That’s exactly what I want except where I am the schools are all awful for any area with houses like that. So either move to car-centric suburbs or add another $20k+ per year to send two kids to decent private schools.
Granted, I live in the midwest where public schools are, as a general rule, pretty good. One of the reasons we moved to the town we did though is that they have a unified school system. I heard too many of my more well-off acquaintances making offhand comments amounting to "oh, you don't want to move there. They go to the poor people school."
If you think good schools are a public good, put your family where your mouth is.
I wish I knew how to fix public schools. It certainly not with more money. IIRC the USA is in the top 10 on money spent per student. Arguably a bigger issue is all the other problems in areas with bad public schools like poverty and all the problems that come with it.
IIRC "busing" is the most effective thing we've tried—wildly more successful than anything else—but approximately everyone (including a lot of people who weren't rich whites) hated it so we don't do it anymore.
Given that selection bias is a big part of what makes a typical "good" school good it's a hard problem to solve without some kind of social-engineering thing like that that mixes everyone up, though that comes with its own problems, especially if it's still possible to escape the system (moving even farther from the city to areas that aren't doing busing; private schools).
Very early (like... kindergarten or 1st grade) tracking or something like it would probably make mediocre schools more appealing for somewhat-well-off parents and counter the tendency of the rich-enough-to-leave but not-rich-enough-for-private-school set to flee the city when they have kids, since it'd isolate the good students from the bad to replicate some of what the suburban schools benefit from to let the "middle" and "high" cohorts do fairly well even at so-so schools, but there's pretty much zero chance the optics on that would be acceptable.
It isn't perfect, but it seems like attracting interest via magnet programs works a lot better than throwing more money at failing schools or unequal access to charter schools.
Where I grew up there was a gang fight at the public school where one student stabbed another.
Yea I realized after posting that the wording is probably not quite correct. What I meant is there is a single school that serves the entire district. Technically, there are several buildings, but they are broken up by grade elementary / middle / high schools.
Perhaps. In the US, there's the small matter of the 14th Amendment.
The number one predictor of a school’s rating is the average income of its parents. Broadly speaking a rich kid at a mid-tier school will do just as well as a rich kid in a “good” school. City schools have poor kids and lower average test scores, but I don’t know anyone who chose the city schools by me and has regretted it.
This is somewhat true but it's missing a component I didn't realize was as important - you're getting relationships/networking even at these "good" schools. I know that sounds stupid but being around people of high socioeconomic status helps you learn unspoken signals and norms. On top of that - your peers will likely be going into high paying professions and will be able to help you make your way into that profession as well. Some people I know who went to these rich kid schools are happy that they did because it helped them. I rarely meet people who were like, "Yeah, going to that rich kid school was pointless. It had literally no effect on my life." I used to think I could just parent/teach my way out of any shit school and then I've watched my friends have kids. There's too much social stuff that can't be made up for by parents.
I'd be especially wary of putting a kid in a poor school. If you go to a poor school (rated or, especially, funded) then you will have to put in a lot more effort as a parent to get satisfactory results - and likely your kid will lose all childhood friendships as they age. People in poor schools frequently don't break out. If you're putting in the effort or your child is just generally exceptional then they'll break out... Which means they're leaving everyone behind and forging a path that none of their peers have done. It makes for an isolated experience and a really difficult one. If you've done it - great, you can help your kid but is that enjoyable? The programs for children who would be average or above average at a good school frequently don't exist at poor schools. Think AP courses, college credit, computer classes, advanced math and english, foreign language options, etc. I know because I had to go to a school that could only afford 4 days a week and that had to cut almost every elective. I've stayed in contact with no one from that region because... well, there's not much of a point. I haven't spoken to anyone from that school in close to 10 or so years and I'm not even 30.
That said - if you or your kid has no large ambitions or only ones that /somehow/ don't rely on any social components at all then it doesn't matter.
On the russian side, I'll make the preposterous claim that Crimea had to be "liberated", because otherwise how else were non-Moscow parents supposed to be able to send their kids to Artek[3] for the summer?
[1] undoubtedly thought of as an expansion on the 1966 system: https://twitter.com/johncleese/status/1254130854462455813
[2] what are current premiums for houses with "good schools?"
Meanwhile, my child who is in a medium rated school in a poorly rated school district is learning critical thinking skills that I didn't even know were necessary until I started flunking out of college. As a second grader, he not only can keep up with math and science and writing standards for his age group, but he can actually apply it: I'm constantly seeing him take real world problems and figure out how to use something he learned in school to solve that problem, whether by building a mental mathematical model or designing an experiment, or using a resource like a dictionary to help him understand a word he doesn't know. My world was never like that...I thought of school as an intake of knowledge that had to be memorized, not as a way of learning.
I'm not putting these motivations into your mouth, but I get the feeling like school ratings are merely a subconscious correlation with whiteness, and as long as you aren't completely checked out from your child's life, you can ignore them completely.