From the responses, it seems many people misread my comment, so I'll clarify: I'm not opposed to choice. I love it. I myself went to an out-of-catchment scho

From the responses, it seems many people misread my comment, so I'll clarify: I'm not opposed to choice. I love it. I myself went to an out-of-catchment school so I could participate in the challenge program there (3 years of certain classes in 2, makes AP easier to take in gr 12). My point is that, as implemented, you guys borked it. It's far too simplistic to say, "let's reward the good schools and punish the bad ones, and the market sort itself out". It results in schools in disadvantaged neighbourhoods getting even worse, and the least well-to-do segments of society being put even further into a hole from which they can't escape. It results in idiotic "teach to the test" systems, instead of good teachers teaching creatively. It might be possible that a truly free market school system would give better results than the norm, but we've seen what your first forays into it have brought: unmitigated disaster. The US seems particularly poor at political innovation, so why not simply imitate those countries that do education well like Korea, Finland, and the like? Take a look at this list [1] (pdf, pg8) and tell me which of the top scoring countries have achieved educational success by adopting policies that share the same principles as NCLB. [1] http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/34/60/46619703.pdf http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/34/60/46619703.pdf