Equitable Access to Education

Working to improve lottery-based school choice

San Francisco introduced district-wide school choice in 2011 to reduce racial and socioeconomic segregation between schools and help students from across the city access better education. Instead, school segregation by race and income increased. As an example of how this occurs, when asked to rank programs for student assignment, white and Black families rank on average 15.9 and 3.4 programs respectively. The problem of school choice exacerbating school segregation is not limited to San Francisco -- it is present in other large school districts, including New York City and Boston, that use lottery-based school choice.
 
Equitable Access to Education is an impact lab that includes team members from the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) working in partnership with Stanford education and management, science, and engineering scholars. 

Together, they design tools to assess the district's new zone-based student assignments where families choose from a set of schools close to where they live (rather than through a city-wide lottery). The team observes families’ interactions with the school assignment process, and captures unintended consequences of zone-based school assignment policies on gentrification.
 
The team's early work was supported in part by the Stanford Impact Labs Design Fellowship that Stanford assistant professors Irene Lo and Francis Pearman participated in during the 2020 – 2021 academic year.

With funding from Stanford Impact Labs, the team can build on SFUSD's commitment to design simple, transparent schools zones that achieve the district's goals of diversity, predictability, and proximity. Through the process—and with more evidence and experience—the lab hopes to develop a method that San Francisco and other districts can use to improve equity in school assignment policies and practices.

Partners:

• Irene Lo, Stanford Management Science and Engineering
• Itai Ashlagi, Stanford Management Science and Engineering
• Francis Pearman, Stanford Graduate School of Education
• Lauren Koehler, San Francisco Unified School District Educational Placement Center
• Joseph Monardo, San Francisco Unified School District Educational Placement Center

For more information, please contact:
Irene Lo at ilo@stanford.edu
 
Related:

https://www.sfusd.edu/schools/enroll/student-assignment-policy/ad-hoc-committee-student-assignment