Showing posts with label Pathak. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pathak. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 4, 2023

The Robert Rosenthal Memorial Lecture for 2023 at BU, by Parag Pathak

 Parag Pathak gave this year's Robert Rosenthal Memorial Lecture at Boston University. The title of his talk is “Still Worth the Trip? The Evolution of School Busing in Boston” 

(The video below may undergo some further editing, but right now it starts with introductions at minute 3.) 


You can also find the Rosenthal lectures from previous years at the link.

(I had the honor of giving the 2007 lecture... Bob Rosenthal and I are academic siblings, we were both advised by Bob Wilson.)

Saturday, July 31, 2021

Tom Payzant, Boston schools superintendent who reformed school choice, dies at 80

 Tom Payzant played a critical role in transforming Boston's school choice from an immediate acceptance algorithm that exposed students and families to complex strategic risk when navigating the system, to a deferred acceptance algorithm that simplified their participation. As Superintendent of Boston Public Schools, Tom came to understand those issues well, and acted on them.

Here's his obit in the Boston Globe.

Thomas Payzant, whose education vision lifted Boston’s schools, dies at 80, By Bryan Marquard

and here's the statement from Boston Public Schools:

SUPERINTENDENT'S STATEMENT ON THE PASSING OF TOM PAYZANT


Here's a pic I took of Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag Pathak, and Tayfun Sonmez when we met with Payzant and his colleagues at Boston Public School headquarters, during the years we worked with BPS, starting around 2003.

Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag Pathak and Tayfun Sonmez at Boston Public School headquarters

Here's a paper that came out of those meetings, describing the deliberations that ultimately led BPS to adopt a deferred acceptance algorithm design for it's school choice system.


Over the course of those years, I was privileged to watch Parag evolve from a super smart young grad student to being a leader in the design of school choice.

I'll post tomorrow about some of Parag's latest efforts to bring the work associated with the design and evaluation of school choice, and market design more generally, into the world of startup companies and big university labs.

Thursday, October 3, 2019

Parag Pathak celebrated in Science News

Science News advises us that Parag Pathak is worth watching...

Parag Pathak uses data and algorithms to make public education fairer
After designing school choice systems, he’s studying student performance

(https://www.sciencenews.org/article/parag-pathak-sn-10-scientists-to-watch)


"If he could be granted one wish, he says he would design a school system from scratch. How, he asks, would you set up that system to be as equitable as possible?"


Friday, June 8, 2018

Parag Pathak interview on designing theories for the real world

Here's the introduction, click on the link to read more, or to hear the audio recording.

Designing theories for the real world
The AEA interviews 2018 John Bates Clark Medalist Parag Pathak.
by Chris Fleisher

He’s been hailed for pushing the boundaries of market design theory while making it practical to real-world situations.
Parag Pathak is this year’s winner of the John Bates Clark Medal. The 37-year-old MIT professor has worked to improve the assignment of students to public schools, notably in Boston, and also evaluated the impacts of school choice systems on student outcomes.
And while his theoretical work has won him widespread praise, he says his engineering-oriented approach to economics has helped him figure out which problems are of greatest practical importance.  
The AEA spoke with Pathak about his research, the influence of his mentor and former AEA president Al Roth, the criticisms against economic theorists, and the opportunities to shape public policy.
An edited transcript follows and the full-length interview can be heard by clicking on the media player..."

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

"Economics that works" in Bloomberg, celebrates Parag Pathak as a reply to some critics of economics


A Top Econ Prize for a Theory That Works
This economist figured out a better way to assign students to public schools.
By Noah Smith, May 15

Here are the opening lines:

"What do people think economic theorists do? The pundits who regularly criticize the profession, particularly in the pages of British magazines, seem to think that they spend all their time making abstruse, unrealistic theories about how free markets are the best of all possible worlds. And it's true that there are still a few economists out there who are essentially doing that. But a lot of theorists are doing something much more humble and practical work on small-bore theories that can be immediately applied to make the real world a little more efficient.

Parag Pathak is a theorist of this latter type. "

And here are the closing lines (what's in between is well worth reading too:)

"In an age when bashing economics is in vogue, the critics should pay attention to researchers like Pathak. Their theories are not as grandiose as the macroeconomic ideas that appear in the press — but they really work, and every day they improve people’s lives."

Friday, April 20, 2018

Parag Pathak wins the American Economic Association's Clark Medal

Here's the announcement, which describes Parag's work well:
Parag Pathak, Clark Medalist 2018

Parag Pathak

See my earlier posts involving Pathak here.

Congratulations Parag, on a well deserved award!
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Update:
Here's MIT's celebration of Parag:
Parag Pathak wins John Bates Clark Medal
MIT economist lauded for work on education, market-design mechanisms.
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here's an interview with Parag in the WSJ
Q&A: How an Economist Unlocked Hidden Truths About School Choice
Parag Pathak of MIT, winner of the John Bates Clark Medal for the nation’s most impressive economist under 40, says he 'fell into the topic'

Here's the Economist's coverage:
A market-design economist wins the John Bates Clark medal
Parag Pathak’s market designs have influenced the lives of 1m schoolchildren

Here's the local angle:
Corning native wins John Bates Clark Medal
"The American Economic Association recently announced its decision to award the Clark Medal to Dr. Parag Pathak, a Corning native and graduate of Corning-Painted Post High School."

Thursday, May 3, 2012

MIT celebrates Parag Pathak

Game theory, in the real world: MIT economist Parag Pathak engineers practical solutions to complicated education problems


...
In 2003, New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, who wanted to revamp the school-choice system, approached a Harvard University professor named Alvin Roth about the problem. Roth had studied the method for matching medical students to their residencies; New York officials hoped something similar would work for their school system.

In turn, Roth asked Pathak, then a first-year PhD student in economics, to look into New York’s school-choice system: Was it a substantive and interesting problem? Pathak decided it was. A decade later, he is still producing new research on the topic, and in 2011 received tenure at MIT, in part because of his work in the area.

Moreover, that work has produced real-world results. Based on the research of Roth and his collaborators, New York City soon adopted what is known as a “deferred-acceptance algorithm” to assign places. Then, Roth’s group, now including economist Tayfun Sonmez, helped Boston review its choice system, leading the city to adopt a new method in 2005.

Using this method, schools first weigh all the students listing those schools as first-choice venues; then, the students who are rejected are essentially allowed to revise their lists, and the process repeats until every student has been matched with a school selection. The crucial difference is that students and families can simply pick the schools they most want to attend, in order.

Our whole agenda is to try to make these systems strategy-proof,” says Pathak, now an associate professor of economics at MIT. “All these methods move in the direction of simplifying the system for students.” Complicated tactical guesses about popularity are moot; the entire process is based on the substantive merits of schools.

This positive outcome, Pathak says, is the fruit of “trying to think of economics as an engineering discipline,” in order to construct practical solutions to real-world problems.

Within economics, his growing area of specialization is known as “market design.” Beyond schools, market-design problems can be found in health care, financial markets, even the process of keyword searching on the Internet. “These allocation problems are everywhere,” says Pathak
, who now also studies school-performance questions and has produced papers examining the quirks of housing markets.

What makes schools good?


"Pathak is the son of Nepalese parents who immigrated to the United States in the 1970s. He grew up in Corning, N.Y., where his father is a doctor and his mother a writer, before attending Harvard as an undergraduate. A direct line can be drawn between Pathak’s career and a class he took during his senior year at Harvard in the spring of 2002, team-taught by Roth and Paul Milgrom, two leaders in market design; Milgrom advised the Federal Communications Commission on the design of their broadcasting-spectrum auctions.

Pathak, an applied mathematics major who graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, says that class allowed him to recognize the possibility of linking game theory with practical problems. He soon enrolled in graduate school in economics at Harvard, received his PhD in 2007 and joined MIT in 2008.

Since then, Pathak’s research on school-choice issues has expanded in part because other places, including Chicago and much of England, have adopted systems similar to the ones he endorses — but due to their own initiative. “It’s as if they followed the discussion in Boston, although there is no evidence of it,” Pathak says. “It’s a great story of how markets evolve.” 

Although strategy-proof systems are gaining in popularity, many cities do not employ them. And yet Pathak believes that in addition to making the selection process simpler, the new systems can lead to a virtuous circle in assessing school quality: If administrators know what students’ real preferences are — as opposed to their tactics-based selections — they can examine what makes certain schools popular and try to institute those elements of good schools in other places, too.

“If we have programs that are oversubscribed, we should figure out why and consider replicating them,” Pathak says.

To be sure, it can be very difficult for people to assess whether or not schools are good in the first place, and for what reasons. In part because of this, Pathak’s interests have developed to include measuring school performance. Along with MIT economists Joshua Angrist and David Autor, he is a founding director of the School Effectiveness &; Inequality Institute at MIT, a new center that launched this year.

Angrist, Pathak and a variety of co-authors have published multiple studies about the performance of charter schools in Massachusetts, for instance, using random samples of students from schools’ admissions lotteries. While recognizing that this can be a “politically charged” issue, Pathak says their aim is simply to shine some empirical light on the matter. So far, the results they have found are nuanced: Some charter schools in urban areas such as Boston have dramatically improved student performance, but charter schools in other parts of Massachusetts have generally performed worse than their non-charter public counterparts.

The researchers are still trying to determine exactly why this is, and aim to expand their studies geographically. But the technical expertise of Pathak and Angrist — a pioneer in developing and refining “natural experiments” in economics — makes them confident they can rigorously equitably assess thorny questions about student performance.

“Through school assignment, we have an engine to measure a lot of things about education production,” Pathak says. And now, students have a vehicle for choosing schools on their merits.
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Let me add that, along with Atila Abdulkadiroglu and Neil Dorosin and yours truly, Parag continues to assist school districts in the design and implementation of school choice systems via the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice (IIPSC).

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Market designers at the Milgrom/Nemmers Prize conference

A multitude of market designers. Here's a photo of
Bob Wilson, Paul Milgrom; and Parag Pathak in the near background: Faces to recognize, and names to conjure with.