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School Admissions Reform in Chicago and England: Comparing Mechanisms by their Vulnerability to Manipulation

Are Parents Gaming their School Assignment?

School Assignment, February 2013

In a study of school admissions systems, Parag Pathak and Tayfun Sonmez introduce a method to compare the mechanisms which districts use to assign students to seats based on their vulnerability to manipulation and offer insight into district policy changes in case studies of Chicago Public Schools’ abandonment of their old assignment mechanism in 2009 and England’s nationwide ban on the popular Boston mechanism in 2007.