Assigning students to schools to minimize both transportation costs and socioeconomic variation between schools

Several studies have found that students' academic achievement is as much determined by the socioeconomic composition of their school as their own socioeconomic status. In this paper we provide a methodology for assigning students to schools so as to balance the socioeconomic compositions of the schools while taking into consideration the total travel distance. Our technique utilizes a biobjective general 0–1 fractional program that is linearized into a mixed 0–1 linear program that can be submitted directly to a standard optimization package. We show how a parametrized model could be utilized to provide a spectrum of different possible assignments so that a decision maker can decide how to balance socioeconomic factors with transportation costs. As a test case for our approach we analyze data from the Greenville County School District in Greenville, South Carolina.