Guiding School-Choice Reform through Novel Applications of Operations Research

In January 2012, Boston initiated a school-assignment reform. After attending several community meetings, I formulated the reform as an optimization problem of finding school-choice menus and priorities that induce the best combination of equity of access, proximity to home, predictability, and community cohesion. Using previous school-choice data, I fit a discrete choice model of how families select schools, and created a simulation engine that estimated a variety of outcome measures for any plan. I also proposed several new plans, and helped Boston Public Schools analyze a short list of plans in detail. In March 2013, Boston adopted one of these plans, which will affect the 9,500 children who apply to Boston elementary schools each year.