Meanwhile, rich parents work jobs with flexible hours and poor parents are hourly with potential catastrophic penalties for missing work. Theoretically, you're

Meanwhile, rich parents work jobs with flexible hours and poor parents are hourly with potential catastrophic penalties for missing work. Theoretically, you're correct (from a parent preference perspective, at least). In practice, even the rich parents would balk at the dollar amount required to make it worth it. That also completely ignores the fact that what you propose would deepen the existing structural inequalities for students, and presupposes that schools are and should remain stratified by income. I vehemently disagree with this unstated premise.