School choice discussions often overlook intradistrict open enrollment, allowing students to attend any public school within their resident district. It’s less prevalent than, say, charter schools or interdistrict open enrollment (which occurs between districts). But it could be part of a wider effort to stem the tide of disenrollment that many districts are experiencing—especially if students can land in better schools as a result. It could also be part of a strategy to boost learning and reduce gaps. A recent NBER study examines the impact of one such public school choice program known as the Zones of Choice (ZOC) in Los Angeles.
The current version of ZOC began in 2010, when competition from charter schools was impacting enrollment throughout Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The plan was to increase students’ high school options by combining LAUSD school catchment areas into larger choice zones. Without a default feeder system, high schools must attract students from across those zones, which often leads to information sessions on their campuses or at middle schools. It may also lead to lotteries for oversubscribed high schools; otherwise, assignments are determined from parents’ ranked choices using a centralized, one-stop-shop algorithm.
In the case of ZOC, roughly 65–70 percent of applicants listed schools not in their neighborhoods as their first preference. Yet only 30 percent ultimately enrolled in non-neighborhood schools, in part because of capacity restraints (still, that’s a big boost from the 7 percent in the year before the ZOC expansion took place). The ongoing enrollment decline in LAUSD means that more schools can absorb additional students, making lotteries rarer and competition more salient, especially since declines in student enrollment impact staffing levels.
In this analysis, the authors used data for all students enrolled in LAUSD between 2008 and 2019, restricting the sample to student level observations in the eleventh grade. They excluded special education and magnet schools without strict neighborhood assignments and restricted their sample to schools that were open before the ZOC expansion. They employed a difference-in-differences design that compares changes in achievement between ZOC students and non-ZOC students. Specifically, they matched each school to a non-ZOC comparable school within deciles that have the same proportions of Hispanic students and students in poverty. They leveraged student addresses, test score data and demographic data, as well as data on school assignments and preferences—and college outcome data from the National Student Clearinghouse.
The analysis finds large positive effects of ZOC on student achievement and four-year college enrollment. By the sixth year of the program, ZOC students’ English language arts exam performance improved by 0.16 standard deviations (SD) relative to comparable non-ZOC students. ZOC raised four-year college enrollment by roughly 5 percentage points, a 25 percent increase from the baseline ZOC student mean, which was mostly driven by increases in enrollment at California State University campuses. Analysts say that “both of these effects [led] to vast reductions in between-neighborhood inequality in educational outcomes.”
Improvements in school quality mostly explain the effects, which are concentrated among the lowest-performing schools. Indeed, families making choices appeared to place significant weight on schools’ academic quality, giving those institutions competition-induced incentives to improve their effectiveness. Ultimately, the ZOC introduced school choice in roughly 30-40 percent of the district (and has now been expanded to include middle schools).
Last, the analysts probed the structural features of the ZOC that may help explain its positive effects. First, there is a manageable number of choices: ZOC option sets include at most five campuses, far fewer than intradistrict choice programs in, for example, New York City and New Orleans. Second (and related), parents are less likely to suffer from information overload, given the relatively few options to compare. Third, the relative homogeneity of students within each zone largely eliminates the factors of income and race from the equation, leaving school quality as the primary metric upon which options are judged—and upon which schools must compete.
Unfortunately, the LAUSD of late has turned a cold shoulder to charter schools. And without options beyond the traditional district schools, it’s hard to operate “zones of choice.”
That said, the bottom line remains that intradistrict school choice, if designed well, can be beneficial for parents, students, and districts. Providing ranked choices for a handful of options and incenting an emphasis on academic quality are vital facets of a well-designed system.
Which raises the question: Will Los Angeles return to the days of trying to out-compete charters to the continued benefit of kids in the ZOC—or will they choose to suck the life out of an intervention that’s working?
SOURCE: Christopher Campos and Caitlin Kearns, “The impact of public school choice: Evidence from Los Angeles’s Zones of Choice,” National Bureau of Economic Research (August 2023).
