[paganel]

Yeah, saw them in American movies. I've also heard about the "busing kids in" policy that didn't work, also from the States.

Try to put your 10-year old kid on public transport half-away across the city in any big European city, especially after the sun is out in the winter.

[hef19898]

You mean like basically all kids in Munich do, just as an example? Regarding this "better school" thing, that seems to be an almost exclusive US problem.

[robertlagrant]

> that seems to be an almost exclusive US problem

On what basis?

[hef19898]

That all the public schools I know in Europe, either directly or indirectly, are pretty much of the same quality (differences for specific teachers not withstanding).

Sending kids to a different school comes down to personal preferences, ranging from available languages to a school being along the commute of a parent or simple preference of tue kid in question. Selecting where to life based on school quality is simply not a thing I know. I do hear a ton of that from the US so.

[paganel]

> That all the public schools I know in Europe, either directly or indirectly, are pretty much of the same quality

That is definitely not the case here in Romania.

One of my personal projects involves mapping the results of Romania's National Exams for pupils at the end of 8th grade (in here [1] are the results for Bucharest), and as you can see on the linked map/link there are definetly better (colored with green, with average school grade higher than the average for Bucharest) and worse schools (colored with red). Going back to 2015, let's say (meaning at this link [2]), one can see that the schools colored green have remained pretty much the same, and the same goes for the red/worst schools.

I have a close friend who's a math highschool teacher in the French Education system and he confirmed to me that a similar situation takes place in France (the Paris area, to be more exact).

[1] https://mihaitc.github.io/scoli/bucuresti/

[2] https://mihaitc.github.io/scoli/2015/bucuresti/

[robertlagrant]

In the UK people move into catchment areas for better schools. How did you measure this equivalent quality of the schools you've assessed?

[hef19898]

By doing a very detailed due dilligence of schools in Bavaria, the rest of Germany, Austria, France and Sweden, using the most advanced data science methodologies, including all available for money social studies as summarized by Chat-GPT (which reminds to run that again now that version 4 is out) and having the results put into a picture drawn by Dall-E and vetted by the social science PhD I met as my taxi driver (I don't take Ubers).