/

The Washington Post

The Lottery That’sRevolutionizing D.C.

SchoolsA Nobel Prize-winning economist designed an algorithm that transformedwhere Washington kids go to school. But how far can it go in addressing

segregation and inequality?

/

Taylor Johnson on her way to KIPP DC College Prep

in Northeast Washington.

Story by Thomas Toch

Photos by Evelyn Hockstein

MARCH 20, 2019

Add to list

n a snowy December Saturdayin 2017, Crystal and SeanGoliday and their young son,

Noah, were among some 5,000 Districtof Columbia families streaming into theD.C. Armory next to RFK Stadium.Inside, staff from nearly all of the city’s236 charter and traditional publicschools were pitching their schools topassersby from long rows of brightlydecorated, swag-filled booths set up onthe armory’s hardwood floor.

At EdFest, Washington’s citywideschool fair and a modern-day educationbazaar that would have been hard tocontemplate a generation ago, highschools even had their cheerleadersout. Coaches held up uniforms to enticerecruits. The Golidays were excited butanxious as they moved through thecrowds. Crystal owned a townhouse in

O

/

suburban Upper Marlboro, Md., whenshe and Sean met, but they wanted toraise a family in the city, in apredominantly African Americanneighborhood where their investmentin a home would grow. So they bought asmall, 70-year-old rowhouse in theDeanwood neighborhood, just over theAnacostia River from RFK. They didn’twant their low-performingneighborhood school for Noah, whowould be starting preschool eightmonths after EdFest, but they hoped tostay in Ward 7 rather than return to thesuburbs or pay for private school. Theywere looking for other public options.In Washington, students could attendany traditional public school with openspots, and nearly half the city’s publicschool population attended charterschools, publicly funded but privatelyoperated.

Crystal and Sean tried to read the bodylanguage of representatives of popularschools as they worked their way upand down the aisles at EdFest. “We’llnever get in here,” Crystal sighed, sizingup the crowd at the Washington YuYing Public Charter School booth, aChinese-English immersion program.

/

Like many of the city’s more affluentfamilies, Crystal was drawn tospecialized schools such as Yu Ying.

After exchanging pleasantries with theprincipal of Cleveland Elementary, aSpanish-English bilingual school run byD.C. Public Schools, the city’straditional school district, Crystalasked, “Can you tell me, honestly, ourchances?”

“Really, honestly, you have to just trythe lottery,” the principal responded.

“We’re concerned that we’ll be stuckwith the neighborhood school,” Seantold me a short time later, as he dartedafter Noah. He liked a high-achievingschool on Capitol Hill that uses theReggio Emilia educational philosophy.

“Sean and I both went to city publicschools,” Crystal said. “We want Noahto be challenged.” The Golidays werealso drawn to schools that were raciallyand socioeconomically diverse. Theydidn’t want Noah to be among the onlyAfrican American students in hisschool.

/

Taylor Johnson, an eighth-grader atDemocracy Prep Congress HeightsPublic Charter School, had differentpriorities at EdFest. A fourth-generation Washingtonian, she hadgrown up in a two-bedroom apartmentwith her mother and father and twinbrother, Todd, in the SoutheastWashington neighborhood of CongressHeights, just a few blocks fromDemocracy Prep. The following schoolyear, 2018-19, she and Todd, who goesby T.J., would be in high school.

Because My SchoolDC’s software placesstudents, the systemlevels the playingfield for familieswho lack politicalconnections or thetime to completescores ofapplications.

/

Their mother, Kelli Johnson, graduatedfrom nearby Ballou High School andwas the first in her extended family toearn a college degree. Taylor, partial tojeans, sneakers and big earrings, hadaspirations beyond high school. “I wantto go to college,” she told me. “Be ateacher or do cosmetology.” Ballou hada cosmetology program, but it wasamong the lowest-rated schools in thecity, and Taylor wasn’t impressed whenshe visited. “People were playing inclass, teachers weren’t teaching,” shesaid.

Taylor and her brother lived in one ofthe toughest neighborhoods in the city.A week after I visited Democracy Preplast year, a Ballou student was fatallyshot in the middle of the afternoonacross the street from Taylor’s school.“I’ve asked to go somewhere where Iknow I’m safe,” the 14-year-old told me.

/

Her parents didn’t need anyconvincing. To the Johnsons, thatmeant going to high school on the otherside of the Anacostia River. At EdFest,Taylor bypassed Ballou, Anacostia HighSchool, Friendship Tech Prep and otherWard 7 and 8 schools. It was thepitches by McKinley Tech, KIPP DCCollege Prep, E.L. Haynes and the DukeEllington School of the Arts inGeorgetown that she wanted to hear.

Public school choice has expandedsteadily in the nation’s cities since thefirst magnet schools emerged nearlyfive decades ago as a way todesegregate public school systemsvoluntarily, and especially since thestart of charter schooling in the early1990s. But in Washington and the restof the country, taking advantage ofexpanding school options traditionallymeant navigating myriad applicationtimelines and deadlines withoutinformation to make clearcomparisons. It meant oversubscribedschools pulling names out of paper

Pre-K student Noah Goliday with parents Sean and

Crystal Goliday at a Valentine's Day event at Elsie

Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter

School.

/

bags, families pitching tents onsidewalks — or paying others to campout for them — to get to the front ofwait-list lines, and schools cherry-picking applicants to get the mostattractive students: a system favoringthe well-educated, the wealthy and thewell-connected.

For schools, the system made planningalmost impossible. Many students wereadmitted to multiple schools but didn’tlet schools know their plans — causingthousands of wait-listed students tochange schools through September andearly October, leaving schools guessingabout revenue and staffing, anddisrupting instruction. Now, theJohnsons and the Golidays werefollowing a very different route. Sincethe 2014-15 school year, the District’s93,000 public school students haveselected traditional public schools andcharters through a single centralizedapplication process powered by acomputer program that matches asmany students as possible to their topchoices.

/

Launched by then-Mayor Vincent C.Gray and run by a unit in the Office ofthe State Superintendent of Educationcalled My School DC, the commonenrollment system starts with schoolssubmitting lists of open spots. Studentsor parents set up accounts on the MySchool DC site and rank theirpreferences, applying to as many as adozen schools after searching with a MySchool DC search engine, via fairs likeEdFest, or by attending public schoolopen houses.

For all its success,My School DC hassuggested there arelimits to what schoolchoice canaccomplish —especially as anantidote to racialand socioeconomicsegregation.

/

My School DC gives students randomlottery numbers. Then an algorithmworks to place as many students aspossible in the schools they want,giving those with better lotterynumbers an edge when schools areoversubscribed.

Students are automatically placed onthe wait lists of schools they’ve rankedbut aren’t matched with, includingschools higher on their lists thanschools they are matched with. And MySchool DC matches wait-listed studentsas spots become available. Parents andstudents can track their standingonline.

Every student in the city is guaranteeda spot in a neighborhood DCPS school.Today, though, with families able tomove beyond neighborhood schoolboundaries, only 27 percent ofWashington’s public school studentstake that option.

Because My School DC’s softwareplaces students, the system levels theplaying field for families who lack

/

political connections or the time andresources to stand in lines, lobby schoolprincipals and complete scores ofapplications. The algorithm rewardsthe ranking of schools in students’ truepreference orders, removing anyadvantage of attempts to game thesystem. And a common onlineapplication process eliminates multipledeadlines, lost paperwork and the costto schools of hiring people to inputthousands of paper applications.

The common enrollment system is animportant window into Washington’schanging educational landscape —generating a trove of information aboutschool preferences that is shaping cityleaders’ thinking about what kind ofschools to create and where to putthem. It is also making publiceducation more transparent forfamilies, and bringing new competitiveenergy to both traditional publicschools and charters, even as it has ledthe two types of schools to worktogether in mutually beneficial ways.And yet, for all its success, My SchoolDC has suggested that there are limitsto what school choice can accomplish —especially as an antidote to the racial

/

and socioeconomic segregation thatplagues education systems nationwide.

Noah Goliday in class at Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School.

he Golidays and Johnsons hada Nobel Prize-winningStanford University economist

named Alvin Roth to thank for the MySchool DC enrollment system. He grewup in Queens, the son of public highschool teachers who were less thanpleased when he stopped going toclasses his junior year. A ColumbiaUniversity engineering professor whohad been working with Roth in a

T

/

weekend science program for talentedhigh-schoolers rescued him by gettinghim into the Ivy League school at thestart of what would have been hissenior year, without a high schooldiploma. He went on to earn a Stanforddoctorate and a Harvard professorship.

Roth, now 67, gravitated to matchingmarkets, where parties must chooseone another, through applications,courtship and other means. In 1995, hewrote a mathematical algorithm thatgreatly improved the efficiency of thesystem for matching medical schoolgraduates to hospitals for theirresidencies. That work led him toimprove the matching models for lawclerkships, the hiring of newly mintedeconomists, Internet auctions andsororities. “I’m a market designer,” hesays. “Currently, I’m focused onkidneys. We’re trying to match moredonor kidneys to people globally.”

He brought his expertise to theeducation sector when he was teachingat Harvard. He got a call in 2003 froma New York City Department ofEducation official who had read hiswork on residency matching andwanted him to redesign New York’s

/

dysfunctional high school enrollmentsystem. In New York, which has thenation’s largest public school district,high school choice is mandatory. Everyyear, the city’s roughly 80,000 eighth-graders must select, via application,from more than 700 programs spreadacross New York’s five boroughs. Thesystem was surpassingly stressful forfamilies, who were forced to put at thetop of their lists schools they thoughtwould be less popular rather thanschools they really wanted to attend. Itwas also rife with cronyism, andthoroughly ineffective. At the end of themonths-long process, some 30,000students were left without schools toattend.

Roth and a star Harvard graduatestudent, Parag Pathak, the son ofNepalese immigrants and now an MITprofessor, adopted Roth’s medicalmatch methodology to streamline theNew York system, working withanother market expert, economist AtilaAbdulkadiroglu, now at Duke. In 2012,Roth won the Nobel Prize in economicsfor his matching work, including theNew York project.

/

After students’ school selections andlottery numbers are uploaded into acomputer, Roth explained in hismodest office in the Stanfordeconomics department, the machineexecutes a vast number of nearlyinstantaneous school placements,“making temporary matches that areconstantly revised as schools are filledwith students that rank them higherand have higher tie-breaking lotterynumbers.” Unmatched studentscascade through the system, as thecomputer works to match them to theirnext-highest choices.

“The model gives students who don’tget their first choices just as muchchance of getting their second choicesas if they had ranked their secondchoices as their first choices,” Roth toldme, “permitting every family to put theschools they want most to attend at thetop of their lists and putting morestudents in schools they want to be in.Children who grow up in poorerneighborhoods shouldn’t becondemned to go to poorer schools.”

/

Todd Johnson, who goes by T.J., outside McKinley Tech. T.J. had been interested in McKinley Tech and

Banneker Academic High but made McKinley his first choice.

romoting school choice isn’t auniversal goal among publiceducators. Administrators

worry the common enrollment modelcould encourage more students andfunding to flow to the charter sector.Charter leaders, especially at popularschools, worry about losing control oftheir enrollment and losing marketshare to other charters. Former D.C.schools chancellor Antwan Wilsonrejected common enrollment in hisprior job leading the Oakland, Calif.,school district in the face of intense

P

/

pressure from unions and traditionalpublic school advocates — only to losehis next job over the policy when hesidestepped the My School DC systemin placing his daughter in a DCPS highschool last year.

But in Washington, the teacher union isweak, and Wilson’s predecessor, KayaHenderson, and her counterpart in thecharter sector, Scott Pearson, theexecutive director of the D.C. PublicCharter School Board, saw commonenrollment as a way to help schools andstudents. A supporter of school choice,Henderson had improved lotteries forpreschoolers and students seekingschools outside of their neighborhoods.In 2011, she launched a commonapplication for DCPS’s half-dozenselective high schools. “We weredriving D.C. parents crazy” by havingschools manage their own enrollments,she told me.

And the annual game of musical chairsin charter admissions made it tough toknow who would show up at her DCPSschools. The picture would be a lotclearer under Roth’s commonenrollment system, she sensed. Schoolswould get real-time updates on new

/

applicants and on how many currentstudents were applying out. Wait listswould be immediately updated when astudent accepted a spot, providinginvaluable enrollment information forplanning purposes. And a year-endreport would tell school leaders whereelse their applicants applied,highlighting each school’s topcompetitors. It would be like Amazon, aMy School DC staffer told me:“Shoppers who looked at this productalso looked at these other products.”(Amazon CEO Jeffrey P. Bezos ownsThe Washington Post.)

The new system“removes any sort ofshadow that peoplecast on charterschools of gamingthe system, of beingsecretly selective,”says Scott Pearson.

/

Pearson viewed Roth’s model as a wayto cut the cost and confusion of havingmore than 60 charter schoolorganizations running their ownapplication systems. Just as important,it was a way to counter the growingperception that some charters wereworking to exclude challengingstudents. The computer-driven systemthwarts schools’ attempts to discouragetougher-to-educate applicants — aproblem in the expanding public schoolchoice landscape. And it does schoolsno good to hold back spots from thelottery in an effort to fill them on theirown; they can no longer draw on theirwait lists selectively now that MySchool DC manages the lists. ToPearson, the new system “removes anysort of shadow that people cast oncharter schools of gaming the system,of being secretly selective.”

Abigail Smith was developing thecharter sector’s common deadline whenGray named her deputy mayor foreducation in 2013. Building a singlecitywide public school enrollmentsystem powered by Roth’s algorithmwas her top priority. “You’re always in asituation where the rich and the

/

powerful are going to find a way tomaximize the system,” Smith told me.“The idea is to level the playing field asmuch as possible.”

T.J. Johnson practicing the trombone after school.

he Golidays, who moved to theWashington area to attendgraduate school, had been

exploring the world of D.C. schoolssince Noah was 1. Crystal trackedMoms on the Hill (MOTH), an onlinegroup of thousands of mostly middle-class parents, and visited schoolscitywide, collecting what she learned in

T

/

a detailed spreadsheet. Sean was drawnto the experiential learning at thecenter of the Reggio Emilia school. Andthey both liked the “sense ofcommunity” at Elsie Whitlow StokesCommunity Freedom Public CharterSchool, a French- and Spanish-immersion charter near CatholicUniversity.

The school had an InternationalBaccalaureate program, high test scoresand a diverse student body and faculty.It also had established a partnershipwith three other dual-languageelementary charter schools to sendtheir graduates to DC InternationalSchool, a dual-language charter middleschool-high school. “It would give us aclear path to graduation,” Crystal said.And so, they put a campus that theschool was opening east of theAnacostia at the top of their list, hopingthat the large number of spots therewould work in their favor.

On Monday morning, two days afterEdFest and hours after the My SchoolDC application season opened, theGolidays typed their 12 choices intoNoah’s portal on the My School DCwebsite and hit send, making them

/

among the first of nearly 25,000 D.C.families seeking spots outside of theirneighborhoods, almost a third of themfor preschoolers like Noah. Fourmonths later, they would learn Noah’sfate.

Meanwhile, the Johnsons weren’t alonein wanting out of Southeast schools.The flow of students under the commonenrollment system has been almostexclusively from east to west, says E.V.Downey, who until recently helpedabout 400 mostly younger middle-classfamilies a year navigate the publicschool choice landscape, charging thema few hundred dollars a year as aconsultant.

Middle-class African Americans livingin Hillcrest and other more-affluentenclaves east of the Anacostia, she says,have bypassed the many highlystructured charter schools in theirneighborhoods in favor of schools inBrookland, Petworth and otherneighborhoods closer to the center ofthe city that stress art, music and

/

exploratory learning, which are alsodraws for middle-class white andLatino families. But the commitment offamilies like the Johnsons to attendschools across the Anacostia Rivermeant that they bypassed not onlyBallou and Anacostia High, but alsoThurgood Marshall Academy, a highlyrated Ward 8 charter school that hasstruggled to fill its spots in aneighborhood that many families havesought to escape.

Todd Johnson (T.J.), wiry and sportinga fade haircut, was a good student atJefferson Middle School Academy,where just 18 percent of students metthe city’s math standards, and where heplayed trombone in the band, ran trackand captained the boys’ basketballteam. He and Taylor and their parentstoured several schools, including two ofDCPS’s half-dozen selective highschools, which required students tomeet their admissions standards beforeincluding the schools on their MySchool DC applications.

/

T.J. got a thumbs-up at both McKinleyTech and Banneker Academic High butmade McKinley his first choice, he toldme, because the school’s sportsprogram was stronger. Taylor didn’t getinterviews at either school and shiftedher focus to Washington LeadershipAcademy and KIPP DC College Prep.They both got their applications inbefore the My School DC deadline, T.J.using a computer in his middle schoollibrary, Taylor applying from homebefore running out the door tocheerleading practice.

With many families lacking Internetconnections or transportation totraverse the city researching schools,

With many familieslacking Internetconnections, MySchool DC makespublic serviceannouncements onradio and Metrobuses.

/

My School DC spends a substantial partof its $2 million annual budget helpingdisadvantaged families — includingtraining guidance counselors and otherschool staff to assist families withapplications; hosting informationsessions at recreation centers, homelessshelters and other city agencies; andmaking public service announcementson radio, social media and Metro buses.A nonprofit called DC School ReformNow counsels hundreds of low-incomefamilies a year and produces a series ofZillow-like virtual school tours. Andenabling families to submitapplications via smartphones hashelped bridge the city’s digital divide.

My School DC has reduced to under300 a year the number of students thatschools enroll outside of the centralizedsystem. In an effort to drive the numberlower, the My School DC board lastsummer gave itself the authority tohave the city’s inspector general policeschools not playing by the rules.

/

Taylor Johnson hugs Wanice Edwards, ninth-grade dean at KIPP College Prep.

he Golidays and the Johnsonswere lucky. My School DCsent Kelli Johnson emails in

late winter congratulating Taylor forgetting into KIPP College Prep, her firstchoice, and welcoming T.J. toMcKinley, where he was among 185incoming ninth-graders matched fromover 800 applicants.

My School DC’s algorithm matchedNoah Goliday to Stokes East End’sFrench program, the family’s secondchoice after the school’s Spanishprogram. Stokes had announced in late

T

/

February that its new East End campuswould be on East Capitol Street inWard 7, near the Prince George’sCounty line, a short drive from theGolidays’ home. Like many families,they had asked a lot of questions whenthey learned that Stokes’s youngstudents would be sharing a buildingwith a charter high school. There wouldbe separate entrances and securityguards, school leaders responded. Thatwas good enough for the Golidays, andthey kept the school at the top of theirMy School DC list.

When East End opened its doors inAugust, it had a diverse student bodydrawn from every ward in the city, withwhite students living west of theAnacostia River making up 15 percentof its enrollment, the first time in thecity’s modern history that significantnumbers of white students weretraversing the river to attend publicschool, says Pearson.

The Golidays were thrilled they landeda spot. Still, 8,600 students ended upon wait lists without matches. Theproblem is that there aren’t enoughspots in sought-after schools.

/

Preferences built into the My SchoolDC system, including for siblings ofenrolled students, add to the challenge.A so-called in-boundary preferencemakes it particularly tough to get intothe city’s best traditional neighborhoodschools. Carving the city intoattendance zones and guaranteeingstudents a spot in the traditional publicschool in their zone is a way ofreconciling school choice with the rightof every student to a free publiceducation.

But not surprisingly, families livingwithin the boundaries of top schoolsexercise their in-boundary advantagemore often than families with weakneighborhood options. And becausemany of the highest-performingneighborhood schools are inpredominantly white and more-affluentsections of the city, the My School DCpreferences weaken the system’s abilityto reduce long-standing racial andeconomic segregation in Washington’spublic schools, despite citywide schoolchoice. For the same reason, undoing

/

the preferences would be politicallyimpossible.

That majority white Ward 3 has nocharter schools — with their mandate totake applications from throughout thecity — compounds the problem. So doesthe fact that white students make uponly 15 percent of the city’s publicschool enrollment, while studiesestimate that about half the city’s whitestudents attend private schools. So onepath to desegregating the city’s schoolsis persuading more white students tostay in the public sector. “There arechoices white families are making thatare reinforcing the status quo racially,”says Smith, the former deputy mayorfor education.

When the Golidays moved inSeptember to a larger house in Ward 7,Noah’s trip to school was only a fewminutes longer — across PennsylvaniaAvenue SE to East Capitol Street. Eachday he’s greeted by Stokes staff as hewalks into the sparkling new gym underthe weight of a big backpackemblazoned with “I can do anything.”

/

But for many D.C. students, the dailyschool commute is a test of theirresolve, as I learned when I traveledwith Taylor and T.J. Johnson to KIPPCollege Prep and McKinley Tech onHalloween. Just before school startedlast summer, the Johnsons, hoping tosave money for a house of their own,moved from Congress Heights to ToddSr.’s mother’s compact, 1,500-square-foot, World War II vintage brickrowhouse, two blocks from PrinceGeorge’s County in Ward 7.

The move meant that Taylor rises at5:50 in the morning to leave the houseat 6:40 in her mother’s Nissan Sentra,battling buses down Alabama Avenue

Based on thesuccess of MySchool DC, DCPSand the chartersector have startedto plan the District’seducational futuremore thoughtfully.

/

SE to the Congress Heights Metrostation. It was still dark when weboarded a standing-room-only GreenLine train bound for Chinatown at 7:05.We switched to a Red Line train androde it a couple of stops to NoMa-Gallaudet U station, arriving half anhour after we departed CongressHeights.

From there, we walked half a mile,under a railroad trestle and up a hillthrough the gentrifying Union Marketneighborhood, arriving at KIPP at 7:50.Sometimes Taylor catches a KIPPshuttle bus from the NoMa station. Butshe mostly walks up the hill by herself.

T.J. follows much the same route as hissister, walking half a mile in theopposite direction once he gets to theNoMa station, across New York AvenueNE and past SiriusXM’s massiveantennas before reaching McKinley’sworn marble steps and metal detectors.

/

Their return home after school takeslonger, an hour and a half without theirparents ferrying them to the CongressHeights station. Taylor told me the daywe traveled together that she feels safecommuting by herself in the dark. Yetfor many D.C. students, there’s a limitto how far they are willing and able totravel to schools.

Recognizing this, DCPS and the chartersector have started to plan the District’seducational future more thoughtfully.Armed with My School DC data thatprovides a much clearer picture offamilies’ school preferences, they haveresponded by adding popular programsin neighborhoods that don’t have them.“It completely changed the game,”former chancellor Henderson told me.“We went from being a seller’s marketto a buyer’s market. It forced us to

Taylor Johnson in her world history class at KIPP.

/

think about advertising, enrollment andthe academic programming we locatearound the city, including a biginvestment in music, physicaleducation and foreign languages.Families that were leaving [DCPS]because they wanted their kids to learna language can now go to aneighborhood school.”

In forcing traditional public schools tocompete more directly, the commonenrollment system has pressed them tostrengthen themselves, as Hendersonsuggests. It has made school choicefairer and more efficient. And it haschanged the dynamic betweenWashington’s public and privateschools. Families are finding publicMontessori programs, dual-languageopportunities like Noah’s and otheroptions that were offered mainly in theprivate sector in the past. But the longwait lists at some schools and emptyspots at others that the My School DClottery has produced make clear thatthe success of school choice inWashington will ultimately requirecreating more strong schools. “If wedon’t have capacity in A-plus schoolsfor all the kids, then some kids aren’t

/

going to go to A-plus schools,” Rothtold me. “No system of choice can fixthat.”

Noah Goliday sits with a book in class at Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter

School.

Thomas Toch is the director ofFutureEd, an independent think tankat Georgetown University’s McCourtSchool of Public Policy.

Credits: Story by Thomas Toch. Photos by Evelyn

Hockstein. Designed by Twila Waddy.