You can't understand America, especially any topic having to do with housing or schooling, without understanding our deep-seated racial conflicts. Pull up a public school profile in any U.S. city that has a large black or hispanic population. Odds are that on the first page, it'll tell you exactly what the racial mix of the school is (so parents can quickly figure out where not to send their kids).

Washington, D.C. http://profiles.dcps.dc.gov/Ballou+High+School (bottom right)

Chicago: http://www.cps.edu/Schools/Pages/school.aspx?SchoolID=610268

Baltimore: http://www.baltimorecityschools.org/cms/lib/MD01001351/Centr... (race statistics on page 1, test scores on page 3).

Philadelphia: https://webapps.philasd.org/school_profile/view/1200 (second item after "enrollment").

School choice means the prospect of black and hispanic families sending their kids to primarily white schools, and that is a non-starter in even the most liberal communities. San Francisco used to have a very progressive policy of assigning schools at random so that wealthy people couldn't congregate in one neighborhood and send their kids to the local school. Even that city had to dismantle that policy a couple of years ago.

There's a difference between demographic info being available for a school and it being on the front page of the school's site. Before clicking through your Chicago link, I tried to find a CPS school site that made demos easy to find, and came up empty. You've hotlinked to the fact sheet for a specific school to make your point, which isn't entirely fair.

I live in Oak Park, and my kids go to OPRF, which is 53/37 white/(latino|african-american). Minorities are (thankfully) overrepresented in the school. Oak Park (a/k/a/ "The People's Republic Of Oak Park") isn't conservative, and the (tiny) village is a haven for well-off white families who want to live close to the city without sending their kids to CPS schools. Lower-income families rent apartments along Austin Ave, or Section 8 houses on blocks like mine, and manage to get their kids into Oak Park schools without too much trouble.

To give you another example, within my city there are 5 high schools and their rankings are vastly different. Students can only go the high school within their district of the city. Thus the housing prices are vastly different between the districts by 2x in some cases. Note that all the schools get the same funding. It is just that the parents wanting high achievement for their students put them in the better performing high school making the imbalance even worse and and the same time causing a housing imbalance.

So even people paying taxes _to the same city_ can't go to this city's public school of their liking? Is this a US wide policy, or is that decided on a city level?

I know it is generally true in California. And their intention is to balance out the attendance to the various schools. And it was not always bad like this. I feel it became worse when a state wide test ranking system was created then people knew which schools were better performing and started flocking towards them so things got imbalanced.