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We analyse the initial impact of a major school admission reform in Brighton and Hove. The new system incorporated a lottery for oversubscribed places and new catchment areas. We examine the post-reform changes in school composition. We locate the major winners and losers in terms of the quality of school attended. We match similar cities and conduct a difference-in-difference analysis of the policy change. The results are complex: we see an increase in student sorting but we also see a significant weakening of the dependence of school attended on student's prior attainment.

In Fall 2009, Chicago authorities abandoned a school assignment mechanism midstream, citing concerns about its vulnerability to manipulation. Nonetheless, they asked thousands of applicants to re-rank schools in a new mechanism that is also manipulable. This paper introduces a method to compare mechanisms by their vulnerability to manipulation. Our methodology formalizes how the old mechanism is at least as manipulable as any other plausible mechanism, including the new one. A number of similar transitions took place in England after the widely popular Boston mechanism was ruled illegal in 2007. Our approach provides support for these and other recent policy changes.

Each year approximately 10 million high school seniors in China compete for 6 million seats through a centralized college admissions system. Within the last decade, many provinces have transitioned from a “sequential” to a “parallel” mechanism to make their admissions decisions. In this study, we characterize a parametric family of applicationrejection assignment mechanisms, including the sequential, deferred acceptance, and parallel mechanisms in a nested framework. We show that all of the provinces that have abandoned the sequential mechanism have moved toward less manipulable and more stable mechanisms. We also show that existing empirical evidence is consistent with our theoretical predictions.

There is a strong, positive, and well-documented correlation between education and health outcomes. In this paper, we attempt to understand to what extent this relationship is causal Our approach exploits two changes to British compulsory schooling laws that generated sharp across-cohort differences in educational attainment. Using regression discontinuity methods, we find the reforms did not affect health although the reforms impacted educational attainment and wages. Our results suggest caution as to the likely health returns to educational interventions focused on increasing educational attainment among those at risk of dropping out of high school, a target of recent health policy efforts.

We used self-report surveys to gather information on a broad set of non-cognitive skills from 1,368 eighth graders. At the student level, scales measuring conscientiousness, self-control, grit, and growth mindset are positively correlated with attendance, behavior, and test-score gains between fourth grade and eighth grade. Conscientiousness, self-control, and grit are unrelated to test-score gains at the school level, however, and students attending over-subscribed charter schools score lower on these scales than do students attending district schools. Exploiting admissions lotteries, we find positive impacts of charter school attendance on achievement and attendance but negative impacts on these non-cognitive skills. We provide suggestive evidence that these paradoxical results are driven by reference bias or the tendency for survey responses to be influenced by social context.

The number and range of school types in England is increasing rapidly in response to a neoliberal policy agenda aiming to expand choice of provision as a mechanism for raising educational standards. In this paper, I seek to undertake a mapping of these school types in order to describe and explain what is happening. I capture this busy terrain from different perspectives: legal status; curricular specialism; pupil selection; types of academy; and school groupings. The mapping highlights the intersections between the current reform agenda and the historical diversity within the English school system to show the dialogue between past and present. Borrowing the geological metaphors of faulting and folding, I argue that long-established school types are not buried under sedimentary layers of reform, but are thrust into the present where they are discursively re-imagined through neoliberalism. Finally, I conceptualise the landscape holistically through the lenses of locus of legitimacy and branding, where I argue that current structural diversification policies enable the enactment of interests other than educational through transferring responsibility for education and related assets away from public and towards corporatised or religious actors and institutions.

Dozens of school districts and college admissions systems around the world have reformed their admissions rules in recent years. As the main motivation for these reforms, the policymakers cited the strategic flaws of the rules in place: students had incentives to game the system. However, after the reforms, almost none of the new rules became strategy-proof. We explain this puzzle. We show that the rules used after the reforms are less prone to gaming according to a criterion called \"strategic accessibility\": each reform expands the set of schools wherein each student can never get admission by manipulation. We also show that the existing explanation of the puzzle due to Pathak and Sönmez (2013) is incomplete.

This article examines the extent to which indicators of the college-going climate of urban high schools are associated with students' application to, enrollment in, and choice among four-year colleges. The investigators examine two mechanisms by which high schools may shape college enrollment among low-income students in an urban school system: (1) by ensuring whether seniors who aspire to a four-year college degree take the steps to apply to and enroll in a four-year college, and (2) by influencing whether students enroll in colleges with selectivity levels at or above the kinds of colleges they are qualified to attend (a \"college match\"). We investigate different approaches to measuring college-going climate and develop new indicators. Findings suggest that qualifications and college aspirations will not necessarily translate into four-year college enrollment if urban high schools do not develop organizational norms and structures that guide students effectively through the college application process. Urban students who attend high schools where there is a pattern of four-year college-going, where teachers report high expectations and strong supports for college attendance, and where there is high participation in financial aid application are more likely to plan to attend, apply to, be accepted into, and enroll in a four-year college that matches their qualifications.

This article uses interest convergence and market-based theories to examine a recently-adopted controlled choice school admissions model intended to desegregate a diverse, urban school district. Drawing on longitudinal, qualitative interviews with advantaged parents who articulated support for controlled choice, we find that these parents' positive view of the measure was based on a belief that the desegregation policy benefited their own children as well as poor children of color. Yet for many, support for the reform was contingent on their child’s school assignment, pointing to the limits of utilizing a market-based model for achieving educational equity.

Melissa Roderick, Jenny Nagaoka, and Vanessa Coca focus on the importance of improving college access and readiness for low-income and minority students in urban high schools. They stress the aspirations-attainment gap: although the college aspirations of all U.S. high school students, regardless of race, ethnicity, and family income, have increased dramatically over the past several decades, significant disparities remain in college readiness and enrollment. The authors emphasize the need for researchers and policy makers to be explicit about precisely which sets of knowledge and skills shape college access and performance and about how best to measure those skills. They identify four essential sets of skills: content knowledge and basic skills; core academic skills; non-cognitive, or behavioral, skills; and \"college knowledge,\" the ability to effectively search for and apply to college. High schools, they say, must stress all four. The authors also examine different ways of assessing college readiness. The three most commonly recognized indicators used by colleges, they say, are coursework required for college admission, achievement test scores, and grade point averages. Student performance on all of these indicators of readiness reveals significant racial and ethnic disparities. To turn college aspirations into college attainment, high schools and teachers need clear indicators of college readiness and clear performance standards for those indicators. These standards, say the authors, must be set at the performance level necessary for high school students to have a high probability of gaining access to four-year colleges. The standards must allow schools and districts to assess where their students currently stand and to measure their progress. The standards must also give clear guidance about what students need to do to improve. College readiness indicators can be developed based on existing data and testing systems. But districts and states will require new data systems that provide information on the college outcomes of their graduates and link their performance during high school with their college outcomes.