Moms Talk: Favoring the Poor in Education

Public education may be the biggest issue in DeKalb County, a diverse county with students across the socioeconomic spectrum. Educators here and across the nation have struggled for decades with how to best handle students from lower-income families who come to classrooms behind their middle or upper-middle class classmates. It's an issue that plays out in schools in our community every day.

Some legislators in Britain think they've got one fix: favoring poor students over middle class students for admission to choice academies and "free schools" in England.

From a story in ParentDish:

The Telegraph reports poor kids have sometimes been edged out of these institutions because richer families buy property in the neighborhood to secure a place in the school. Members of Britain's Labour Party say these reforms will close the gap between rich and poor (poor being defined as families who make less than $26,000 a year).

Under the proposal, schools would get $700 for every poor child enrolled. The proposal would also:

• Require all schools to give preference to children from military families, meaning primary schools must admit them to infant classes even when they exceed the current legal limit of 30 pupils.
• Ban local councils from imposing area-wide "lotteries" to distribute places to overcrowded schools. However, individual schools will still be allowed to hold lotteries.

So, what do you guys think of this? Is it progressive? Idealistic? Unfair or unreasonable?