Operations research methods have been used to identify and evaluate solutions to the reconfiguration of public school attendance area boundaries for over fifty years. The talk will explore connections between evolving issues in public education and advances in optimization, computing and geographic information systems, beginning with early work motivated by Supreme Court decisions to desegregate schools. We will also discuss how the limitations of early models and solution approaches hindered their applicability. The years since have seen new research directions to address additional challenges related to the design of school attendance boundaries and leverage emerging advances in technology. The talk will end with a reflection on current issues facing public school districts, including school busing and return-to-school plans amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ways in which operations research can be part of these discussions.
Dr. Karen Smilowitz is the James N. and Margie M. Krebs Professor in Industrial Engineering and Management Science at Northwestern University, with a joint appointment in the Operations group at the Kellogg School of Business. Dr. Smilowitz is an expert in modeling and solution approaches for logistics and transportation systems in both commercial and nonprofit applications. Dr. Smilowitz is the founder of the Northwestern Initiative on Humanitarian and Nonprofit Logistics. She has been instrumental in promoting the use of operations research within the humanitarian and nonprofit sectors through the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Engineering, as well as various media outlets. Dr. Smilowitz is an Associate Editor for Transportation Science and Operations Research.