The Boston Public School match

A Boston Globe article, "School Choice: A Mechanism Design Approach" (2003) highlighted the difficulties that the Boston Public School (BPS) system may give parents in strategizing about applying to schools. Briefly, Boston tries to give students their first-choice 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 the authors to a meeting in October 2003. BPS agreed to a study of their assignment system and provided them with micro-level data sets on choices and characteristics of students in the grades at which school choices are made (K, 1, 6, 9), and school characteristics. Based on the pending results of this study, the Superintendent has asked for the authors' 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.