Discovering Opportunities in New York City's Discovery Program: an Analysis of Affirmative Action Mechanisms

Abstract

Discovery program (DISC) is an affirmative action policy used by the New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE) to increase the number of admissions for disadvantaged students at specialized high schools.For instance, in the 2016-2017 academic year, this program resulted in about 1, 350 more disadvantaged students being admitted, almost tripling the number of disadvantaged students prior to the introduction of the program. However, our empirical analysis of the student-school matches from the 12 recent academic years (2005-06 to 2016-17) shows that about 950 in-group blocking pairs were created each year amongst disadvantaged group of students, impacting about 650 disadvantaged students every year. Moreover, we find that this program usually benefits lower-performing disadvantaged students more than top-performing disadvantaged students (in terms of the ranking of their assigned schools), thus unintentionally creating an incentive to under-perform.In this work, we explore two affirmative action policies that can be used to minimally modify and improve the discovery program: the minority reserve (MR) and the joint-seat allocation (JSA) mechanism. Theoretically, by employing choice functions, we show that (i) both MR and JSA result in no in-group blocking pairs, and (ii) JSA is weakly group strategy-proof, ensures that at least one disadvantaged is not worse off, and when reservation quotas are carefully chosen then no disadvantaged student is worse-off. We show that each of these properties is not satisfied by DISC. In the general setting, we show that there is no clear winner in terms of the matchings provided by DISC, JSA and MR, from the perspective of disadvantaged students. We however characterize a condition for markets, that we term high competitiveness, where JSA dominates MR for disadvantaged students. This condition is verified, in particular, in certain markets when there is a higher demand for seats than supply, and the performances of disadvantaged students are significantly lower than that of advantaged students. Data from NYC DOE satisfy the high competitiveness condition, and for this dataset our empirical results corroborate our theoretical predictions, showing the superiority of JSA. We believe that the discovery program, and more generally affirmative action mechanisms, can be changed for the better by implementing the JSA mechanism, leading to incentives for the top-performing disadvantaged students while providing many benefits of the affirmative action program.