Efficiently and equitably assigning students to public schools

In this talk, I will give an overview of key issues that arise when operationalizing school choice algorithms, and provide technical and computational approaches for addressing some of these issues. In joint work with the San Francisco Unified School District we propose a new student assign policy using zones and other school choice policy levers to minimize travel distances while ensuring diversity. In other work, we consider school waitlists and reassignment, and propose, axiomatically justify, and optimize over a class of reassignment mechanisms. In simulations using NYC public school data we show that our optimal mechanism maintains efficiency while halving reassignment in simulations. I will end with a reflection on where there continue to be gaps between academic school choice mechanisms and practical implementation, and how we as academics can co-design technical solutions with our non-academic partners.