Pete Ryan
There’s a long-held charge against the traditional system in US public education: Sending children to neighborhood schools consigns poorer kids to underfunded and unsafe schools while affluent kids thrive in amenity-rich environments geared toward college preparation.
To combat this, some districts have introduced programs that let families apply to public schools outside of their neighborhoods. Since 1999, the number of students enrolled in these “choice schools” has doubled in the country’s largest school districts, to 14 percent of all students in the public system.
But the majority of these programs still favor already privileged families, according to Chicago Booth’s Christopher Campos, Brown’s Jesse Bruhn, University of Texas’s Eric Chyn, and Brown postdoctoral scholar Antonia Vazquez. While such programs allow families to opt into school lotteries, those who would have the most to gain from better schools are the least likely to take part, the researchers find.
Of the 150 largest school districts in the country, roughly 90 percent allow families to decide whether to apply to a choice school. But most academic studies of school choice have focused on Boston or New York City, which require all families to apply to choice programs. The research is “all oriented around these mandatory systems and doesn’t take into account the potential effects of individual selection into these markets,” Campos says.
Seeking to capture a more complete picture of how opt-in policies affect student outcomes, the researchers analyzed the Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest voluntary public school choice system in the United States. They studied two cohorts of fifth-grade students between 2004 and 2013, tracking their math and English scores as they moved through the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. The researchers looked at all fifth graders in the district as well as the subset of students who took part in the school-choice program.
The differences between the two groups were notable. The choice subset had a smaller share of Hispanic students: 54 percent compared with 80 percent of students in the district. Meanwhile, the choice subset had a lower share of students who identified as living in poverty and a higher share who were higher achieving academically.
Tracking changes in application rates as the school-choice program expanded into new neighborhoods, the researchers find that people were more likely to apply to choice schools when they were nearby, suggesting transportation was a barrier to participation and could account for the low numbers of applicants.
There’s room for improvement
Opt-in systems are the most common form of public-school choice in large US districts, but because participation is voluntary, they provide less equitable access than mandatory systems.
How might the market respond if the challenge of commuting to schools were resolved? Modeling the effects of different policy interventions suggests that a universal busing program would increase participation to 33 percent of families overall, up from 20 percent today, filling 86 percent of seats in choice schools, up from 55 percent.
“In practice, though, this probably isn’t on the menu, as the fiscal costs are too large,” Campos says. “Our model remains silent about the financial burdens of busing.”
Shifting the model to a mandatory system (mirroring New York City or Boston) rather than an opt-in one would fill 98 percent of seats in all choice schools, the researchers find. It would also raise academic achievement across the district by involving students who have the most to gain from better schools.
Such a switch is neither cheap nor easy, Campos cautions. Districts would have to invest in the administrative resources and fund an information campaign letting residents know about the new approach.
And it may be politically costly to make the switch. Districts with choice systems that are opt-in rather than mandatory may be catering to the “most marginal family”—that is, the family that is closest to pulling children from the district and placing them in a charter or private school. These tend to be higher-income families with higher-achieving kids who, in their desire for access to the highest-quality schools, prefer the system of choice that impedes the inclusion of lower-achieving, poorer families, Campos says. Even homeowners without children may weigh in because property values are helped by having a high-quality school that’s accessible to local residents.
The district may acquiesce because by retaining marginal families, it can protect enrollment and revenue that would otherwise be lost if they exited for charter or private schools, preserving resources that can help cross-subsidize lower-income students who remain in neighborhood schools outside the choice system.
Regardless of the barriers to change, Campos says, the theoretical promise of school choice will be fulfilled only when the systems are designed to include every child, not only those with the resources to play the game.
Christopher Campos, Jesse Bruhn, Eric Chyn, and Antonia Vazquez, “Who Chooses and Who Benefits? The Design of Public School Choice Systems,” Working paper, December 2025.
Your Privacy
We want to demonstrate our commitment to your privacy. Please review Chicago Booth's privacy notice, which provides information explaining how and why we collect particular information when you visit our website.