School choice, a remedy for sprawl?

This has been a thread on the pro-urb list. Here's one of the things I wrote:

Washington DC has some good public elementary schools in NW DC. They also have the "Capitol Hill Cluster Schools" consisting of two elementary schools and one junior high in the central part of Capitol Hill. The schools in upper NW can have high white enrollments; the cluster schools are 80% African-American.

I keep suggesting that (a.) the Cluster Schools could be expanded by one school north and one school south; and (b.) that more areas of the city should take up the cluster school concept and bull it forward (I have proposed an arts cluster -- visual, performance, language and writing, foreign language and culture, media -- in the Greater H Street area to complement the developing arts and entertainment district, but there just hasn't been much traction for this idea and since I don't have children I'm not gonna kill myself to make this happen...).

Although as pointed out in Diffusion of Innovation by Rogers, innovation in public education has the longest period for take up as far as adoption is concerned, compared to other institutions. Besides the materiel issue, these particular municipal institutions are especially resistant to and insulated from change (cf. The Future Once Happened Here).

It's a lot to ask for citizens to rise up and do the work that other people are being paid to do to improve these institutions. It's the rare public official like Mayor Daley, who takes this on. See Catalyst: Voices of Chicago School Reform for more about the process in Chicago.

While the Chicago reform effort does get coverage in the national press, it doesn't receive as much sustained coverage as the school choice and voucher movement.