No one on the U.S. left cares one whit about the badness of choice for anyone; what I perceive as the major obstacle is fairness in the distribution of resources. If the middle- and upper-classes can take their kids out, the fear is that the remaining children will get the resource and opportunity shaft. There IS a bell curve of some form in all things; even in the private world, there are great schools, and there are crappy ones. Sure, the crappy ones are cheaper, but that doesn’t mean they’ll magically go away due to market forces, leaving only lean and efficient ones. Right?

So I think the main arguments that make sense to me about inter-school choice would be those that make arguments about how to continue to distribute competence and resources equitably without regard to race/class AND provide choice. Within schools, there is a rough ability to do this; across schools, not so much—yet.

Philadelphia has a handful of racially and economically diverse schools where Black and White students achieve comparably high test scores, defying the traditional achievement gap. In some cases, African Americans outperform their White peers.

[...] The schools are different, but share some essential characteristics: focused attention on each child; little teacher turnover; a relatively stable student population; and, perhaps most importantly, rigorous dedication to narrowing racial achievement gaps. Each school is supported by strong leadership and boasts both economic and ethnic diversity.

Full article.

1.) Students in the same school are still physically in the same building. They are in clubs, on teams, eat lunch in the same space, etc. More importantly, they take the same electives which are typically not or differentiated at the lower levels.

2.) Students in the same school still have the same administration and broad resources. If all of the students in a school wanted to take an honors curriculum, a principal could simply increase the number of honors sections. Getting enough AP certified teachers to make all classes AP would be difficult, but should a school be lucky enough to face that problem, it could be accomplished too.

3.) The alternative to allowing students to choose a standard curriculum or a more challenging curriculum is to have one size fits all. This is not really viable; either the curriculum will be too hard or too easy for large numbers of students.

I’m not sure SLCs are, in fact, working out as you imply. I suspect there’s a lot of window dressing, but only from anecdotal acquaintance, not from any comprehensive study of what is going on (I hope such a study is under way).

Right, but the point is that ‘choice of classes’ is neither tracking (the institution placing all students into a track for all subjects) nor complete homogenization and, in effect, more like ‘setting’ (as I understand it).

I strongly get the impression that the SLC grants the Dept of Education is running have tended toward homogenisation within grades 9 and 10 esp in the basic academic subjects.

SLCs may be pushing for homogenization in grades 9 and 10, but these represent choice of a different kind—many smaller learning communities are magnet or specialty programs which are likely to appeal differentially to students of varying abilities. And although SLCs may be the ‘new thing’, they are not typical of American high schools at this point.

Is it really the case that ‘setting’ is uncommon in the U.S.? Our experience in the U.S. has been that choices of which courses to take in advanced form is pretty idiosyncratic. Few high school students want to go all Honors/AC/AP because it’s just too brutal. So different students make different choices about where to take advanced courses and where to take regular courses (depending on ability and interest). They also often trying to figure out how to trade off GPA against ‘strength of schedule’ for university admissions purposes. My sense is that this is all quite typical for U.S. high-school students. Is there data that indicates otherwise?

Katherine and Sebastian—- schooling is like Babies and Cars—US and UK English diverge completely. The Brits practice streaming much less than they used to, but setting (in which you are placed for each subject with children who have reached roughly the same level—there doesn’t seem to be an American equivalent term) is common and pretty uncontroversial. I suspect some of the disputes over tracking versus complete homogenisation in the US would be a bit less fractious if setting were more widely adopted (as it is, frequently, for math, but often only for a small elite top-set).