Well, I am with Richard Kahlenberg and other educators who have found, in the trenches, that schools need to have a critical mass of high and middle SES children to work - and that you mustn't tell a middle class parent faced with a majority low SES school to send their child to that school to "lift it up", because "middle class kids have the right to go to a middle class school as well" as I believe he put it.
I believe that if you tell can tell parents convincingly that middle class children (or middle and high SES children, it's just a shorthand) WILL be in the majority and their needs WILL be met, parents WILL choose that nicely free public school almost all of the time, and that happens to help the low SES children who go to that school, too, most of all, because the quality of what happens in that schools classrooms will be so much higher. That is what magnet programs, gifted programs etc do and it works for many places. It takes a lot of effort, of course. Vouchers as a nice subsidy for people who are thinking of opting out anyway are a wonderful solution that works for people who actually have access to meaningful choice, means there is F all to do for people who should actually work on improving the public system. All it ends up doing is funneling money into the private sector.
If that is your ideology that is fine (General you, not anyone on this board). But be honest about it, it does squat for public schools, squat for poor people. There's evidence.
