School Sorting and Disclosure: Disclosure to Families

How and why are children assigned to specific third grade teachers? Would it be a good thing if public schools had formal mechanisms for informing parents about who makes those teacher assignments and about what criteria they use? Might it be even better if parents were told precisely how their own child's assignment is made? This is where we started. These questions, which no one else seems to have addressed, seemed important to us. Surely the talent of a school's third grade faculty often will be markedly uneven, and, for any number of reasons, a particular teacher frequently will be considerably better suited than are the other third grade teachers to teach a specific child. Who one's classmates are (and are not) also can make a great deal of difference to the child's learning and experience. In short, it seems evident that just which children get which third grade teachers can be vital to a child's educational, indeed, life-long development. In fact, this decision is often far more critical to a child than are other school decisions, which courts have held involve a child's constitutional rights. For example, students successfully have invoked the first amendment in order to curtail the discretionary authority of school officials to decide what sort of student expression of ideas will be permitted in the school;' and students have invoked successfully the due process clause of