Glitch Keeps Waitlisted Students Waiting

School-choice lottery results leave hundreds without complete info on chances to get into top picks.

The lottery worked on a simplified sorting mechanism that should have been clearer for parents. But a software glitch in the results, which were emailed out on Wednesday evening, left hundreds of incoming students without complete information about how close they currently are to getting into one of their top picks.

After receiving four school choices from each applicant, the district’s Office of Choice & Enrollment ran the algorithm, an intricate, multi-step process that tries to match each student with their top pick, but gives preference to students who live in the neighborhood or have siblings already in the school.

It sorted approximately 7,000 students, from pre-kindergarteners through high-school seniors, district officials said. That took place under a brand-new algorithm that removed past incentives to game the lottery, instead encouraging parents to accurately rank their choice of schools in the order they actually wanted their kids to attend.

But just as the system debuted, incoming high schoolers experienced a minor glitch in learning just how they’d fared under the district’s new way of assigning students.

Minor Glitch

In the letters that went out on Wednesday, 476 rising ninth-graders who didn’t get in to any of their top four choices and would automatically be placed at the district’s two comprehensive high schools, James Hillhouse and Wilbur Cross, couldn’t tell how close they were to getting into a better match.

Due to ​“an error in the lottery software,” the emails had a blank spot where incoming freshmen should have seen their position on the wait-list for all the schools where they still had a chance of getting in, officials said in a statement on Thursday afternoon.

The district is now working with the software vendor, Smart Choice Technologies, to fix the error, they said. The wait-list position that was omitted in the initial email was sent out to families in a separate email before Friday morning, even earlier than the 10 days they’d initially promised, Michael Pinto, the district’s chief operating officer, said on Thursday evening.

Officials stressed that this glitch applies only to high-schoolers who didn’t receive a spot at any of their four top choices. Those students who already have a desk at one of their preferred schools were not waitlisted at any higher choices, they said.

“The New Haven Public School District understands the important of each’s child’s placement and is committed to the academic excellence and achievement of all students at all schools within the district,” the district administration said in a press release. ​“And we are committed to ensuring that our lottery process is transparent and that our rising ninth-graders have the start they need and deserve in high school to succeed in school and in life.”

At least one other elementary-school parent also said that the letter didn’t list the school where their child had been accepted; on Thursday afternoon, district officials said they’d be looking into that too.

Bigger Change

This year, the lottery, administered under new leadership, tried out a new way of having parents pick schools.

In years past, school officials assumed parents understood a complicated odds game that rewarded them for knowing where to rank schools where they had an advantage with sibling or neighborhood preference.

But, under the new system, which was suggested by three economics professors at top universities, parents were encouraged to be honest where they really wanted to see their child next year, not just where they had the best chance of getting in.

The revamped algorithm was meant to simplify the process for parents, but because many didn’t find out about the updates until this week, they feel they were playing a game whose rules had changed midway through the game.

This year, Marquelle Middleton took over direction of the school-choice lottery, after Sherri Davis-Googe returned to her former job with Hartford Public Schools.

With direction from the superintendent and approval from the board, he implemented a new algorithm that three assistant professors from Princeton and the University of Chicago for advice had recommended to revamp the school-choice lottery process that many considered broken.

Those academics, who are providing a data analyst to the district at no charge, suggested changing the algorithm that it uses to assign students to reward students for listing the schools that they’d like to attend. That’s similar to the system used by school districts in New York, Chicago and Boston.

“New Haven was one of the big pioneers of this a long time ago, and they hadn’t updated to the best practices,” said Christopher Neilson, an assistant professor at Princeton University.

In past years, the system would initially line everyone up at their top-ranked school. Those who didn’t claim a spot would be put on a waitlist and pushed into another sorting for their second choice, and so on. But this year, the lottery tried to get as many students into a choice they’d prefer as possible.

That’s primarily because the algorithm factored preferences for living in the neighborhood or having siblings in a school differently. In years past, those preferences only applied to top-ranked picks. That meant parents had to decide whether to gamble on a long-shot or settle for the school where they had an advantage.

Under the old system, ​“you might like a school a lot, but you’re better off not putting it,” Neilson said. ​“That makes it strategic in how you apply.” In past studies, the professors ​“documented that people have trouble figuring it out.” Neilson added, ​“The people we want to help the most are the ones who are most likely to mess up.”

Neilson said he hoped the system would be easier to explain. ​“The first thing is you just rank schools in the order you like them,” he said. ​“You don’t have to try to be sneaky, thinking about what if you have a low chance and put it first.”

This year’s survey asked questions like whether parents would consider a private option if they didn’t receive their top choice or whether it mattered how far they’d have to walk to a bus stop. But those questions had no bearing on the actual placement this year, Neilson said. Those questions will just help guide the district’s future decision-making, he added.

Next year, for students starting in 2020 – 21, the three professors are planning to design online tools, like chat bots, that can walk families through the process, introducing them to more schools and showing them how to maximize their odds of a school they like. The contract states that the school district will approve each ​“smart marketing” and ​“application assistance” tool before it goes live on the website.

Already, some parents are wondering how this year’s data changed how parents played their neighborhood preference and whether the waitlists would be shorter. Neilson said they’d be analyzing that data before next year’s lottery.

Neilson, who said that the lottery process had been ​“confusing” when he tried to enroll his own kids in New Haven Public Schools, said that he felt the district was committed to coming up with fixes that would leave parents feeling better about the lottery.

“I know there’s always so much concern [about the lottery], but if there’s one message I could send, it’s that, whatever problems it has, they realize that and the people in the [Choice & Enrollment Office] are committed to it. Before, they didn’t want us to do research or to calculate anything, but in the last year, they asked us to figure out what they can do better. They probably won’t get credit for a while, until the system starts getting implemented, but they deserve credit for taking this seriously. The board and the superintendent might have their disagreements, but they knew that they could work on this together.”

Parents with further questions about the district’s lottery can contact the district’s Choice & Enrollment Office by phone at 475 – 220-1430 or by email at choiceenrollment@new-haven.k12.ct.us.