to develop an ethical theory of pandering: of privileging the interests and preferences of already unjustly privileged actors because the consequences tend to benefit everyone. Such a theory will need to be ethically pluralistic and weighted along a contextually sensitive continuum, rather than rendered in all-or-nothing terms.

Boston Public Schools (BPS) closed for in-person learning in March 2020 due to COVID-19 and didn't fully reopen until the 2021-2022 school year. Due to the age of schools and absent ventilation systems, coupled with decades of disinvestment in the infrastructure, BPS entered the pandemic with serious challenges impacting the health of students and staff. These challenges were magnified by an infectious airborne virus. Instead of using this opportunity to improve ventilation systems, BPS opted to invest in an air quality monitoring system. This system only confirmed what was already known-there is poor ventilation in most school buildings. It did not lead to correction of new or long-standing problems. This failure has harmed the BPS community, which includes primarily low-income Black and Brown families. This article describes Boston's school system, its track record of inadequate attention to infrastructure, and explores pitfalls of focusing on evaluation instead of correction.

In public education, racially segregated schools are now often understood as a natural result of a messy mix of failed policies and parent decisions. However, parent decisions and school choice are both constrained by districts. In the case of Boston Public Schools (BPS), the staff hired to support “well-informed choices” do not provide information to families—including those who need it most—even when it could mitigate known inequities. Using data from semi-structured interviews with 37 staff, participant observation in registration sites, a supplemental survey of 1,887 registering families, and district administrative data on all registering families, I find that BPS constrains the actions of frontline staff, making them unwitting proponents of the fallacy of choice. The equal treatment of families who come with unequal access to the registration and choice systems protects racial privilege in relation to schools and harms both families of color and the staff of color who work with them. This racism of omission enacted within the choice apparatus causes staff and families to focus on the selection process rather than the limited and racialized access to the public good of schools.

This paper analyses the mechanisms of stratification and inequalities in educational achievements. The main objective is to determine how stratification leads to unequal educational outcomes and how inequalities are channelled through student characteristics, school characteristics and peer effects. This analysis is undertaken in five countries differentiated by their schooling systems. The countries are Japan, Finland, Germany, Italy and the UK, and the dataset used is PISA 2003. The analysis consists of a multilevel econometric model used to explain variations in performance scores. The explanatory variables are student, school and peer characteristics. The institutional context of each education system is used to interpret the results and to describe how inequalities arise. In the last section, policy implications, based on the regression results, are derived.

Background: The desirable extent of curriculum choice to be offered to students remains a central policy question in England. Previous studies of the impact of the introduction of a common curriculum for 14–16 year olds in 1988 have suggested that some gender differences were narrowed as a result. These studies examined subject choice either in terms of students' ex ante preferences in advance of enrolling for subjects or in terms of ex post aggregate data on examination entries. There is some conflict between the evidence provided by these two sources. One possible reason for this conflict could be that existing ex post evidence does not examine the interaction between student characteristics or the effect of school-level variables. Purpose: This study aims to identify effects of social class and gender on subject choice for 14–16 year olds in England over and above effects that are attributable to students' ability. Effects that operate at school level are separated from those that act at the level of the individual. Sample: The sample is drawn from the schools that participated in the Yellis system for providing analysis of the examination results achieved by 16-year-old students. The sample of 664 schools and 112,412 16-year-old students was selected by including all schools who had participated in the Yellis project for at least five years during the period 1994–2002. All of the sample schools were participating in the scheme in 1998, the year for which a cross-sectional analysis is presented in this paper. Design and methods: Statistical (probit) models are used to investigate effects of student and school characteristics on the probability of a student entering for examination in each of six option subjects: Business Studies, French, Geography, German, History and Home Economics. The models take account of levels in the data and identify interactions between the student characteristics. Results: After taking prior ability into account socioeconomic background effects, taken together, exert a stronger effect than gender on the likelihood of entering for examination in history. Socioeconomic background effects are also stronger in the case of business studies. The effect of socioeconomic background is stronger for females than for males. There are also strong social effects operating through the characteristics of the cohort of students at the school. The proportion of students eligible for free school meals has a significant effect on the probability of entering for examination in geography, German or History. Conclusions: In so far as the results from this study can be compared with previous research they support the conclusions of previous ex post studies rather than ex ante studies in terms of gender preferences in subject choice. This might suggest some difficulty in generalising from the kind of ex ante data gathered previously. The evidence of the effect of socioeconomic background at individual and school level suggests that current policy aiming to increase subject choice within and between schools will deepen differences between the subjects studied by students from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

This paper explores the experiences, stories, and efforts that parents have taken when engaging in public school choice on Cape Cod. As part of the No Child Left Behind Legislation along with the Massachusetts Education Reform Act, public school systems can opt to become school choice districts. This allows parents from outside their public school boundaries to send their child to any school district that has classified itself as a school choice district. In many parts of Massachusetts parents have been given more options to educate their child. This has become a staple within the 65-mile peninsula of Cape Cod Massachusetts. Cape Cod contains fifteen towns that are comprised of eight public school districts; all of which practice public school choice. Employing the methodology of qualitative inquiry, parents in this study shared their personal stories and experiences they encountered while engaging in the process of school choice. Inquiring about parent's thoughts, ideas, perceptions, and stories associated with the choice to enroll their students in a non-community district created insight into many themes that parents saw as important when choosing a school. The major themes that surfaced throughout the research included dynamic school leadership, high academic standards, extracurricular activities, athletic programs, social networks, and school safety. The literature related to school choice depicted how parents and school systems compete for students. Understanding that parents create their own realities and opinions based on their own experiences and interpretations leads us to look at school choice through the lens of Social Construction Theory.

I investigate three goals of school choice: student welfare, encouraging neighborhood schools, and diversity. I develop a framework for finding the optimal match for any combination of these objectives while respecting stability and incentive compatibility. I then apply my framework to data from Boston Public Schools. If the mechanism conditions on demographics, the improvement in student welfare (relative to the status-quo) is equivalent to moving 291 students (out of 2,513) to a school one rank higher in their preference lists. My analysis also shows that one can simultaneously improve welfare, encourage neighborhood schools, and increase diversity. For example, one can increase the number of students enrolled in their neighborhood school by 50\% without reducing welfare or diversity. I close by discussing menus-and-reserves mechanisms that implement the matches I find by designing menus and reserves based on a solution to one of my optimization problems and then running a cumulative-offer mechanism.

I investigate three goals of school choice: welfare, encouraging neighborhood schools, and diversity. I use optimization problems to find the best stable and incentive compatible match for any combination of these objectives. These problems assume there is a continuum of students and school seats, which allows me to describe the incentive compatibility conditions in a tractable form. I prove that the set of stable matchings is generically continuous in the distribution of students and the school capacities, which implies that the characterization of the possible stable matches in the continuum model approximates the set of stable matches in a matching market with a large, but finite, number of students. I then apply my framework to data from Boston Public Schools. If the mechanism conditions on demographics, the improvement (relative to the status quo) in student welfare is equivalent to moving 291 students (out of 3,479) to schools one rank higher in their preference lists. In contrast, if the mechanism does not condition on demographics, the welfare improvement is equivalent to moving only 25.1 students to schools one rank higher. Improvements in the distributional goals can be made (e.g., increasing enrollment in neighborhood schools by 50%) without reducing welfare or diversity. This paper was accepted by Gabriel Weintraub, revenue management and market analytics.

Boston's public schools have long drawn national attention in educational and political studies and more recently in legal accounts of desegregation. With the rise of remedial law, the maturation of public unions, and the improvement of constituencies—all forces flowering in the 1970s—the traditional concept of organizational rationality has been effectively undermined for professionals in the school system. Problem-solving skills and professional concepts relating to resource allocation and accountability are submerged by the inescapable need for coalition building, negotiation, and compromise. In the process, the critical roles are those of amateurs, neither committed to the organization or program, nor responsible for results.

Music instruction was instituted in the Boston Public Schools by Lowell Mason in 1838. During the 1860s and 1870s, a strong music program was developed in Boston under the leadership of the Committee on Music, Luther Whiting Mason, and other music staff members. Education historians have described the growth of bureaucratic urban school systems in the nineteenth century. This article deals with the development of the Boston music program, with its centralized administration, specialized music supervisors, and teacher-training programs. Textbooks were published and a curriculum organized to meet the needs of the expanding urban school system. The Boston School Committee endorsed music to promote good discipline and encouraged music performances to bring the school system positive publicity. The music program declined in the economically depressed 1870s because the music staff was cut while the school population increased. Nevertheless, the Boston program became a model for music programs throughout America and abroad.

This chapter analyses the mechanisms of stratification and inequalities in educational achievements. The objective is to determine how stratification leads to unequal educational outcomes and how inequalities are channeled through student characteristics, school characteristics and peer effects. This analysis is undertaken in five countries differentiated by their schooling systems. The countries are Japan, the UK, Italy, Germany and Finland, and the dataset used is PISA 2003. The analysis consists of a multilevel econometric model used to explain variations in performance scores. The explanatory variables are student, school and peer characteristics. The institutional context of each education system is used to interpret the results and to describe how inequalities arise. In the last section, policy implications, based on the regression results, are derived.

Educational processes and outcomes are influenced by a multitude of factors, including individual and contextual characteristics. Recently, studies have demonstrated that student and context characteristics may produce unique and cumulative effects on educational outcomes. The study aimed to investigate (1) the relative contribution of student, classroom, and school characteristics to reading fluency and orthographic spelling, (2) the relative contribution of specific predictors to reading fluency and orthographic spelling within the sets of student, classroom, and school characteristics, and (3) whether the contribution of student, classroom, and school characteristics differs for reading fluency and orthographic spelling. Participants were 789 German third-grade students from 56 classrooms in 34 schools. Students completed an intelligence test and a questionnaire assessing self-control. Reading fluency and orthographic spelling performance were assessed using standardized achievement tests. Multilevel structural equation modelling was used to control for the hierarchical structure of educational data. Variances in students' reading and spelling skills were in large part explained by student characteristics (>90%). Classroom and school characteristics yielded little variance. Student-level intelligence and self-control were significantly related to reading fluency. For orthographic spelling, student-level intelligence and self-control, class-average intelligence, and, at the school level, the socio-economic status of the school's neighbourhood were significant predictors. Future research needs to investigate relevant classroom and school factors that may directly and indirectly relate to academic outcomes.

Eighteen experts, including Albert Shanker, Ernest L. Boyer, Thomas Kean, and John Menge, examine the issues surrounding educational choice in public school systems and the voucher system for private schools. They discuss when choice should be considered, methods of implementation, and the extent to which government should be involved. Descriptions and evaluations of choice programs that have been implemented are presented. The book includes contributions from both supporters and opponents of choice presented within an academic framework to enhance examination, debate, and analysis. Since 37 states have adopted legislation that provides some kind of choice in the public education system, the issues involved will be important to school boards, educational administrators, public policy makers, parents, and taxpayers.