> Then again, maybe we'll just see an explosion of high-end private schools 20 miles outside of cities.
There is no reason to do this if you have reasonable selection criteria. Right now we're trying to maintain the facade that all public schools accept everyone while not actually doing that in practice. Make the acceptance criteria explicit and you don't need the implicit gating by income.
> What if many people that would qualify don't because they've not had the resources to excel outside of that environment? Also, what if the testing is subtly biased towards one group over another?
This is solved by allowing each school to have their own criteria.
The thing parents want isn't actually to put all the rich kids together. It's to put their kid together with the creative kids and not the destructive kids. That might correlate somewhat with rich kids and poor kids, but it's not the same thing. Then schools that do a better job of selecting for what parents really want will be more attractive to all parents than the ones using cheap heuristics like parental income. And then the creative poor kids get to go to the good school.
It also allows schools to specialize. You've got some kids who are in gangs. How about a boarding school which is 20 miles outside the city. The kid stays there all week and only comes home on weekends. A place where the bad kids can turn themselves around, where you remove the kid from existing bad influences for the school week. We already have private schools like that, but the poor families who need them the most can only send their kids to the drug-infested prison-school allocated to the neighborhood they can afford to live in.
There is no reason to do this if you have reasonable selection criteria. Right now we're trying to maintain the facade that all public schools accept everyone while not actually doing that in practice. Make the acceptance criteria explicit and you don't need the implicit gating by income.
> What if many people that would qualify don't because they've not had the resources to excel outside of that environment? Also, what if the testing is subtly biased towards one group over another?
This is solved by allowing each school to have their own criteria.
The thing parents want isn't actually to put all the rich kids together. It's to put their kid together with the creative kids and not the destructive kids. That might correlate somewhat with rich kids and poor kids, but it's not the same thing. Then schools that do a better job of selecting for what parents really want will be more attractive to all parents than the ones using cheap heuristics like parental income. And then the creative poor kids get to go to the good school.
It also allows schools to specialize. You've got some kids who are in gangs. How about a boarding school which is 20 miles outside the city. The kid stays there all week and only comes home on weekends. A place where the bad kids can turn themselves around, where you remove the kid from existing bad influences for the school week. We already have private schools like that, but the poor families who need them the most can only send their kids to the drug-infested prison-school allocated to the neighborhood they can afford to live in.