The reason we have low-quality public schools is because education is criminally underfunded and poorly handled, especially in poor areas because of property tax funding.

I don't fully support removing magnet schools, but you can bet that if rich families had to send their kids to the same schools as the poor kids, they'd be lobbying all day for better funding. Apportioning funding per-head from state taxes rather than property taxes would be a good first step.

I think the leftys, who I generally hang around and aggree with get a lot wrong about schools. We spend a lot on schools, other countries that spend a lot less get better outcomes. I mean FFS the richest country in the world with a 85% graduation rate, it's completely insane. Fixing the schools isn't a one-dimensional problem, and I think there are some charters that have good ideas. While they do generally under-serve students with differing abilities, I think that is talked about too much and is used to try to discredit everything they do. There are problems in the schools, absolutely, everyone agrees, and unfortunately aversion to change comes from every level, but unfortunately it's often on different issues/changes. Teachers, parents, students, admins and politicians all have things they balk at that prevents fixing the schools, we need to change a lot of minds or have a huge top down reworking of schools, but unfortunately that runs right into one of the issues people get all worked up about, local control.

> forcing everybody to be in the low quality public schools.

Seems obvious to me that the issue isn't that private or magnet schools are high quality, but rather that public schools are low quality. Basically, the goal is still, bring people up. The "bringing down" in this case is not only temporary, it's only actually "bringing to baseline."

A bunch of rich people and state congresspeople's kids being forced to go to "shitty public schools" sounds like a great way to force the issue.

>A bunch of rich people and state congresspeople's kids being forced to go to "shitty public schools" sounds like a great way to force the issue.

This sounds suspiciously close to "hold other peoples' children hostage until they give me what I want"

And the alternative sounds suspiciously like "extract resources from poor communities to feed my rich kid new lacrosse sticks."

Again, if going to a public school is so bad as to be considered "holding a child hostage," the issue isn't the making-rich-kids-go-to-public-schools, it's the public schools.