Controlled School Choice

Controlled choice over public schools is a common policy of school boards in the United States. It attempts giving choice to parents while maintaining the racial and ethnic balance at schools. None of the papers in education and in school choice describes how in practice to assign students to schools while complying with desegregation guidelines. In this paper, we provide a foundation for controlled school choice programs. We develop a natural notion of fairness, which is crucial in any school choice program, and show the following results: on the positive side assignments, which are fair for same type students and constrained non-wasteful, always exist in controlled choice problems; a “controlled” version of the student proposing deferred acceptance algorithm (CDAA) always finds such an assignment which is also weakly Pareto-optimal; on the negative side it is impossible to design a mechanism which is fair for same type students, constrained non-wasteful and incentive compatible. CDAA provides a practical solution for controlled school choice programs. JEL C78, D61, D78, I20.

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