The root cause is that you have more or less four choices
* private, which is expensive (and in some cases not a guarantee of quality)
* rich public, which requires probably living in the extremely local school district
* magnet/charter, which usually have whole apparatuses dedicated to securing donor funding similar to how colleges ask former alumni and the wealthy to top up their budgets
* poor public
At least some of the problems might be solvable by consolidating America's extremely local school districts, but that's kind of hard because a lot of the separate school districts were intentionally set up that way to ensure that socioeconomic classes did not have to share schools in a post-segregation world. Even if you did manage to do it, a lot of people would probably pull out and choose private instead.
> At least some of the problems might be solvable by consolidating America's extremely local school districts
Large school districts seem to attract their own special blend of problems.
> But it is absolutely insane that in some states "boundary-hopping" school districts can send parents who want the best for their child to jail.
Sounds like fraud, which is generally a jailable offense. Specific details would matter, but what would you expect to happen if you registered to vote with an improper address so you could vote in a different district for some reason? I'd expect some chance of jail.
* private, which is expensive (and in some cases not a guarantee of quality)
* rich public, which requires probably living in the extremely local school district
* magnet/charter, which usually have whole apparatuses dedicated to securing donor funding similar to how colleges ask former alumni and the wealthy to top up their budgets
* poor public
At least some of the problems might be solvable by consolidating America's extremely local school districts, but that's kind of hard because a lot of the separate school districts were intentionally set up that way to ensure that socioeconomic classes did not have to share schools in a post-segregation world. Even if you did manage to do it, a lot of people would probably pull out and choose private instead.
But it is absolutely insane that in some states "boundary-hopping" school districts can send parents who want the best for their child to jail. http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/ame...