Actually, the districts with the highest concentration of low-income families have long received extra funding per pupil compared to the majority of school districts in the state. For more than twenty years now, all public schools anywhere in the state offer open enrollment to all students anywhere in the state, up to the limits of the capacity of each school district to receive students.
So if students don't like what is on offer in their local school district, they can shop around, and take their state funding with them, by trying out another school district's offerings of courses and teachers (and classmates). More students enrolled means more state funding, so school districts make efforts to provide attractive programs that will bring students across district lines. This competition among school districts has promoted innovation in programs and resulted in a fair amount of interchange among students who live in different neighborhoods. School districts compete with one another by offeringprograms for fine-arts-inclined students, or students who desire language immersion programs (Spanish immersion and Chinese immersion programs are both hot programs in Minnesota), and students with many other characteristics. Some school districts gain almost half of their enrollment from open enrollment, and correspondingly some of the historically worst school districts in Minnesota have lost large percentages of enrollment to families crossing district boundaries to look for better schools. (Minnesota also has a huge number of charter schools, which is a distinct form of competition for publicly subsidized students, but they cannot offer some of the programs that public school districts can.) This competition keeps all districts accountable for providing a good learning environment, and helps change the psychology of teachers and principals dealing with families from one of treating learners as a burden to one of treating learners as an opportunity to be grateful for.
Any other state in the United States could do the same, and a few already have.
Abolishing private schools is a distinctly bad idea (as shown by the example of the Netherlands, where multiple kinds of schools receive public funding on a per-capita basis) and anyway is unconstitutional in the United States. The last major effort to abolish private schools in a whole state was sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan (which didn't like Catholic schools) and was overturned by the United States Supreme Court.
My state has had a state law that finances districts equally by enrollment since the 1970s.
http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf
Actually, the districts with the highest concentration of low-income families have long received extra funding per pupil compared to the majority of school districts in the state. For more than twenty years now, all public schools anywhere in the state offer open enrollment to all students anywhere in the state, up to the limits of the capacity of each school district to receive students.
http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/Academic_Excellence/School_...
So if students don't like what is on offer in their local school district, they can shop around, and take their state funding with them, by trying out another school district's offerings of courses and teachers (and classmates). More students enrolled means more state funding, so school districts make efforts to provide attractive programs that will bring students across district lines. This competition among school districts has promoted innovation in programs and resulted in a fair amount of interchange among students who live in different neighborhoods. School districts compete with one another by offeringprograms for fine-arts-inclined students, or students who desire language immersion programs (Spanish immersion and Chinese immersion programs are both hot programs in Minnesota), and students with many other characteristics. Some school districts gain almost half of their enrollment from open enrollment, and correspondingly some of the historically worst school districts in Minnesota have lost large percentages of enrollment to families crossing district boundaries to look for better schools. (Minnesota also has a huge number of charter schools, which is a distinct form of competition for publicly subsidized students, but they cannot offer some of the programs that public school districts can.) This competition keeps all districts accountable for providing a good learning environment, and helps change the psychology of teachers and principals dealing with families from one of treating learners as a burden to one of treating learners as an opportunity to be grateful for.
Any other state in the United States could do the same, and a few already have.
http://educateiowa.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task...
http://www.ecs.org/html/offsite.asp?document=http%3A%2F%2Fww...
abolishing private schools
Abolishing private schools is a distinctly bad idea (as shown by the example of the Netherlands, where multiple kinds of schools receive public funding on a per-capita basis) and anyway is unconstitutional in the United States. The last major effort to abolish private schools in a whole state was sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan (which didn't like Catholic schools) and was overturned by the United States Supreme Court.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6094501649208458...