Integrating Schools for Centralized Admissions

As school districts integrate charter schools for centralized admissions in Denver, New Orleans, Newark and Washington D.C., some charter schools have stayed out of the system. This is counterintuitive as centralized clearinghouses are deemed beneficial to schools as well as students. We provide a new framework to study the incentives of a school to join a clearinghouse and we show that each school prefers to remain out of the system when others join it for the standard mechanisms used in practice for student assignment. Therefore, our analysis provides an explanation of why some charter schools have evaded the clearinghouse. To overcome this issue, we propose two schemes that can be used by policymakers to incentivize schools to join the system, which achieves the desired integration of schools to the clearinghouse.