My public middle-and-high schools were attended by a very wide quality-range of students, and they did an excellent job segregating students within the school into different classes according to academic ability.

There was mobility in that students who performed very well in the B-level classes were able to join A-level classes in subsequent semesters while poorly performing students were advised to move downward. Most of the subjects had three ability levels (A, B, G). There were even some students who would excel in one subject and take AP english or history while remaining at a more normal level in the STEM subjects.

Most importantly, I am convinced that the A-level students at my highschool received just about as good an education as they could find at any public school in the country. At the same time that G level and some B-level students were preparing to graduate and not go to college, most of my classmates in the A group were graduating having completed college-freshman-or-sophomore-level calculus and many were receiving acceptance letters from Ivy-league universities.

I don't know for sure whether or not this type of arrangement is common, but it seems to me like it shows that having a mixture of academic abilities in the same neighborhood need not be a disaster.

That said, I'd quibble with your first sentence. While I'd certainly agree that making educational opportunity depend less on parents' wealth is a very good thing, that wasn't the thrust of my comment. The main point I was raising had to do with how coupling housing and schools makes the housing market inefficient and so collectively costs society. Imagine if what school a child went to was determined by what car his parents drove. People might well go out and mortgage their futures, as described in the article, in order to buy Ferraris so that their children could go to the best schools. And the price of Ferraris would increase in commensurate fashion. But even if a chunk of that cost was paying for the school access they want, they'd also be buying cars they might not necessarily want. It would make much more sense for all concerned if people could buy the thing they wanted directly, perhaps by paying for private school, than to have this proxy good.

I suspect part of the problem is that private schools seem too elitist for many American's democratic tastes, but what exactly is the difference between a private school and a "public" school where the price of admission is the purchase of a multi-million dollar home? As in so many policy areas if we could talk honestly about what we want and what's going on, we could have less convoluted and more straightforward policy arrangements to further our goals.

You're suggesting that, if we switched to funding what-are-now-public schools directly through tuition payments made by the students attending them, then that might amount to a more just (or at least generally more satisfying) system than what we have now?

Or is there another policy you think would be better?

Anyway, there are a variety of different ways we could imagine loosing the tight coupling between housing and schooling. I mention downthread that I think school choice / vouchers is a promising approach, but I am open to other ideas as well.

It's certainly not a fair system.

The fairness depends on what "fair" means. You seem to think it would be fair for the people who create good schools (primarily by providing good students) to get stuck with mediocre schools. They put in all the extra value, but get nothing much in return. That doesn't seem fair to me.

And once you have 2 kids...

As for the Jewish students... well isn't it nice that the law does not block them from moving into the better school districts? The same applies to anybody else. If you are successful, you can move into the good school district. This has been true for about 47 years in the USA. Nobody is stopping anybody.

Don't want to pay? Clearly you don't care about education, and your child would likely degrade the educational environment. Can't pay? It's pretty much the same thing, but with a small non-zero chance of being wrong, and maybe you should homeschool.

There is no perfect system. :-(

I didn't say it was a good system; just observed that it is how it is.

It is nearly impossible to do justice to both sides when they are starting from such different places in life. How do you level the playing field when one was read bedtime stories to since they were a toddler and the other entered school not knowing how to read? How does the kid from an average nuclear family fare with the kids whose parents cannot even be trusted to feed them? How does a kid sheltered in a quiet suburban neighborhood feel safe around a kid that grew up fighting on the streets?

For decades the focus of the system has very clearly been on trying to offset the damage incurred in the home life of these children. And sadly, it has utterly failed at fixing multigenerational poverty. Indeed, policies stemming from No Child Left Behind seem to have made the problem even worse, raising generations of problem children who have been emboldened by weak administration that provides little consequence for consistently disrupting classes or assaulting students or even teachers!

The sad truth is that you can't fix home problems at school, and that our educational and social policies have only enabled the proliferation of broken homes.

A. The brightest folks are not always the hardest-working. "Hard-working" in a student means blowing time on stupid worksheets and memorization instead of devoting resources to playful exploration of knowledge.

B. There is more aggregate value in having everyone do a bit better than having an occasional student who's amazing and pampered. Especially if they then proceed to go leave and never interact with the local economy again.

C. If your society is predicated on the notion of the occasional brilliant genius popping up to care for the slavering morons, maybe your society should fail.

It's not that easy. For a well-functioning society it is indeed better to invest educational resources broadly to have everyone do a bit better. However, in many scientific disciplines (and especially in areas such as mathematics and theoretical physics) it seems most progress comes from a small number of high impact individuals (e.g. Newton, Einstein, Feynman etc). Thus, for robust scientific progress you should actually direct your educational resources towards the most promising kids.

Ultimately then your preferred distribution of educational resources depends on your values. If you care more for scientific progress than for social issues, then it is rational to favor targeted rather than broad spending of educational resources.

I personally do care about both, but faced with a choice I'd go for scientific progress because ultimately advances in science, technology and medicine prove to be the best way to reduce human suffering.

I sure know it, because I was a bit lazy, but they do tend to go together. Even if they didn't, I'm fine grouping them together. The distinction doesn't matter for my purpose. Crudely, say that success potential is the product of those two. Multiply hours of effort by IQ if you like. Anyway, it doesn't matter for my purpose.

"There is more aggregate value in having everyone do a bit better than having an occasional student who's amazing and pampered."

That all depends on the trade-off. How much will you hurt the top 10% and how much will you help the lower 50% by the proposed change? If the hurt is great (likely) and the help is minor (likely) then the result is a loss.

> Kids with the potential to succeed come from parents with the potential to succeed.

There's another designation. One you have a genetic incentive to profess. Shame on you. Honestly. We should improve education by... improving education. As in the process by which we educate any arbitrary person. This "who deserves it" business is a distraction that perpetuates itself.

There is no "process by which we educate any arbitrary person". Some won't succeed, no matter what portion of our resources we blow on them. The mere attempt causes our best teachers to leave the profession; few enjoy being powerless babysitters.

Your "who deserves it" terminology has a problem. It suggests that we are dishing out reward or punishment, but really could provide the best for everybody. We can't actually provide the best for everybody. This is partly because resources (including non-clonable human teachers) are limited, and partly (mostly) because the less-capable students interfere with education for the more-capable students.

I may have overstated my position. I know there are some intractable kids that can't be educated. I just don't think the success of parents is a good measure for us to be using here. Not because it isn't a good one. It is. But because it disincentives anyone without such parents from even bothering to try. They will always be measured as the child of a not-successful person. Many such "poor-yet-viable" kids become indistinguishable from the intractable kids very quickly when they become aware of such attitudes. It is far more destructive. We only need an elite in proportion to scarcity. It is in fact only when we can provide an even playing field that the elite can be elite and not merely aristocratic.

Education doesn't work, full stop. Or at least, it doesn't do what you think it does. The point isn't to provide a learning environment, or provide resources for students to learn. After all, education isn't paid for by an equity slice of the alumni's human capital. No, it's paid for and administered by government officials, working on the behalf of employers and parents. And what they want isn't bright, curious, and inquisitive people - they're happy when they get them, but they've got much bigger concerns. Obedience, reliability, conformity, conscientiousness, and pliability are all much bigger things that they want to cultivate.

Like, it speaks to the success of the educational system that you think it's hard to be a nerdy kid in today's educational environment and that school is a poor learning environment for so many children, and you don't immediately follow that up with something like "and that's why my children aren't going to school".

Most Americans learned how to read, write, and do math in schools. They aren't perfect, but I think you underestimate how much learning goes on just to become a functioning citizen.

But even you don't deny that they can. For some reason you seem to think that teaching those things is trivial or easy.