Of course, the article does fail to answer the rather obvious question "what of the lottery losers?". You can't get a system that does right by *all* children unless those "lower quality" schools offer quality education at a more vocational level - and children and parents both have no problem with choosing vocational schools if those are the most suitable for the child's abilities. In here we have free school choice and different kinds of high schools - vocational, technical, academic, to simplify a bit - but the system is somewhat hampered by the many parents who continue to insist in the face of all evidence that their kids should be in the academic schools, resulting in kids failing year after year and getting utterly demotivated.