Brookings Institute

How students are assigned to schools is changing, especially in urban areas. After decades of using students’ home addresses to determine school assignments, many U.S. cities are now turning to placement algorithms—alongside school choice policies—to determine which students can attend which particular schools. These algorithms, built on the Nobel Prize-winning theory of market design, elicit families’ ranked preferences for schools and use those preferences, along with schools’ priorities, to match students and schools.

In this paper, we examine the unified enrollment (UE) systems that use placement algorithms to make student assignments. After describing these systems, we explore their considerable promise and peril. We argue that UE systems can markedly improve the equity and efficiency of urban education systems. However, they must navigate difficult political terrain—with strong forces pushing against equity—and are vulnerable to misunderstandings by system users and designers. In other words, for all of their technical elegance, these systems’ ultimate success will depend on how people interact with them...