Who Gets What in Education: Can School Matching Improve Student Achievement?

We examine two approaches to improving urban school systems: changing who gets to go to existing schools (reallocation) and restructuring school portfolios through closures and reconstitution (resource augmentation). Using data from New York City high schools, we estimate models of school effects allowing for both vertical school quality differences and horizontal student-specific match effects. While sophisticated reallocation policies that optimize student-school matches can generate modest educational gains, they are constrained by limited seats at highly effective schools. Simple resource-augmentation policies targeting replacement of low-performing schools achieve comparable improvements with less systemic disruption. Analysis of NYC’s school closures reveals that basic graduation rate metrics effectively identify struggling schools, suggesting complex value-added models may be unnecessary for targeting closure decisions. Our findings indicate that capacity constraints, rather than poor school matching, primarily drive educational inequality.