I don’t know about your district, but in ours, there is way more public attendance at a PTO meeting for an elementary school of 500 kids than there is at the school board meetings, where the span of interest is 15,000 kids.

People want to get involved at the smallest political levels because they can actually be heard and make a difference. Some would say there is a ‘pride of ownership.’ A PTO is better in that regard than a district school board. A District school board is better than the State Board of Education, which is in turn better than the US Dept of Ed.

Jacobs rightly points out that there is a risk of voluntary resegregation with any open enrollment approach — that social pressure will tend to cause white schools and black schools and so on to develop anyway. I agree. But segregation by choice and segregation by policy are two different things. Those who are brave enough to step across the social line need to be affirmed and protected.

Like a friend of mine who was in the first class of males admitted to Vassar…

See – this is part of why in practice I have a real block seeing it happen.

Teachers would be free to unionize if they wish, but there would be no requirement that schools have a union teaching staff (a move which makes the teachers’ union accountable for performance and not just to bully raises).

Jacobs’ book doesn’t address this stuff – it’s about school resegregation, caused by the ‘invisible fence’ of suburban districts.

I can tell you now – I’m not likely to get to that book sooner than you are going to answer my questions. So maybe you should stop answering me? EXCEPT…I read your blog and I know that you said that you answer questions.

(I’m teasing you a bit here)

That doesn’t mean there has to be one school for every family so that each family has its selfish desires exactly met. But parents will be able to seek the one that comes closest without also having to move.

Step 1: The state/fed creates standards for accreditation (curriculum, teacher qualifications, facilities, etc). Any school may apply, but only schools granted accreditation will receive public funding.

Step 2: Drop all attendance boundaries. Any kid can take their public funding to any accredited school and have it serve as 100% tuition.

Step 3: Allow any school building to seek emancipation from its present school district. There would be no need to be a member of a district, although sets of schools would be free to voluntarily organize. However, it must operate as a not-for-profit corporation subject to public scrutiny (ie Sunshine Laws still apply).

I’ve never said that I favor a wild-west, roll-your-own education environment. We need standards, audits, and disclosure.

But I want school administrators and teachers to feel accountable to get results. I won’t try to define what those results are, or how to measure them in this note. My point is that when a parent feels the school their kid is attending is not serving their kid, they can – with a minimum of restriction (e.g. only one xfer/yr, no xfers after a grading period has started, etc) – xfer their kid to another school.

The teachers and administrators who perform will attract kids to their schools. The ones who don’t will get starved out (perhaps to be replaced by another group who thinks they can do it better).

If you get a chance, read Jacobs:”Getting Around Brown”

As for choice – you and I have been through this before – you are saying there is a captive audience in people who have no mobility. But I don’t see why that doesn’t put the onus on the system to provide better, rather than make people move?

Our economic system based on the notion that the ‘invisible hand,’ which is the summation of millions of individual decisions, is the best framework to allocate resources and inspire innovation.

Which is not to say that there aren’t ways to corrupt a free market system. We always need to be vigilant and quick to bring violators to justice.

By the way, what I’m advocating is free choice (of schools) for all – everyone. The rich get that choice by being able to pay whatever tuition is necessary to put their kids in private school (e.g. the kinds of schools Bush and Kerry both attended as kids).

The middle class have the mobility to be able to move to the school district they choose. Indeed, the school district is often the primary determinant of where they choose to live. Religious schools are also in the realm of affordability for much of the middle class.

But the poor have no choice. They have little mobility, and the schools where they live suck.

Do you really mean that, Paul? Seriously. That would be a very very scary thing, that’s my first reaction to reading that.

It’s a more organic, natural way of things. Let the thousands and thousands of little decisions by the parents direct the way the system evolves. Central planning isn’t working so well, mainly because it can be so easily corrupted and manipulated. I’ve just finished reading “Getting Around Brown” by Jacobs, which tells the story of developer defined desegregation of Columbus in the 1980s, and how the result twenty years later has been an enrichening of the developers, but more segregation than ever.

I agree with what you suggest. How it happens? Sometimes it just seems luck with a good dose of good decision-making. But in a system education however many millions of kids across so many different variables, just how much equity can we ever expect and achieve?

I think you know me well enough to know that I will still say that we have to try for the best. But all systems will have limitations.