Parents desire several features when choosing a school, but they often compromise on some preferences in favor of others. We develop a novel measure of aggregate preference compromise by examining the discrepancy between ideal preferences and those specified under real-world constraints. Relying on data from a representative sample in Kansas City,…

School buses may be a critical education policy lever, breaking the link between schools and neighborhoods and facilitating access to school choice. Yet, little is known about the commute for bus riders, including the average length of the bus ride or whether long commutes harm academic outcomes. We begin to fill this gap using data from New York…

We estimate school-choice preferences revealed by the rank-ordered lists submitted by more than 22,000 applicants to a citywide lottery for more than 200 traditional and charter public schools in Washington, D.C. The results confirm previously reported findings that commuting distance, school demographics, and academic indicators play important…

The Supplemental Educational Services (SES) provision of the No Child Left Behind Act offers free tutoring services to students attending perennially underperforming schools. The author assesses the extent to which Chicago Public Schools students most in need of and who could potentially benefit the most from additional academic instruction…