When moving from primary school to secondary school, many children do not end up at the school of their choice.
The usual distribution mechanisms for allocating school places are not very efficient and often cause inequality. This is what scientists from the ZEW – Leibniz Center for European Economic Research Mannheim and Queen’s University Belfast discovered in a study. As an alternative, they have developed an approach that prioritizes the wishes of parents and students. And it should also ensure a fairer distribution of school places.
To date, there have been two main methods used to allocate school places. In both cases, the wishes of parents and children are compared with the schools’ selection criteria. The schools’ criteria have a lot of weight. In the Immediate Acceptance (IA) process, the mechanism with “direct acceptance”, a student gets a place at the school that he has put at number 1 on his wish list – if there are enough places there. If the number of applicants exceeds capacity, the school selects the applicants who most closely match its selection criteria. The others leave empty-handed and may not get a place at their second or third choice school if it is full of first-time applicants.
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This article lies IPPEN.MEDIA as part of a cooperation with the Education.Table Professional Briefing before – first published it Education.Table on October 4th, 2023.
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“Average grade suggests precision that it doesn’t have”
In the Deferred Acceptance (DA) process, schools also select all applicants who most closely match their selection criteria. However, it also takes into account applicants with second and third choices. It is therefore possible that second-choice students push out first-choice students if, for example, these students have lower grades. This procedure is particularly widespread throughout Europe.
The scientists see a better procedure for allocating school places in the “rank-minimizing mechanism”. Each student receives points: one point for the school that is number 1 on their wish list, two points for the school that is number 2, etc. The algorithm now finds a distribution in which the number of points for all children is as small as possible. The goal is for more children to end up at a school that prioritizes them.
There are various options for achieving this with the methods used so far, explains Thilo Klein. He is a professor of quantitative economic research at Pforzheim University and an economist at ZEW. For example, the school’s criteria for allocating school places could be defined more broadly in order to have more leeway in the allocation. Then it is no longer a question of whether a child has an average grade of 2.1 or 2.2, but rather a grade of A or B. “This gives the average grade less weight as a criterion,” says Klein, and that’s a good thing because “the average grade suggests a precision that it actually doesn’t have.” (Annette Kuhn)
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