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.