These things have already been tried on a large scale, in fact. We've had experiments with busing and consolidating districts. State "equalization" funding already attempts to compensate for difference in property taxes. Public schools are still awful.
Many urban districts already spend more money on a per pupil basis than top-performing private schools with no positive results. There's a reason Black and Hispanic parents are the fastest growing homeschooling demographic.
In fact, this is one big problem I have with the chattering class talking about school choice. They have this stereotype of school choice folks as white and religious. There are so many POC involved in school choice advocacy that are ignored by the press.
The most vocal anti-school choice people I have ever met are white liberals (usually Boomers) who have never stepped foot in an urban or rural school in their lives.
I really do not understand the need to carry water for people like this. You give Black and Hispanic families $20,000+ per year per kid vouchers to invest in their educations and shit in this country would change fast.
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It cracks me up seeing people try to assimilate longshoremen into the "labor shortage is about the wages" political narrative. Longshoremen easily make six figures and have great benefits.
They make more money than the class warriors making these claims. It's really a testament to how bad our K-12 and higher education system is now that people don't even have a sense of these employment options.
You have academics and journalists out there caricaturing the people who do these jobs, and those workers are more financially secure than they are. Longshoreman definitely makes more than a college professor.
These folks are going to be shocked when they learn that counties do not have "rights" versus the state, but are, in fact, political subdivisions that exist at the will of the state. State can do whatever it wants to them.
If state lawmakers wanted to, they could write Leon County out of existence at the next legislative session.
The media encouraging local governments to pick fights with state officials has always been lunacy. States can pick fights with the federal government because they are legally sovereigns under the constitution. Counties do not have that privilege.
One of the big reasons unschoolers are not particularly persuasive within the homeschooling community is their pedagogy is based primarily on emotion. It has become a distinctly millennial parenting shtick more than anything.
You aren't going to convince most homeschoolers that academics don't matter. Most school choice folks are well-off, they want their kids to go to college, they want them to be academically and professionally competitive.
You don't need to have an oppressive curriculum to raise successful kids. But you also cannot have a free-for-all that caters to their every emotional insecurity, both real and imagined by the parents.