Elephantstrunk

As if by magiic but more likely because its the start of a new school year or my attention I notice that Marginal Revolution has picked up an excellent summary of the state of the art in school choice mechanism design. Tyler Cowen gives the following summary of Professor Hoxby’s presecriptions. A successful mechanism requires:

1. Supply flexibility, which means that schools should have the ability to open where there is demand for them, expand with increased demand and contract with reduced demand
2. Money should follow students, which means that funding policies must be designed so that schools that are in demand have the funds to expand and those that are not in demand lose funds and must contract; and
3. Independent management of schools, which means that schools must be free to innovate in a range of areas, including pedagogy, teacher pay, budget allocation, and the way the school is organised.

Now all of these are good points but they are also means to an end. The end is allowing a schools system to evolve and successful educational strategies and systems that can be reproduced to spread. Thus points 1 and 2 are meant to allow good schools to grow and bad schools to whither while point 3 is meant to ensure that different approaches are tested.

In themselves these are not bad points but they are in conflict and not just in the sense that given only the points above one might even hope that the best school would become the only school. It almost decrees that the only method of propagating successful education is by corporate expansion or imitation. Unfortunately, schools can’t grow that much. The best private schools are mostly independent and of limited size despite massive over subscription. Many of the best features of schools also depend very much on the individuals involved and cloning is not yet an option.

Moreover there will still be students in dying schools. Done wrong, taking money away from them will only make maters worse.

1. Beyond that these prescriptions only address a few of the main determinants of succeful schools, the students as a body and their attitudes as individuals don’t fit into this system very well. If you took the pupils from the best school and swapped them with the pupils from the worst school my guess is that improvements would be slow in best school and deterioration not drastic in the newly constituted worst school. Nor do they address the quality or variety of teachers or the objectives of education. Fortunately London schools appear significantly more flexible than their US counterparts, (at least as they are stylised, Ben. W. Murch, the elementary school I went to in Washington was flexible and excellent) and within the state system many of the desiderata described above apply. London schools are rapidly improving but as far as I can see measures like those above are only part of the story. More importantly: Changes going on within schools — mostly better funding, training and adoption of best practice, and increasing flexibility of approach and personalisation of teaching
2. High demand for places from a growing population
3. Significant intervention and supervsion from above

I think the considerations above help that but they are far from all that is going on.

Also the previos Marginal Revolution post mentions Gale Shapley mechanisms in the context of on-line dating. Where, I want to know, are the actually implemented applications of top cycle trading?