I’d make my customary link back to mine at this point, but frankly I’ve blethered on about it so much it’d be pretty tedious. I’ll try to hold my auto-rant function in check until Tetsuo finishes his little journey. Which given he was born already aged 13 might not be too long, and frankly a breeze compared to the delivery…

I guess it’s typical for schools in America to draw funding from a mix of federal, state and local (property) taxes, and the mix will vary from state to state to municipality, as will restrictions on the schools students can attend. Local revenues *typically* cover about 25% to 55% of school funding (the national average being 28%) with state revenues contributing almost all but 10% of the rest. (That 10% is the feds).

“Local” funding is covered by school boards, which are superlocalized, except in (ding ding!) Virginia and Maryland where the school boards are matched to counties! (And Hawaii, where the entire state is a single school district). So it’s a given that students can attend any school in a school district (assuming the school board says its OK) but very rare that two school boards would exchange students within a district, because then taxes from on municipality would be paying for students whose families pay taxes in another.

The vast majority of US students will go to school in the attendance zone determined by their local school boards… but that “local school board” could have 150 schools, or 1.

Thanks for keeping me on my fact-toes. I was also reminded last week that some Americans do, in fact, carry umbrellas! The things we forget.

As always I enjoyed to read your article.
I’ve been teaching in Japan for about 5 years now and the school system is very different from the one in my home country. (btw. most other countries such as America also have a completely different school system from ours).
Personally I’m not really a big fan of the system.
Students only have to study for their exams a few times per year, but are basically free to forget everything in the meantime. In my country we had tests almost every week and could never really stop studying.
I also think it’s not a good idea to split students up depending on how well they did in entrance exams. I’ve seen best friends who were seperated because of that.
This also puts a lot of stress on the students at a very young age already.

I genereally don’t like how kids are treated here.
At first they are (mostly) spoiled and parents won’t be strict no matter what and as soon as they enter elementary school their schedule becomes so riduculously busy!
All the parents think that they might have a little pro soccer or pro pianist at home and so they need to push push push their children.
After school, they go to juku and/or eikaiwa and after that they have to play soccer, baseball, learn how to play the piano, violin and whatnot.
Some of them enjoy this busy schedule, but many don’t.
They should be allowed to be kids and explore their unique talents.
In Japan, the parents try to push some talent on their kids hoping their kids will become super famous and successful in the future.
I don’t get it. It makes me sad and angry.

I have a young, small family in my house.
Every night the young elementary school kid practices the piano (I come home from work after 10pm and she’s still at it!!!) – and there’s no evening when the mother isn’t screaming like hell at her kids! :(