Designing school choice for diversity in the San Francisco Unified School District.

Zone-restricted student assignment policies in San Francisco Unified School District can reduce school segregation while preserving proximity, though they reduce choice.

• Why it matters: District-wide choice has largely failed to reverse rising segregation, leaving a gap for policies that balance diversity with practical constraints like predictability and proximity.
• What they did: Since 2019, the team collaborated with San Francisco Unified School District to design zone-based assignment using optimization, then compared it with district-wide choice by estimating a choice model from historical applications and simulating assignments.
• The result: Zone policies with reserves reduce racial minority concentration in high-poverty schools while maintaining proximity, whereas district-wide choice with reserves and distance-based priority further reduces segregation but reduces predictability; no policy dominates, and simulation reveals variation beyond spatial segregation indices.

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