I'M ALL RIGHT, JACK.  There is school choice in the United States, with the price of admission bundled with a fancier house.  Joanne Jacobs finds two articles that address the disinterest in school choice among people satisfied with their own schools.

Upper-middle-class parents aren’t rallying to reform the schools, writes Lewis Andrews inThe American Spectator.  Affluent parents are getting the schools they want, responds Mike Petrilli.  The question is whether they’ll support reforms to help other peoples’ children. If those reforms — think test-based accountability — hurt their own children’s schools, they’ll resist, he argues.

Mr Andrews suggests that the wealthy districts spend money on fluff.

Suburban parents have always been ready to mob a school board meeting to agitate for improved athletic facilities, but never for teacher evaluations or merit pay. The PTA will mobilize families and schools to support the most controversial social movements, from gay rights and gun control to affirmative action and costly accommodations for the disabled, but not a peep about the pressing need to save urban children from failing schools.

His contention is internally inconsistent, as he goes on to complain about those same districts spending local money on some of the same things the poorer districts rely on other jurisdictions to provide.  Ultimately, though, he misses the mark.

Suburban parents are unlikely to ever give up their luxuriously appointed classrooms and handsome athletic fields, but, as Upton Sinclair discovered almost a century ago, they will be the first to remedy a clear demonstration of local dysfunction, especially when coupled with options for improvement. If any force has the potential to reform the traditional public school, it is the righteous indignation of a rudely awakened upper-middle class.

The problem, precisely, is that what's left of the upper-middle class remains insulated from the failings of other school districts. And perhaps that remnant participates in the positional arms race for universities so as to shelter their children from the products of those failing school districts in less selective universities.

At Flypaper, Mike Petrilli disagrees with Mr Andrews in a way that makes sense.

The No Child Left Behind backlash in the suburbs isn’t due to concerns that the law isn’t working to fix urban education. Plenty of evidence shows that it’s helped. The anger comes from a feeling that the federal law is starting to make affluent public schools worse–or at least worse in the eyes of their customers. If a principal asks a beloved teacher to scrap her favorite unit on dinosaurs or poetry or jazz or whatever in order to make room for test-prep, you better believe the affluent parents are going to be mad. As well they should be. Mandating statewide, test-based teacher evaluations will only make the situation worse.

Smart policy would treat different schools differently. It would be more surgical, focusing tightly on schools that are clearly in distress, and offering benign neglect to the others. Ironically enough, the way to get upper-middle-class parents engaged in school reform is probably to leave their own schools alone.

Or, to achieve the same effect, don't make the upper-middle-class parents opponents of improvements in underperforming school districts by applying a one-approach-fits-all-schools policy, such as No Child Left Behind, which implies the dual proposition, No Child Gets Ahead, or, as a friend puts it, All Children Left Behind.