School choice is touted to alleviate inequities in students' schooling experiences. It is seen as a way out of under-performing neighborhood schools. However, it can be challenging for marginalized students to leave their neighborhood school and transfer into a school of their choice. The reason for this challenge is the inequitable opportunities surrounding school choice, such as elite charter schools located outside of city centers and credit-recovery schools targeting marginalized youth (Garcia, 2008). As marginalized students try to navigate the school choice landscape, they may engage in sequences of transfers increasing the chance that they will ultimately drop out. Since most school choice research explores student experiences using quantitative research, general school mobility patterns and outcomes are understood. What is not well established is the individual student's more nuanced experiences engaging in school choice, the choices they make, and the resulting outcome, particularly for marginalized youth. Additionally, little research has explored the impact of transferring on students' mathematical learning. This dissertation examined how highly mobile, marginalized youth described their experiences transferring schools and learning mathematics. This study used an analytic framework that foregrounded students' empowerment, their ability to achieve their goals. The framework focuses on agency and opportunity structures as key components of empowerment. This framework was used to examine three highly mobile, marginalized youths' experiences engaging in school choice and learning mathematics. This analysis of empowerment highlighted the challenging opportunity structures these youth faced when engaging in school choice and the assets they utilized in making decisions. It also identified important opportunity structures that supported, or hindered, these students' mathematical learning. Finally, the resulting empowerment (both mathematical and school choice empowerment) that these students' experienced was examined. The findings demonstrate the complexity of engaging in school choice and reveal both challenges and successes engaging in school choice and mathematical learning. The school choice findings indicate that students may be falsely empowered when engaging in school choice, they may engage in new chance transfers offering them a new start, and/or they may increase their mobility by "trying on schools" for a good fit. The mathematical findings suggest that students may experience mathematical learning empowerment and/or earning empowerment, and that recognizing this difference is important; develop a procedural understanding of mathematics that may create further challenges as highly mobile youth transfer schools; and experience productive opportunity structures that may be essential in supporting students' mathematical empowerment. The findings suggest important implications for highly mobile marginalized youths' mathematical achievement, school choice policy, and further research. Specifically, the findings suggest the importance of using a framework that examines opportunity structures, assets, and empowerment to better understand and support students' engagement in school choice.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Education / Master / Master of Education

Thesis (M.Com. (Development Theory and Policy))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, School of Economic and Business Sciences, 2017 / This paper carries out an analysis to test for the existence of a private school premium in schooling outcomes among primary school children in Pakistan. In Pakistan, private schools are often preferred over public schools, due to their assumed higher quality of education, by almost every social class in the country. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence on whether a private school premium in learning outcomes exists using recent geographically representative data, and whether private school benefits accrue to children in every social class proportionally. Using the latest ASER (Annual Status of Education Report) data from 2015, the analysis confirms the existence of a private school premium. It also identifies some of the mechanisms that drive this premium. In particular, it appears that household-level characteristics account for a large part of why children in private schools do better than children in public schools. In addition, the findings suggest that private schools disproportionally affect the learning outcomes of the students belonging to different social backgrounds and in different areas, benefitting those at the upper end of the distribution and in urban areas more. / GR2018

Thesis advisor: Utku Ünver / This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter consists of a survey of the literature on affirmative action and diversity objective in school choice mechanisms. It presents and analyzes some of the main papers on the subject, showing the evolution of our understanding of the effects that different affirmative action policies have on the welfare and fairness of student assignments, the satisfaction of the diversity objectives as well as the domain of policies that allows for stable outcomes. The second chapter analyzes the problem of school choice mechanisms when policy-makers have objectives over the distribution of students by type across the schools. I show that mechanisms currently available in the literature may fail to a great extent in satisfying those objectives, and introduce a new one, which satisfies two properties. First, it produces assignments that satisfy a fairness criterion which incorporates the diversity objectives as an element of fairness. Second, it approximates optimally the diversity objectives while still satisfying the fairness criterion. We do so by embedding "preference" for those objectives into the schools' choice functions in a way that satisfies the substitutability condition and then using the school-proposing deferred acceptance procedure. This leads to the equivalence of stability with the desired definition of fairness and the maximization of those diversity objectives among the set of fair assignments. A comparative analysis also shows analytically that the mechanism that we provide has a general ability to satisfy those objectives, while in many familiar classes of scenarios the alternative ones yield segregated assignments. Finally, we analyze the incentives induced by the proposed mechanism in different market sizes and informational structures. The third chapter (co-authored with Orhan Aygün) presents an analysis of the Brazilian affirmative action initiative for access to public federal universities. In August 2012 the Brazilian federal government enacted a law mandating the prioritization of students who claim belonging to the groups of those coming from public high schools, low income families and being racial minorities to defined proportions of the seats available in federal public universities. In this problem, individuals may be part of one or more of those groups, and it is possible for students not to claim some of the privileges associated with them. This turns out to be a problem not previously studied in the literature. We show that under the choice function induced by the current guidelines, students may be better off by not claiming privileges that they are eligible to. Moreover, the resulting assignments may not be fair or satisfy the affirmative action objectives, even when there are enough students claiming low--income and minority privileges. Also, any stable mechanism that uses the current choice functions is neither incentive compatible nor fair. We propose a new choice function to be used by the universities that guarantees that a student will not be worse off by claiming an additional privilege, is fair and satisfies the affirmative action objectives whenever it is possible and there are enough applications claiming low--income and minority privileges. Next, we suggest a stable, incentive compatible and fair mechanism to create assignments for the entire system. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

This thesis presents research into the processes, practices and experiences of transition to secondary education in Northern Ireland from a children's rights perspective. Three aspects of the contemporary landscape of transition are considered: availability of school places and children's school choice aspirations; privately operated unregulated tests used for selection; and school level admissions arrangements which mediate transfer. The overarching aim of the thesis was to understand how inequities in each of these areas are potential barriers to children's enjoyment of their rights under the Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1989). The mixed-methods study was conducted in three strands: a documentary analysis of school admissions policies for 205 academically selective and non-selective secondary schools offering admission in September 2014; a collaboration with children as research advisors to inform the purposes, processes and outcomes of the research which reflects a rights based approach; and a questionnaire of a broad sample of transition age children (10-12 years, n=1327) which extensively investigated their views and experiences of the policy and practice of transfer. The rights based, mixed methods approach was intentional, so as to place the voices of those directly affected by the transfer arrangements at the heart of the research. The findings illustrate serious inequities which represent a system-level failure to safeguard the child's right to education (article 28) under the CRC and according to Tomaševski's 4-As conceptual framework; that education should be available, accessible, acceptable and adaptable (2001). Aspects of transition procedures, such as the differential availability of school places and inconsistencies in school admissions requirements, limit school choice and contribute to inequitable access to secondary education. The assessment arrangements are shown to create additional complexities in admissions practices, resulting in differential experiences of access to academically selective schools. This thesis, by offering insight into children's experiences of admissions decisions across the full range of school types, demonstrates that the power of choice lies with schools. An analytical tool, developed as an outcome of this research, is proposed as a means to assess the extent to which transition arrangements are underpinned by respect for children's rights.

To rule through choice is to create differentiated options for urban citizens who use public infrastructure and to produce information and price signals that guide decisions. It treats urban residents as rational consumers of public goods. Economists, planners and activists developed the rhetoric and tools of choice over the course of a half-century. This strategy moved from the fringes of planning and policy making to become widely accepted and adopted. How did this manifestation of choice become central to urban policy? What are the consequences of policies that emphasize individual choice? What can be done to make them conform to the ethical standards of planning? The dissertation that follows focuses on the origins and development of choice-based policy-making and the public dispute over it in New York City. Two cases elucidate the rule of choice. School choice and congestion pricing were signature policies for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (2002- 2013). In the 1950s two economists, William Vickrey and Milton Friedman, translated fundamental principles in that discipline into policy proposals in education and transportation governance. When the Bloomberg administration sought to govern education and roadway infrastructure through choice, this strategy became the source of public debate and deliberation. The history and contemporary politics of the two cases provide material for reflecting on core theoretical issues in planning, including the changing nature of liberalism, the meanings and uses of data and rationality and the role of the material world in producing and recreating modes of engaging with urban problems.

Matching market design studies the fundamental problem of how to allocate scarce resources to individuals with varied needs. In recent years, the theoretical study of matching markets such as medical residency, public housing and school choice has greatly informed and improved the design of such markets in practice. Impactful work in matching market design frequently makes use of techniques from computer science, economics and operations research to provide end–to-end solutions that address design questions holistically. In this dissertation, I develop tools for optimization in market design by studying matching mechanisms for school choice, an important societal problem that exemplifies many of the challenges in effective marketplace design. In the first part of this work I develop frameworks for optimization in school choice that allow us to address operational problems in the assignment process. In the school choice market, where scarce public school seats are assigned to students, a key operational issue is how to reassign seats that are vacated after an initial round of centralized assignment. We propose a class of reassignment mechanisms, the Permuted Lottery Deferred Acceptance (PLDA) mechanisms, which generalize the commonly used Deferred Acceptance school choice mechanism and retain its desirable incentive and efficiency properties. We find that under natural conditions on demand all PLDA mechanisms achieve equivalent allocative welfare, and the PLDA based on reversing the tie-breaking lottery during the reassignment round minimizes reassignment. Empirical investigations on data from NYC high school admissions support our theoretical findings. In this part, we also provide a framework for optimization when using the prominent Top Trading Cycles (TTC) mechanism. We show that the TTC assignment can be described by admission cutoffs, which explain the role of priorities in determining the TTC assignment and can be used to tractably analyze TTC. In a large-scale continuum model we show how to compute these cutoffs directly from the distribution of preferences and priorities, providing a framework for evaluating policy choices. As an application of the model we solve for optimal investment in school quality under choice and find that an egalitarian distribution can be more efficient as it allows students to choose schools based on idiosyncracies in their preferences. In the second part of this work, I consider the role of a marketplace as an information provider and explore how mechanisms affect information acquisition by agents in matching markets. I provide a tractable “Pandora's box” model where students hold a prior over their value for each school and can pay an inspection cost to learn their realized value. The model captures how students’ decisions to acquire information depend on priors and market information, and can rationalize a student’s choice to remain partially uninformed. In such a model students need market information in order to optimally acquire their personal preferences, and students benefit from waiting for the market to resolve before acquiring information. We extend the definition of stability to this partial information setting and define regret-free stable outcomes, where the matching is stable and each student has acquired the same information as if they had waited for the market to resolve. We show that regret-free stable outcomes have a cutoff characterization, and the set of regret-free stable outcomes is a non-empty lattice. However, there is no mechanism that always produces a regret-free stable matching, as there can be information deadlocks where every student finds it suboptimal to be the first to acquire information. In settings with sufficient information about the distribution of preferences, we provide mechanisms that exploit the cutoff structure to break the deadlock and approximately implement a regret-free stable matching.

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This study investigated a district magnet program that required high levels of actual parental involvement. The district that houses this program uses Epstein's framework of parent involvement to reach out to all families. The research sought to match parent responses with the magnet program expectations and the Epstein framework. Interviews were conducted and completed with twenty-four participants including diverse backgrounds. Particularly sought after were parents from different ethnic groups and gender within two separate middle schools. The research also endeavored to learn how the district school choice program forced parents to navigate their child's enrollment, whether at the elementary school or middle school levels. My findings suggested that the parents in this study fit into more than one framework. During the study, two more frameworks emerged that better place parent engagement with the student choice program along with that of Epstein. My working hypothesis was that a "one size fits all" parent involvement framework does not exist for parents who chose this magnet program. My study suggests that school districts need to reach out to all parents in whatever form works for both parties: the parents and school programs. School districts are charged with developing the flexibility needed to meet families where they are and provide support necessary to sustain higher levels of parent involvement. This action will lead to more success in the familial journey through their child's educational experience.

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