Every year, 70,000 New York City eighth-graders get sorted
into about 400 high schools across the Big Apple. But until the early 2000s, more
than a third of students wound up at schools they had not chosen.
School choice systems emerged in the 1960s and ’70s after
courts began ordering schools to desegregate to comply with federal law. The
systems were meant to provide mostly poor, minority students zoned to
underperforming schools with access to a better education. But many choice
systems have still not met that goal, with parents in the know gaming the
system to get their children into preferred schools while other kids end up back
at their poor, neighborhood schools.
In 2003, researchers with expertise in game theory and market design overhauled New York’s school choice system to make it fairer. Parag Pathak devoted much of his time as a doctoral student in economics at Harvard University to analyzing components of the system, such as how to break a tie between two students vying for the last seat at a school. Now an economist at MIT and cofounder of the School Effectiveness & Inequality Initiative, Pathak, 39, continues to apply economics to daily life.