School Choice in Context : Can Open Enrollment Cure Segregation?

We study the impact of school choice on segregation. It shows that the popular school choice mechanisms lead to substantially different school and residential segregation, an important and overlooked aspect of choosing among school choice mechanisms. We show that open enrollment policy in public school choice program can decrease diversity of individual schools and increase segregation depending on which student allocation mechanism is used. Without open enrollment, we study the model of location choice and show that segregation is mainly associated with income. In comparing mechanisms, we show that Boston mechanism fosters segregation more than the deferred acceptance. With open enrollment, the difference between BM and DA becomes more drastic. We show that BM can actually intensify segregation when open enrollment policy is adopted, while DA is more resilient to segregation. The deferred acceptance with multi tie breaking creates maximally diverse schools