In general, schools in America have much much lower quality than ones in Russia. Some immigrants families here in Bay Area are quite frustrated because schools here seems to have a goal to be "a safe and pleasant place where you put your kids so you can go to work" instead "place where kids learn stuff".

Basically, schools are made in such way that no real hard work is actually done at schools and that everything needs to be done at home (evenings, weekends, etc.). I believe that is reason schools with Asians and Whites kids are much more successful.

So my theory is that there are no "good" or "bad" schools here in America: all schools are of a equally low quality, there are only "good" and "bad" neighborhoods.

To answer your question at the end: a child born in the U.S., whether born to illegal immigrants or not, is a citizen and therefore a legal resident and therefore can attend public school.

Children who themselves illegally immigrated to the U.S. can also attend public school without cost (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plyler_v._Doe).

Same process in Poland (start by enrolling anywhere, later exams from the previous school matter), yet the difference was big. High schools in my home town got between 98% and ~10% people advancing higher. I guess 98% wasn't 100 because kids moving to schools abroad were counted as "not on the list of local universities".

For primary school you pretty much started in a mixed, local group, without any visible bias, so chances were really very similar for everyone.

I would argue that it's more because of self-selection, not because of good schools being that good:

Those who have the motivation and background to continue to higher education also tend to shift towards "good" schools. They would continue even if they didn't go to a "good" school.

The problem with that in America is that allowing entrance to schools based entirely on tests scores results in large numbers of Asians and whites and very few black and Hispanics and you end up with this racial discrimination mess.

The solution is that you perhaps should be making bad schools less bad, instead of making the awesome schools more shiny and then digging moats around those.

Therein lies the problem. How? In general, bad schools suffer from a lack of funding and the political will to do something about it.

As far as I understand, "failing" school isn't about just money. It's more an atmosphere thing. Of course, the atmosphere comes with most pupils' poor background, but you wouldn't fix that by throwing money at school. ButnNot that it would hurt, too.

The answer is to stop funding schools locally. Until that's done, nothing we do education-wise matters.

You want the Federal government to fix the school system?

Works in many places in the world.

I want the federal government to fund the school system; I'm neutral towards federal standards, although we already have those in the form of NCLB.

The current system ensures that the people who need the most help get the least.

Efforts must be made to eliminate systematic biases in standardized testing. When we are reasonably convinced that has been done, as far as I'm concerned it's all just how the cookie crumbles. Make sure that you're acceptance policies are merit based, and damn the consequences.

Merit-based access to education is an extremely debatabe proposition. Should a quality education be limited only to the already brilliant? Is it a better outcome to make a high-potential kid very well educated or a medium-potential kid basically educated? Remember that both become voters in a democracy.

West Wing had a nice conversation about this with regard to Affirmative Action beteen the black intern and the conservativx supreme court justice.

I don't know. My own educational experience? it was a waste of time and money. I stuck with it through highschool graduation then got a .com job (that 'required' a college degree) right away. I'd be measurably more wealthy now if I had left when I passed the equivalence test a year and a half earlier and worked another year during the boom. (I graduated and got my first .com job in '97-'98, so I didn't have long to grow into a position that would last me through the crash. I mean, I made it, but judging from how my salary was going before and after the .com, I'd have entered the crash with another ten grand a year in salary, which would help, 'cause I stayed employed, but my wages didn't move at all for a few years after the crash.)

So yeah, I feel like I got negative value out of my public school experience. But, my mother was a teacher; and she taught me to read and supplied me with books. Without reading as much as I did? I would have gotten nowhere. My dad? mid-level IT manager. My step dad? a computer programmer. I had access to computers from the age of three, programming environments, and parents who would help me learn about that shit.

My experience would indicate that the children of people who don't have valuable skills to pass on to their children would benefit much more from a public school "education" than I could.

Perhaps we're working on different definitions here, but here's an anecdote of what merit-based education can do for everyone.

My friend was diagnosed with multiple learning disabilities as a child, and attended a school for people like him. Classes were small, teachers understood and he learned how to write and do math as well as an ordinary person- great results for someone with his long list of disabilities.

On the other hand, I aced an exam to go to a very selective school. Teachers pushed every kid there to do their best, and I learned how to speak, write, debate, program and do math at a level far beyond what I would have otherwise. Sure, I would have come out of my high school years knowing a lot about math no matter what school I attended, but I wouldn't have learned anything about how one should speak or debate, nor would I have learned how to write well.

I think that's the way to go- push kids as far as they can go. This is a lot easier when teachers know how far they can push, which is where results- based stratification ( something I, at least, consider synonymous to merit-based) comes in.