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Comment by markessien | Hacker News Reader

This is why America remains segregated. Rich neighbourhoods send all their children to the same schools, poor neighbourhoods send their children to the same school.

Children should be assigned to schools out of their living zone - then there will be incentive to make all schools nice, and it will break the cycle of poverty.

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There have been court-ordered busing programs within large American cities to try to deal with racial segregation in particular, though not without controversy. (Riots in Boston in the 1970s, for instance.) However, these are going out of style, and even when in style were usually confined to a single school district (generally, that means a single town or city), in part for legal reasons (Milliken v. Bradley). And they were only intended to address racial segregation, not economic issues.

And there's pretty clearly an effect. There's a large house price premium for schools in a "good" school districts. Here are some (2006, but still relevant) numbers for school districts in Silicon Valley: http://www.cupertinoschoolscores.com/News/Home_Buyers_Pay_Pr...

Children should be assigned to schools

If you mean by their parents, then yes. If you mean by our nanny overlords in their never ending quest to maximize the teachers unions' deathgrip on the system, then no thanks.

I'm currently paying for every kid, regardless of income, to go to a public school, plus more tuition for my own kids to go to a real school where they will actually learn something.

I'd much prefer a system where I pay for my kids, you pay for your kids, and we all chip in for the poor kids. In all cases, the parents need to be the ones choosing the schools. The "incentive to make all schools nice" will only happen when parents can move their money to the school of their choice.

As someone who lives in an area where forced busing still occurs, the result is actually quite different. The middle class students are sent to private schools, charter schools, homeschooled, or the families move away altogether. If they go to the public schools, they can't learn because of the disruptive students who are bused in. The parents resist all efforts to raise the property tax base because their children don't attend public schools anymore, and so why should they pay for them? And so the schools lose even more money.

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