How lotteries in school choice help to level the playing field

Using School Choice Lotteries to Test Measures of School Effectiveness

The measurement of school effectiveness is a central feature of educational accountability policies in all 50 US states and around the world. While school accountability measures are often based on test score levels (e.g., percent proficient), critics argue that test score gains are a fairer way to judge schools’ contributions to student achievement (e.g., Ladd and Walsh 2002, Ryan 2004). Such ...

A theory of school-choice lotteries

We introduce a new notion of ex ante stability (or fairness) that would be desirable for a school-choice mechanism to satisfy. Our criterion stipulates that a mechanism must be stable based solely on the probabilities that each student will be assigned to different schools, i.e., the assignment must be viewed as stable even before students know which school they will end up going to. This is in...

Teacher Mobility, School Segregation, and Pay-Based Policies to Level the Playing Field

Contents Acknowledgements ii Abstract iii Introduction 1

The (Un)Level Playing Field: How Color-Blind Educational Tracking Leads to Unequal Access

Educational tracking seeks to group students by unobserved ability using measures of observable acquired skills. In a model where individuals have differential skills prior to beginning formal education due to differences in early childhood development (e.g. linguistic, cultural, or nutritional disadvantages), we show that color-blind tracking systematically underplaces minorities. As a result,...

Expense Options to Level the Compensation Playing Field