The Choice Alternative to School Assignment

The problems associated with the reassignment of students to schools, whether the result of closures, expansions, grade reconfigurations, or district desegregation, are some of the most difficult problems that school administrators must face. These problems are compounded with the political backlash that can result whenever parents sense a loss of control over their schools. An increasingly popular approach to reassignment, however, is to allow ‘choice’. When parental choices are honored, the otherwise adversary relationships between parents and administrators are diminished and community support for schools is strengthened. In this paper is a series of mathematical programming formulations which can enable administrators rapidly to generate alternative assignment schemes that maximize choice. In addition, these multiobjective frameworks allow the explicit analysis of the trade-offs between a variety of important but competing objectives.