A lot of debate about school choice going on. A bit of anecdotal and therefore completely worthless data follows.

I went to elementary school in an average neighorhood in Atlanta. My school ranged from lower middle class to upper middle class. Our test scores were about what you would expect from such a school. My high school had a much greater range, from lower class to upper middle class, but half was a magnet school and drew students from all over the county and the other half was a regular high school in one of the better neighborhoods in Atlanta. My county was one of the worst school districts in a state that regularly boasts the 50th (of 51, including DC) SAT scores in the country. High school dropout rates were atrocious, and I think some of the schools in my ocunty had a 5% college attendance rate. By any objective measure, the system is failing. Despite this, I got a pretty good education. Going to the magnet school and having a fairly involved PTA meant that though our facilities were embarrassingly bad (science labs virtually nonexistent at times, giant cockroaches everywhere, heating that sort of did it's own thing), we got good teachers, plenty of AP classes, and chances to actually go to good colleges, something most students (both magnet and not) from my high school did.

However, this system was at the expense of everyone else in the county. My county was very polarised between white and black, and even the middle- and upper-middle-class blacks who lived in the south end of the county (who made up the majority of black residents of the county) got completely shafted in the education system. If you weren't smart enough or talented enough to get into one of the county;s magnets (and some were better than others, but all were better than the home schools in that area) and your parents weren't rich enough to pay for a private school or lucky enough to talk your way into another school, you were stuck. The white end of the county (and I use the term loosely, only one high school was less than 50% black) were better off.

You'd think with these experiences I'd be in favor of school choice, right? No, I'm not. I think that taking away money from failing schools is completely and totally counterproductive. If the school is remaining open and students are still attending the schools, you're just wrecking the chances of the students who stay. And generally closing the failing schools is not an option. Plus there is a reason for having students go to school in their own neighborhoods. Not only is it easier on them not to have to ride a bus for two hours to get to school (which some of my friends did) and they get to have friends in their neighborhood, but ultimately the communities (not the larger state/federal government) are supposed to be responsible for education. Moving students all over the place decreases the community influence on education which we're supposed to value.

There are other problems with school choice too: there are only so many 'working' schools and if they're not full they may require putting your 8-year-old daughter on the subway for an hour and a half (as in the NYT article I cited below). Ultimately, I think the only solution is to fix the neighborhood schools. I wonder if this is possible. It will require a lot more than the current budget and I imagine the feds/states (probably both) will have to chip in. And I can't imagine all schools ever being equal in a qualitative sense ot the word. Ideally, I'd like every school to give every student a chance to succeed at some field that interests him/her.

I think a tracking system might be the way to go in larger districts. This would allow poorer schools to pool their resources while still keeping students relatively close to home. If a student wants to become a mechanic, shouldn't he spend part of his day learning that and less of his day reading Shakespeare? The elitist in me says that he's not getting as good an education, but I'm not sure that that's really true. I definitely think an education like this would be better than the vast majority of the education a student receives in a failing public school now, anyway, so if it's not a long term solution, at least a short term one. I know many European districts have had success with tracking in the past (though the school systems and societies are so different that I'm not sure the comparison can teach us anything).

I don't know that I like this solution, but I'm just kind of throwing it out there.