Reply to Revised Boundary Recommendations to be released on or about June 13

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Reading the thread about School Within a School and Ludlow Taylor ( http://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/135/388579.page )  I can't help but think their situation was impetus for the choice sets idea.

If I understand it correctly, these are two geographically close schools, one with specialized programming open to city-wide lottery.  Most families at the school live within proximity, if not in-boundary, and they'd like a proximity preference to truly make it a "neighborhood" school that's still open city-wide.  But that might harm progress being made at Ludlow-Taylor, where families also want to see growth in IB attendance.

I'm not advocating choice set as a solution here, but it's an eye-opening example of how that policy might work.  Everyone with geographic proximity gets a preference in a ranked lottery for both schools (and whatever other schools are nearby) and get guaranteed placement in one or the other.  [/quote]

But this example shows the fundamental flaw with the thinking behind choice sets. Why is any kid who lives nearby and wants to attend not attending? The only reason would be that someone who lives further away had a better lottery number. What becomes of that person in a new system? They're worse off.

The fundamental logical flaw with choice sets is thinking that mutually beneficial trades are possible-- that's it's possible to change the assignment process so that everyone benefits. In the current assignment process, an explicit characteristic is that no mutually beneficial trades are possible -- in order for one child to be better off, another has to be worse off.  Which gets to the conceptual flaw with choice sets, which is thinking that there was something wrong with our existing assignment policies. Our existing policies do an excellent job of rationing a scarce resource -- seats at desirable schools. What's wrong is that there are too many schools that few people want to send their kids to and too few schools that a lot of people want to send their kids to.  People don't like the outcome -- half of the families who play the lottery don't get matched to any of their choices -- but that's not a problem with the way the lottery works, that's a problem with their not being enough schools that people want to go.[/quote]

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