> You go to your local high school

Parents are often willing to move to areas where there are good schools.

In the top 10% of income brackets yes. Outside of it, not so much...

You don't think parents make decisions based on what they believed to be in their child's best interest?

I'm not sure why this is getting downvoted... it's true. If you can't afford to move, you don't.

Consider northern Tarrant county of Texas which is the highest density school district area I have heard of.

Houses in Southlake cost about 20% more per square foot and tend to be substantially larger than all neighboring areas except Colleyville. That creates exclusivity largely due to magnified wealth that has grown up around the school.

Now that the population in the area has substantially swollen competition among the school districts has increased irrespective of wealth, though wealth remains an influential factor. When a student can live mere miles from various schools in more than two school districts, in some rare cases 4 districts, there is incentive to consider among the choices even though it’s supposed to limited by geography.

To complicate that further there are state funded charter school systems that have competitive admission requirements and ignore geography.

Yes there are also private schools as well. In many places private schools exist to provide wealthy children a superior education. That does not apply in the north Tarrant area where there are so many excellent public schools to choose from and the wealthy ones are among the best in the nation. In this area private schools exist only to provide education public schools cannot, such as religious sponsored education.

>Where I live students don't have any choice in which high school to go to. You go to your local high school, unless your family is wealthy and you can afford private schools.

You must never have bought a house. If you look on any real estate website, you'll find the ratings for local schools. Some towns grow or shrink on the quality of their schools. School districts are as important as cars in explaining the geometry of modern suburbia.

My city had a school choice program. Your local school was required to accept you, but out of dustrict schools were free to impose additional restrictions. Most used a lottery, but a few (at least 1 I waa considering) would look at at an applicants grade and test scores and make an admission decision based on that.

> Where I live students don't have any choice in which high school to go to.

People choose schools by moving house.

In the twenty-first century US as in thirteenth century china.

昔孟母，择邻处。

(I would claim that people, in the time of de Vos as in the time of Mencius' mother, don't vote with their feet to choose schools as much as choose their childrens' classmates, and perhaps especially the parents of their children's classmates, but I'm a cynic.)

"94027 children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a 94301, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the 95112s and 95023s."

The game is the game: https://youtu.be/mSXm4FUmE5g?t=59

The game I'm referring to is whatever game you need to play to gain capital, social, economic or otherwise. Whether that's applying to colleges and all of the requisite application fluff; the technical interview game or the optimal high school game. And while these games are significantly easier to play if you come from means, I know plenty of low income students who play the game far better than your elite private school types.

Ohio had a system where you could opt to go to neighboring school systems (but you would need to provide your own transportation).

That's the whole point --- to take away the top 5% power to buy their way into college via a fancier high school.

Obviously your family moves freshman year to optimize your chance of getting into UT /s

I’ve had plenty of discussions with people on how they plan to move from starter homes to homes in more affluent areas so their kids can mingle with richer kids and go to their schools.

Is there good evidence this makes a difference in the outcome of their children?

This is interesting but I'm not sure it supports that moving to affluent areas will help scholastic achievement.

For example, looking at the "median household income" feature, it doesn't seem to correlate well with "fraction of college graduates".

It might not need to, as long as median income does. The saying of “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” and “you are the company you keep” rings very true in my experience. Just being around the kids of successful parents should help in opening more doors.