The “progressives” told me it would starve public schools of funds and students since private schools would admit only the best and brightest
So I said — don’t let the schools choose. Let the people choose. If the school is filled then you use a lottery for who can actually get in, M of N people. Simple.
Students would apply for the school and M of N applicants would be picked randomly.
It turns out the administrators running the lottery would run the randomization program until it gave them the student distribution they wanted (read: the best and brightest, and since it's the south... somehow whiter than expected).
School systems are also special because you don't really want to overprovision school seats, so if there at the end of the day are as many seats as there are pupils in the system as a whole, there can only be selection and never competition in the economic sense.