Community-Engaged Development of Mathematical Models to Guide School District Design

• In Event: Building Equitable Learning Ecosystems: Two Interdisciplinary, Sociotechnical Designs

Abstract

Designing school districts to advance equitable access to education involves many complexities. Since the landmark United States Supreme Court decision on school desegregation, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), mathematical models to support this complex decision space have emerged in the operations research literature; see Clarke and Surkis (1968), Heckman and Taylor (1969), and Liggett (1973), for some of the earliest examples. At the core of school district design problems is the assignment of students in geographic units to schools and/or educational programs. These assignments then form the attendance area boundaries for neighborhood schools and enrollment policies for schools and educational programs that operate outside of neighborhood schools.

As the public education landscape has evolved and operations research methods have expanded, collaborations between school districts, communities, and operations researchers have continued. Despite these many advances, Malczewski and Jackson (2000) cite several key limitations of these mathematical optimization approaches: they can be incomprehensible to interested parties, they often fail to include criteria that district administrators believe to be important, and they implicitly assume a social consensus. This creates an inherent conflict between model simplicity for transparency and community adoption, and model complexity to reflect the many interconnected decisions in school district design.

In this paper, we present a new modeling framework for district design decisions that incorporates the many advances in school district modeling in the past decades, notably many of the innovations in Caro et al. (2004), and includes flexibility to expand decision-making capabilities. The framework is adaptable to the needs of local communities and computationally efficient such that one can generate multiple solutions iteratively with community input. At the core of this framework is a new stream-based approach for district design and student assignment that incorporates multiple design and assignment decisions simultaneously by assigning students in small geographic units to a set of schools (e.g., elementary, middle, high school) and educational programs (e.g., bilingual, special needs) with a single composite variable. The stream-based formulation allows multiple interrelated assignment decisions simultaneously leading to comprehensive guidelines for student assignments, and it is flexible to accommodate many context-specific factors.

These innovations are rooted in district and community input generated through longstanding research-practice partnership. The district involved had recently launched an initiative to streamline the student assignment process, with a focus on addressing historic inequities in access to schools through broader district redesign. Consideration for building a new school to replace one closed following desegregation was of significant interest to the district. A committee, who represented and gathered further input from the broader community about their priorities and values, was convened to guide the process. By participating in the committee and the RPP, our mathematical models reflect the community’s values and context (Coburn et al., 2021). This community input makes for more useful modeling and solutions and helps to navigate the ever-changing conditions in which school districts operate. Thus, the paper illustrates the development of a context-specific school district design model within a research-practice partnership.

Authors

• Karen Smilowitz, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author

• Sarita Smith, Evanston / Skokie School District 65
  Presenting Author