I live in the city, pay outrageous taxes (ie. taxes are about equal to my mortgage), and now my son is 4. So I'm faced with sending him to a school district with lousy outcomes and no budget, sending him to Catholic school, or moving to the burbs where they have sponsored robot teams and some of the best schools in the state.
Not in the US. Public schools are funded and managed by the local governments (usually county or city). So, only residents of those locales get to attend.
You could send a child to a private school in the suburbs, but that's doesn't gain you anything over sending the kid to a private school closer to home. Plus, it costs an additional $6000+/year. That's tuition at my local Catholic high school; it's an average school, no better than the publics in the same area.
<outsider's shrug> From a policy perspective it seems to be a no-brainer then to move school financing to the state level, at least for a part of the schools.
You can in my state, but we'd have to politick to do it, and the cost is more than private school. And the private school is a better investment (smaller class size, less common core) at that price.
