What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity with an algorithm

Re:What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity... by Balgair on Monday September 24, 2018 @02:10PM (#18059896)

Denver Public Schools have a 'choice' model that works alright[0]. You can opt, for free and without restrictions, to go to another school other than the neighborhood one (you are automatically put in the 'closest' as a placeholder). Generally, there is no busing with DPS, as school kids ride free on public transit. The Denver School of Science and Technology[1] is a 'charter/public' portion of DPS that regularly pull from across the metro, mostly via public transit. There are many other issues with DPS, but the 'choice' model they use, along with the assistance of public transit, generally works pretty well.

[0]http://schoolchoice.dpsk12.org/schoolchoice-round-1/

[1]

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Re:What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity... by bobthepanda on Tuesday September 25, 2018 @02:55PM (#18069326)

New York City also uses citywide school choice for high school. School choice really doesn't scale up. You end up getting a yellow-pages sized book of schools (and each page is a single school!), you trek across the city to view schools, there are entire forums and such dedicated to navigating the process. It's like the college application process in miniature.

We also generally do not use busing, but New York City is so large and congested that you start asking a lot of kids. I went to a school that was 90 minutes away by public transit on a good day, so I'd wake up at 5am to make an 8am start time.

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Re:What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity... by Balgair on Tuesday September 25, 2018 @04:15PM (#18070105)

> I'd wake up at 5am to make an 8am start time

Oh man! A friend in HS had swim practice before school and woke up at ~4:30 for it 3 days a week. On each of those days, she was just a zombo. I can't even imagine doing that every year. Do you think it was worth it for you?

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Re:What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity... by bobthepanda on Tuesday September 25, 2018 @04:34PM (#18070261)

The other choices, unfortunately, weren't much better. New York calibrates its schools to match up with parent commutes so that kids leave at the same time or earlier, and these parents in my neighborhood often had the same 90+ minute commute. As an example, there was a much closer in school that was 45 minutes away by bus, but they started at 7am, so it would've required an earlier wakeup time.

There was a school within walking distance, but the graduation rates weren't too hot. The nice thing about school choice, in theory, is that it doesn't cause neighborhoods to gentrify or disintegrate due to the quality of the local school. But if you scale it up to a million kids you basically make it so that only people with time and money can really game the system. I wouldn't consider myself particularly blessed, but I definitely was not the worst off person.

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