School and District Enrollment
Prepare, forecast, run and audit fair, transparent, and equitable school assignment lotteries.
We improve educational outcomes by supplying school districts and families with enrollment tools built on state-of-the-art enrollment science.
“A student who gets their first choice school increases their achievement by 0.4 standard deviations in Math and 0.14 in reading.”
Equitable
Transparent
Simple
Our products make school choice fair and transparent, while respecting family preferences and school system priorities such as those related to integration and travel time. Our software is based on Nobel Prize-winning research by the very professors who invented it.
Design
The design and implementation of the lottery is critical. Our researchers helped pioneer a modified Deferred Acceptance algorithm for lotteries that has been shown to improve matches and educational outcomes. For instance, when New York City migrated to our algorithm, 30,000 more students were able to choose a school, rather than be assigned manually.
We’ll work with you to design the most optimal lottery approach, including assignment algorithm, tie breaking schemes, priority parameters, and parent choice options.
Forecast
A critical part of the design and planning process is to simulate lotteries to forecast enrollment, test corner cases, and anticipate challenges. Our software makes it easy to run scenarios and plan for the future.
Enrollment directors can adjust the parameters of their match and forecast the consequences. For example, parents are less likely to exit a public school district when offered a seat at a highly-ranked choice. An enrollment director interested in maximizing the number of first- and second-choice offers yielded by a match can use the Design Tool to adjust capacities accordingly. Another might use the design tool to set priorities so as to reduce transportation costs.
Enable Parents
Parents are often mystified by a bewildering array of choices and may not understand the best approach. Our School Finder and Choice Tool makes it easy for parents to get the right information they need to make the best decision for their family.
Match
The design and implementation of the assignment lottery is critical. Our researchers helped pioneer a modified Deferred Acceptance algorithm for lotteries that has been shown to improve matches and educational outcomes. For instance, when New York City migrated to our algorithm, 30,000 more students were able to choose a school, rather than be assigned manually. We will determine the exact algorithm specifications and provide software to run the lottery.
Audit
We can provide an independent audit to determine if your process was fair, equitable, and transparent. And if we run your lottery, we guarantee it will stand up to scrutiny from others and can provide a ‘paper trail’ for full explainability and transparency.
Assess
Federal and state law requires US districts to measure and report on school quality. Often these measurements are built on statistics related to achievement and graduation. Regrettably, the comparisons implicit in such accountability metrics are often misleading: good educational outcomes reflect family background as much or more than real student learning. Our Assessment Tool uses the randomized trials embedded in our DA matching schemes to provide reliable measures of school quality.
We can also assess the impact of lotteries. For instance, in Denver we found that students who received their first choice school increased their achievement by 0.4 standard deviations in Math and 0.14 in reading. (Read the paper here.)