Complex Decision Process

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Review of “Modeling School Transfer as a Complex Decision Process using Administrative Data” submitted to American Sociological Review—ASR-19-303
In this paper the authors use data from two adjoining school districts—Baltimore City and Baltimore County—to model mobility among elementary school students over a five-year period. The authors argue that choosing a school in a two-stage process, where families first identify the set of acceptable options and then, within that choice set, select a school based on a reasoned comparison of their characteristics. They then conduct an empirical analysis well-aligned with the conceptualization they put forth and, like much prior literature, show that academic considerations and structural factors are strong predictors of flows between schools. The paper is generally well-organized and clearly written, and the empirical analysis is nicely executed. However, I am not convinced that either the theoretical or empirical contribution of the paper is of a level that warrants publication in the American Sociological Review.
Broad Comments
The authors make a compelling case that families choose schools using a two-stage process, first identifying a set of potentially acceptable schools and then selecting a specific school based on a closer comparison of the characteristics of the schools in that limited set. However, it seems likely this process plays out most strongly among families when they initially select a school for their child to attend. The literature is clear that school mobility is often unwanted, a byproduct of other disruptions in families’ lives. Thus, I am not convinced that mobility decisions/student flows are the best empirical test case for the conceptualization the authors put forth. The families that arguably are most effective at employing the process the authors describe will never show up in the data—they will have selected a school and remain in that school for the duration of their child’s elementary school career. It seems to me that unified enrollment data would offer a stronger empirical context for testing the decision process the authors propose. The set of listed schools that each family lists would represent the set of acceptable options and each family’s most preferred school would be considered their selected one. Such data would allow the authors to directly observe families’ choice sets and not have to infer choice sets by transfer patterns. I recognize that the authors are unlikely to have access to unified enrollment data so, at a minimum, I think the paper would significantly benefit from a discussion of the pros and cons of using mobility data/transfer patterns as their empirical context.
There are a number of appealing aspects of the paper—the description of families’ choice process was clear, the empirical analysis was well-done, the results provide useful information—but I was not clear on the primary contribution of the paper. Was it intended as a reconceptualization of the process by which families choose schools? A new method for modeling families’ processes for choosing schools? Identifying the factors important to families when selecting schools? Providing insight into the relative influences of choice versus structure in shaping segregation levels? The paper does all of this to some degree and, because it does so many things, this masks the intended contribution(s) of the paper. Where and how does this paper advance our knowledge?
Clarifying the intended contribution of the paper will likely help rectify the fact that the paper does not always engage with relevant literature as deeply as it should. For example, there is a large literature that uses unified enrollment data to provide on families’ school choice process. Denice and Gross have a 2016 paper in Sociology of Education that uses data from Denver. Jon Valant, Jane Lincove, and Josh Cowen have at least one paper in Economics of Education Review that uses data from the OneApp System in New Orleans to model families’ schooling preferences. And similar work has been done in New York and Chicago as well. All of this is relevant to the discussion of families’ schooling preferences and the factors the authors identify as important almost perfectly mirror the conclusions of prior work. There is also a significant literature that uses school/district characteristics to predict transfer flows under interdistrict open enrollment programs. Welsch, Statz, and Skidmore have a 2010 paper in Economics of Education Review and there is also a 2011 paper in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis that models transfer flows in Minnesota and Colorado. All of this work is at least tangentially relevant to what the authors are doing. However, the degree to which these literature are ultimately relevant depend upon what the authors intend as the primary contribution of the paper.
How should the reader think about the fact that this analysis was done using only two districts? I recognize that the authors address the issue of generalizability in the concluding section of the paper, but I found it a bit unsatisfying. In particular, I wonder the extent to which Baltimore City schools are relevant to the educational considerations of Baltimore County families. For these families, it seems likely that schools in other suburban counties are more likely schooling destinations than Baltimore City schools. How might restricting the data to the set of County families who consider City schools a plausible transfer option ultimately shape the results? Ideally, this sort of analysis would be done with all districts within a given metro area. Limiting the data to transfers within these two districts prevents the schooling preferences of Baltimore County families who do not consider City schools a plausible option from informing the parameter estimates. In sum, the authors should discuss how the use of transfers among only two districts might shape substantive conclusions.
Minor Comments
Page 13, last full paragraph- The final two sentences in the paragraph are not clear.
It would be helpful to clarify whether students in Baltimore County can transfer to charter schools in Baltimore City.
Page 20, Last full paragraph- The text states that there are 27,730 potential school pairs. But then a couple sentences later it says that more than 40,000 pairs of schools never fall in the same subset. How can there be more pairs of schools never falling into the same subset than there are potential school pairs?

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