Controlled School Choice∗

Controlled choice over public schools is a common policy of school boards in the United States. It attempts giving choice to parents while maintaining the racial and ethnic balance at schools. None of the pa-pers in education and in school choice describes how in practice to assign students to schools while complying with desegregation guide-lines. In this paper, we provide a foundation for controlled school choice programs. We develop a natural notion of fairness, which is crucial in any school choice program, and show the following results: on the positive side assignments, which are fair for same type stu-dents and constrained non-wasteful, always exist in controlled choice problems; a “controlled ” version of the student proposing deferred ac-ceptance algorithm (CDAA) always finds such an assignment which is also weakly Pareto-optimal; on the negative side it is impossible to design a mechanism which is fair for same type students, constrained non-wasteful and incentive compatible. CDAA provides a practical solution for controlled school choice programs