Many school districts consider family preferences in allocating students to schools. In theory, this approach provides traditionally disadvantaged families greater access to high-quality schools by weakening the link between residential location and school assignment. We leverage data on the school choices made by over 233,000 New York City…

In this paper, I study the effect of winning the public school choice lottery on public school enrollment. In particular, I look at how different outside options affect how sensitive students are to receiving their first choice in the public school lottery, focusing on three measures of outside options: "ability to afford" private…

While school choice has been well studied, there is little existing research exploring the role of transportation, in general, and school buses, in particular, to school choice decisions. We examine the effect of school buses on school choice decisions using data on kindergarten students and their eligibility for transportation assistance in New…

The National Coalition on School Diversity has updated this review of federal support for school integration during the tenures of Secretaries Arne Duncan and John King, who both served during the Obama Administration. While much remains to be done, the Obama Administration has made concrete progress on school integration policy. This overview…

There is a strong relationship between students' socioeconomic status and their levels of academic achievement. Although educators should be held accountable for improving the performance of all students, including those living in poverty, schools alone can't eliminate the negative factors associated with poverty that lead to a large achievement…