Interpreting School Choice Treatment Effects

Results and Implications from Computational Experiments

Bibliographic Data

ID15347679
AuthorsMarouli (0000-0003-4987-9186, corresponding author), Spiro Maroulis
Year2016
Volume19
Issue1
Publication date2016-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1460-7425 • E-ISSN: 1460-7425
PublisherJournal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.18564/jasss.3002
OpenAlexW2291717963
LanguageEN
Citations received5

Providing parents and students a choice to attend schools other than their assigned neighborhood school has been a leading theme in recent education reform. To evaluate the effects of such choice-based programs, researchers have taken advantage of the randomization that occurs in student assignment lotteries put in place to deal with oversubscription to popular schools and pilot programs. In this study, I used an agent-based model of the transition to school choice as platform for examining the sensitivity of school choice treatment effects from lottery-based studies to differences in student preferences and program participation rates across hypothetical study populations. I found that districts with higher participation rates had lower treatment effects, even when there were no differences in the distributions of school quality and student preferences between districts. This is because capacity constraints increasingly limited the amount of students who are able to attend the highest quality schools, causing the magnitude of the treatment effect to fall. I discuss the implications of this finding for interpreting the results of lottery-based studies involving choice schools

Economics · Management science · Computer Science · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics · Psychology · School Choice and Performance · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies

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