From the Magazine: A Nobel Prize-winning economist designed an algorithm that transformed where D.C. kids go to school. But how far can it go in addressing segregation and inequality?
On a snowy December Saturday in 2017, Crystal and Sean Goliday and their young son, Noah, were among some 5,000 District of Columbia families streaming into the D.C. Armory next to RFK Stadium. Inside, staff from nearly all of the city’s 236 charter and traditional public schools were pitching their schools to passersby from long rows of brightly decorated, swag-filled booths set up on the armory’s hardwood floor.
“Sean and I both went to city public schools,” Crystal said. “We want Noah to be challenged.” The Golidays were also drawn to schools that were racially and socioeconomically diverse. They didn’t want Noah to be among the only African American students in his school. Pre-K student Noah Goliday with parents Sean and Crystal Goliday at a Valentine's Day event at Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School. Her parents didn’t need any convincing. To the Johnsons, that meant going to high school on the other side of the Anacostia River. At EdFest, Taylor bypassed Ballou, Anacostia High School, Friendship Tech Prep and other Ward 7 and 8 schools. It was the pitches by McKinley Tech, KIPP DC College Prep, E.L.
My School DC gives students random lottery numbers. Then an algorithm works to place as many students as possible in the schools they want, giving those with better lottery numbers an edge when schools are oversubscribed. The common enrollment system is an important window into Washington’s changing educational landscape — generating a trove of information about school preferences that is shaping city leaders’ thinking about what kind of schools to create and where to put them.
Roth and a star Harvard graduate student, Parag Pathak, the son of Nepalese immigrants and now an MIT professor, adopted Roth’s medical match methodology to streamline the New York system, working with another market expert, economist Atila Abdulkadiroglu, now at Duke. In 2012, Roth won the Nobel Prize in economics for his matching work, including the New York project.
But in Washington, the teacher union is weak, and Wilson’s predecessor, Kaya Henderson, and her counterpart in the charter sector, Scott Pearson, the executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, saw common enrollment as a way to help schools and students. A supporter of school choice, Henderson had improved lotteries for preschoolers and students seeking schools outside of their neighborhoods. In 2011, she launched a common application for DCPS’s half-dozen selective high schools.
T.J. Johnson practicing the trombone after school. The Golidays, who moved to the Washington area to attend graduate school, had been exploring the world of D.C. schools since Noah was 1. Crystal tracked Moms on the Hill , an online group of thousands of mostly middle-class parents, and visited schools citywide, collecting what she learned in a detailed spreadsheet. Sean was drawn to the experiential learning at the center of the Reggio Emilia school.
Middle-class African Americans living in Hillcrest and other more-affluent enclaves east of the Anacostia, she says, have bypassed the many highly structured charter schools in their neighborhoods in favor of schools in Brookland, Petworth and other neighborhoods closer to the center of the city that stress art, music and exploratory learning, which are also draws for middle-class white and Latino families.
My School DC has reduced to under 300 a year the number of students that schools enroll outside of the centralized system. In an effort to drive the number lower, the My School DC board last summer gave itself the authority to have the city’s inspector general police schools not playing by the rules.
The Golidays were thrilled they landed a spot. Still, 8,600 students ended up on wait lists without matches. The problem is that there aren’t enough spots in sought-after schools. When the Golidays moved in September to a larger house in Ward 7, Noah’s trip to school was only a few minutes longer — across Pennsylvania Avenue SE to East Capitol Street. Each day he’s greeted by Stokes staff as he walks into the sparkling new gym under the weight of a big backpack emblazoned with “I can do anything.”
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