Winning the Lottery

Via Crooked Timber, controvery in England over student assignment to schools (which they refer to as admissions). The Department for Eduction and Skills, equivalent of the U.S. Department of Education, has established new regulations that try to make student assignment to schools fairer through a variety of measures. Admissions criteria, such as interviews and requested donations, that were disproportionately a barrier to less advantaged students have been banned. Most radical, families can no longer guarantee their child a slot in a school by purchasing a home nearby.

These changes are understandably controversial, and the controversy has focused on the city of Brighton and Hove. In response to the new regulations, the local school authority there instituted a system that divides the city into six catchment areas and uses a lottery to assign children to a school within their cathment area. Previously, preference for slots in a particular school went to children living closest to it, prompting more affluent families to purchase homes as close as possible to popular schools, and raising the prices of homes in those neighborhoods. The goal of both the national policy changes and the specific lottery policy in Brighton is to increase equity and transparency in school admissions, but whether the policy will actually do this is subject to debate.

In many ways, England is farther down the choice road in public education than the United States, having instituted a national "open enrollment" policy under the Tory government in 1988. English schools have also typically had more freedom to choose students than most American schools. Strikingly, given the many differences between our two countries and education systems, many of the fears about increased choice are the same on both sides of the Atlantic--potential increases in social stratification, inequity for disadvantaged students, concerns about the impact on communities, etc.--as is the hope by choice proponents that it will increase educational customization and equity for disadvantaged children who are ill-served by residentially-based assignments. Americans who are interested in the interplay between choice and equity should keep an eye out to the debate there. This forthcoming paper on the subject from the Institute for Public Policy Research, an English think tank that falls somewhere between the Brookings Institution and my previous employer, also looks well worth checking out. Although most American schools and districts don't have "admissions" in the same way that English schools do, their idea of a local-area-wide "admissions authority" to handle the school assignment process for all students and schools would make a lot of sense in the growing number of American cities, like D.C. and New York, that have a growing array of public (and, in the case of D.C., private) school choice options.

Shameless Plug: If you want to know more about England's experience with education reform and what the U.S. can learn from it, check out this interview I did with Blair education reform architect Sir Michael Barber last winter.