As someone not from the US, does this mean you don't get to choose the high school you go to and it is only determined by your address regardless of where you friends go, etc.?
Public schooling in the US is done at a very local level, so varies significantly across the country. Where I grew up, the 1 school in your district was required to accept you. However, some of the nearby districts would let you apply to them, and accept people on a case by case basis. For the most part, this let academically strong students go anywhere; but was also used to let families who move stay at the same school (including siblings who were not yet enrolled).
There are also charter school, which are a weird mix between public and private schools, that typically operate on a mix of applications and lotteries. Plus private schools that can enroll pretty much whoever they want.
Yes the government-provided schooling tends to be hyper-local in the US, though there are exceptions.
This was (along with other things) used to avoid regulations banning racial segregation of schools (since neighborhoods were already segregated due to policies like redlining).
When people perceive one school to be better than another, they may use various forms of fraud to get their children into the school; using the grandparent's address is common (since grandparents may own a house in the suburbs while the parents are younger and live in an apartment in a poorer neighborhood).
> When people perceive one school to be better than another
Often there's more to it than just perception. My parents moved to a smaller suburb so my brother and I could attend schools with higher standardized test scores, lower class sizes, less violent incidents, more extracurricular activities, and ultimately _a lot_ more funding. Both districts were public. They made this decision looking at publicly accessible data in the 80s/90s.
Looking back, it was objectively one of the best decisions they made for our future... if not the best.
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Sure - address fraud is very common in regards to getting your kid to a better education opportunity but when there are stark, vast differences between districts I have a hard time blaming people. Especially given my anecdotal experience.
> Sure - address fraud is very common in regards to getting your kid to a better education opportunity but when there are stark, vast differences between districts I have a hard time blaming people. Especially given my anecdotal experience.
Indeed, a friend of mine in elementary school was one example; his grandparents lived down the street from me, and his parents were in a terrible school district.
Ope.. getting hung up on the statement "perception has a correlation with reality." Reality is the way things are, and perception is quintessentially subjective. It is not guaranteed that perception correlates with reality - just spend 10 minutes with my family for this lesson.
I argue the difference between school districts in the US is not perception, as it is not subjective - it is fact. It is reality. This is something that has been so extensively studied I wish all of us could accept it as fact.
Sorry to get hung up on a word. I find that people making these decisions aren't typically doing it from a subjective place -- they're making data-driven decisions to maximize their child's opportunities.
If you're attending public school for the most part - no, you'll be assigned to a school. There are a lot of exceptions though, merit based schools you can elect to attend, lottery based systems. And of course your parents are free to pay for private school.
This system does come with issues though, like parents lying about their address to get their kids into a "better" school.
For your regular public schools yes. However some districts also have more specialized selective enrollment schools you can apply to get accepted to, which may be based on academic performance/testing/demographics.
Sometimes people will use a relative's address to get into a different school/district.
Other than that, charter schools and private schools are also an option of course.
Correct. School assignment at all levels of public school in the U.S. is determined by residence address, with the exception of the magnet and charter school systems,[1][2] which are application-based. There are also private schools.
As someone from the US - does this mean there are places where students are free to go to any high school they wish? Could this result in overcrowding if all the students want to go to the same school?
I am from Brazil, I don't know how it is in other parts of the country, but there are no restrictions here as far as I know. I heard of people that would study in the school in the other side of the city because it was considered the best school. But there is a limit of how many students a school can accept, so they need to enroll as soon as possible. And I think they need to arrange their own way to get to school, because it's not a route the school bus would make.
Bear in mind that my city has around 100 thousand inhabitants, I don't know if this considered small or medium in US.
City vs metropolitan area confuses many people. A size of a city “feels” like the metropolitan area, but that it often technically many cities up against each other.
I am from Austria and yes I am free to send my kid to any public school in the country that will have them. I've even had times in my own childhood where I lived in one state, went to school in another and then switched schools twice within a month because I just didn't like the first one I switched to.
I've never heard that we have significant overcrowding issues or somesuch - if anywhere then probably in Vienna, but that's just general capital city capacity woes.
if there is choice (like in my town growing up where there were 5 elementary schools and you could choose to go to any one) there was no guarantee that you'd go to the one you wanted with priority based on various things (distance, popularity etc).
In Boston where there are some VERY good high schools and some meh high schools there is an exam system that may or may not be replaced by something else due to the fact it blatantly favors the wealthier residents.
Also, about the "regardless of where your friends go" part, I'd say most people meet their friends in school. I guess if they moved and had to change schools that would suck but I can't think of anyone that happened to personally (other than friends who moved far away, like to another state). And the school district is often a very key factor when people with kids are looking for housing.
At least where I live you change the school you go to at least once and I just assumed it was the same in the US considering that there are middle and high school. So when you switch from middle to high school, I would have assumed not all of your friends end up at the same school...
In my district (in the US), the schools are arranged in a hierarchy, and at each level the school size increases. So the middle schools each have feeder elementary schools, and no elementary cohorts get split between the middle schools. And the high school gets everyone. It's not a huge district, however (500-600 students per grade level), so it's possible other more urban areas do it differently.
The only time where a friend group can get split is if they redraw the boundaries for the elementary schools. This happens occasionally, not every year.
They are all assigned by address; so there are N elementary schools that feed into a single junior high (or middle school), and typically a junior high will feed into a single high school. So your friends move up with you unless someone moves.
This is all "typical"; there are many exceptions. Where I live now, they unified the secondary schools (i.e. junior-high and high-school) so that you can apply to go to a different junior-high or high-school than your local one, space permitting. Similarly where I grew up, you could apply to go to a different school, but a "legitimate academic reason" was required. People did game the system, most commonly by claiming they wanted to study a foreign language that was offered at the school they wanted to go to, but not the school they were in the district for.
I should note that where I grew up the school-system was unusually non-local in the sense that there was one system for the entire county (which was about half the land area of Saarland). Even then you were required to go to the local school though. More typical is that each town or city manages the schools for their area.
This is mostly true in the US. The map is reflecting districts. I happen to be in a small town in New Jersey, so we're an elementary district with one school. Children after 6th grade go to a middle school and high school that is part of the secondary district which overlaps other municipalities/elementary districts. Some districts have multiple elementary schools and their own local level maps (not reflected here) that influence placement in the elementary schools in the district.
In my school, my district had an elementary school, middle school, & high school. So yes if you live at the same address the whole time, you and your friends would all go through each school together.
As mentioned it’s often hierarchical (elementary schools being the smallest) BUT you still have people who switch to private school at the boundaries, etc.
There are also charter school, which are a weird mix between public and private schools, that typically operate on a mix of applications and lotteries. Plus private schools that can enroll pretty much whoever they want.