“SEII assists Boston’s School Choice Discussion”

SEII Director Parag Pathak togeth­er with grad­u­ate stu­dent Peng Shi to pro­vide ongo­ing ana­lyt­i­cal assis­tance to Boston Public Schools and the External Advisory Committee at the request of Boston’s Mayor Thomas Menino. The Mayor’s deci­sion sup­ports Superintendent Carol R. Johnson’s rec­om­men­da­tion that her tech­ni­cal team work with Professor Parag Pathak, direc­tor of the School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative (SEII) at MIT. The team will con­duct an in-depth analy­sis on zone-based and non-zone-based mod­els to sim­u­late how fam­i­lies would choose schools under a new sys­tem. The analy­sis is based on sev­er­al years of assign­ment data and used to project choice pat­terns in the future.