By solving the long-standing issue of how students are placed in Boston public schools, Peng Shi, Trinity ’10, has helped the city take a crucial step toward school reform.
Shi, currently a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, submitted a proposal to change the assignment process, which was recently approved and adopted by the Boston School Committee. The previous assignment system had families rank their preferences from a list of 96 primary schools divided into three geographic zones. A lottery then determined the school each child would attend. Under Shi’s zone-free proposal, families will get to choose from a list of at least six schools generated by a computer algorithm. In addition, because many schools in Boston are clustered together in low-income neighborhoods, the list will guarantee inclusion of at least two high-quality schools, though they may be further away.
Shi, whose work was profiled by The New York Times, noted that the assignment issue was difficult to solve due to numerous external factors that had to be considered.
“It’s a very complicated issue.... It’s not a simple problem we can engineer and solve,” Shi said. “School assignment has to do with housing markets, it has to do with poverty distribution, it has to do with urban sprawl and white flight—all of these issues are entangled together.”
The previous school assignment system resulted in high transportation costs, Shi said. With this process, many students ended up attending schools that were far from their homes, leading to inefficiencies in transportation. In 2012, the Boston school district spent $80 million on school busing.
“Sometimes there will be empty buses going all the way across the city,” Shi said. “There have been nightmare stories where children are stuck in traffic for one or two hours on a routine basis.”
Shi became involved with the project through attending community meetings held throughout Boston and receiving feedback from parents and other community members.
“Families were frustrated with this system being unpredictable,” Shi said. “People don’t like the idea of playing a lottery. When their child is born, they like to know where they’ll be going to school so that they can mentally invest in the school a few years beforehand.”
Shi’s mentors during his time at Duke were impressed but not surprised to learn of his accomplishments in Boston.
Kamesh Munagala, associate professor and director of graduate studies of computer science, has published research with Shi, whom he called “unparalleled” in analytical ability.
“My research is very theoretical, very mathematical,” Munagala said. “[Shi] realized he wanted to do work that is more inspired by society.... He wanted something that could connect to people.”
Shi has also published research with Vincent Conitzer, Sally Dalton Robinson professor of computer science and professor of economics.
“When he was deciding about graduate school, one of his main concerns was to have real-world impact,” Conitzer wrote in an email Sunday. “I am very happy that he has found a way to use his mathematical and algorithmic skills to have that impact.”
Despite the progress that the new assignment system could make, city schools still face a number of critical issues, Shi said. School assignment does not fully address more entrenched problems in the schools, he noted, using a dilapidated house as a metaphor for the concerns of people in Boston.
“If you have a house, you want the house to be nice,” Shi said. “The steps to the house, maybe something is broken or there’s an obstacle, so it’s important to fix the steps. But if the house still has broken windows [or] the foundation is not good...[then] there are so many other things to do. While fixing the front steps is important, the main issue is still with the house and that still needs to be addressed.”
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