**** Elections thread *****

[CoccoBill]

I understand that's the premise, but I can't find any proof of that actually happening. There seems to be a huge variance in the performance of American schools, and on average they're not achieving good results at least based on standardized tests. My intuition says that competition makes the best better and the worst worse, since being on the short end automatically cuts funding, limits the available expertise and creates a social environment that makes it very hard to achieve results.

It would be interesting to know what is the number of homeschooled applicants to higher education and what their acceptance rates are. It does seem that the ones that get in to colleges/universities perform well or at least on par with others, which seems to support your first point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling#Supportive

[wufwugy]

I understand that's the premise, but I can't find any proof of that actually happening. There seems to be a huge variance in the performance of American schools, and on average they're not achieving good results at least based on standardized tests. My intuition says that competition makes the best better and the worst worse, since being on the short end automatically cuts funding, limits the available expertise and creates a social environment that makes it very hard to achieve results.

You're definitely right about there being huge variance. The US system has very little choice, so it isn't choice causing this variance.