This also applies to the first few years of college.
Result? Everyone gets an amazing education, and you can't pay your way around it.
You might say that there is a risk that universities will simply select around it. In order to prevent that, universities may not use any criteria to select students from within the province, except a score, calculated from pre-university college education, that is a Z-score augmented by metrics from the performance of your classmates at standardized high school exams, deviation thereof, and a few more. The exception are programs like medicine and dentistry, where this score is used as the primary criteria but the interview and scores at ethical tests are also taken into account.
That way, there is simply no way to pay your way around it. Private high-schools are not competitive with the best public schools (which you can enter by exam or recommendation), purely private colleges and universities are even worse, and everyone ends up on a common track.
Result? In my Computer Science program, almost every minority is over-represented (the others are more commonly in Math or EEng), altough there is still a large majority of men.
It works pretty well. I would recommend it to you, but you'd probably need to sort out your incompetent-on-purpose government (from both parties). It would also require basically nationalizing every accredited university, but on the upside you'd have tuition costs of ~3000$ per year for every university.
In addition, charter schools have no curriculum requirements in the name of "flexibility". They can teach whatever they want and hire whomever they wish but still get federal $$$. It's absurd.
Even worse, the US lacks comprehensive nationalized standards to begin with - public schools can purchase textbooks that have completely different US histories, usually regarding the Civil War and racism. It really is a clusterf*ck of epic proportions driven entirely by the GOP. I know HN gets fussy about calling out political differences, but this is a huge one. The GOP fights standards tooth-and-nail, as do GOP governors at the state level.
What if someone were in a region where the math education program was #100 in the world? Would it not be reasonable to want to create a private program providing an education that is capable of producing students that are competitive to those students from your province? What if some parents from your province weren't satisfied with being #2 or #3 and instead want the option to send their kid to a local program competitive with the #1 ranked program in the world?
> and you aren't allowed to run a private school with a different curriculum - at all
That's some Harrison Bergeron level thinking that is blatantly liberty reducing.
You might say that I left off the rest of that statement, "beyond a certain amount of enriched tracks that are available to anyone.", but even that ignores the fact that resources are finite. Parents more invested in their children's futures might be able to pool resources together in the form of a more competitive private program for their children but not have enough resources for all children. One of those finite resources might be the ability to attract enough world class educators and still maintain a low teacher to student ratio that the teachers can have a significant impact on each child.
As a society, we made the decision that it is not fair for children of richer parents to be able to have much better education that the rest, and instead made it better for everyone.
Since you insist on stating it in terms of freedom, we traded freedom from the obligation of public schooling for the freedom to have high quality education (and thus equal opportunity). Thanks to this choice, we have better outcomes than the US, and just as much freedom - just not the reductive kind of freedom you recognize.
If you really want even better math education, the solution is that instead of shelling out money, you can do research on how to ameliorate teacher education or pedagogical techniques, or run as a politician to get those resources allocated. That is also your freedom.
Ultimately, if you care about creating something resembling equality of opportunity and if you want to reduce inequality, you will have to abandon your reductive concept of freedom, where a homeless man starving enjoys more freedom than if he was in public housing, somehow.