The reality as we have experienced it is that most public schools are just fine and if families simply sent their children there, the schools and community would benefit from the participation

Unfortunately there is no incentive to wait. I would expect most people would like public schools to be better but have no expectation they can influence them to be better in time for their kids to benefit so they'd separate the two issues. (1) send your kids to private school so you're not sacrificing them on principle (2) push for better public schools.

I wish I knew how to fix public schools. It certainly not with more money. IIRC the USA is in the top 10 on money spent per student. Arguably a bigger issue is all the other problems in areas with bad public schools like poverty and all the problems that come with it.

> I wish I knew how to fix public schools. It certainly not with more money.

IIRC "busing" is the most effective thing we've tried—wildly more successful than anything else—but approximately everyone (including a lot of people who weren't rich whites) hated it so we don't do it anymore.

Given that selection bias is a big part of what makes a typical "good" school good it's a hard problem to solve without some kind of social-engineering thing like that that mixes everyone up, though that comes with its own problems, especially if it's still possible to escape the system (moving even farther from the city to areas that aren't doing busing; private schools).

Very early (like... kindergarten or 1st grade) tracking or something like it would probably make mediocre schools more appealing for somewhat-well-off parents and counter the tendency of the rich-enough-to-leave but not-rich-enough-for-private-school set to flee the city when they have kids, since it'd isolate the good students from the bad to replicate some of what the suburban schools benefit from to let the "middle" and "high" cohorts do fairly well even at so-so schools, but there's pretty much zero chance the optics on that would be acceptable.

In my area (urban, educated south) we moved from a the "busing model" for integration, into a "magnet school" model. If a school is failing, reboot it as a "charter-like" school, with some attractive theme. It is still a public school, but now offers something unique the community (like robotics programs or mandarin immersion, arts programs in partners with the opera or state symphony, IB schools etc). Then it "attracts" interested parents across the district and becomes self-sustaining. The local population gets access to the improved school, and others have a lottery (or by other means with special rules for siblings and more).

It isn't perfect, but it seems like attracting interest via magnet programs works a lot better than throwing more money at failing schools or unequal access to charter schools.

You need to define what unified means, without that your comments are unclear. In many big cities there is one school district, but the school you go to is basically defined by the area you live in, you go to a school near your house. Thus you end up with segregated schools if you have segregation by race or income (ie rich people live in expensive housing that is grouped, and that school has better educated parents and they can give more support to it). You need to add integrated to that equation. I went to a school that was historically racist with clear separation in schools that reflected neighborhood separation. At some point there was court ordered integration - and that was a really good thing. Over time, after I left the area, richer and whiter people either moved out of the city to the county schools and/or sent their kids to private schools, so the old segregation was re-introduced.

> You need to define what unified means

Yea I realized after posting that the wording is probably not quite correct. What I meant is there is a single school that serves the entire district. Technically, there are several buildings, but they are broken up by grade elementary / middle / high schools.

> I wonder what would happen if well-off folks worked at improving public schools rather than fleeing to private institutions.

Where I grew up there was a gang fight at the public school where one student stabbed another.

Private schools are a bane to society. They mainly provide the well endowed separation from the less endowed, forming they're own clique which eventually creates a class system. Not to mention that they deplete the public system from talent, exasperating the class issues.

> Private schools are a bane to society.

Perhaps. In the US, there's the small matter of the 14th Amendment.

Private schooling in inherently exclusive. This is the prime motivator. It ensures their children will only have peers of a similar socioeconomic background.