Based on my time in Australia, here are a few things they did which are radically different than what we do here and I think make a lot of sense.
1 - Separate super competitive sports from schools. You can and should still have all play intramural level sports and compete against other schools but there's nowhere to really go after you win the equivalent of "District".
The side effect of this was, the club sports were hugely competitive.
And, for the "All Play" aspect of it, they would grade / classify the teams on ability so that everybody is playing at the appropriate level suited to their ability. The picked last kids play against other kids who were picked last.
In Australia, they couldn't even fathom something like Odessa Permian HS, or doing what they did in Waco in the late 1980s and combine 3 x 4A HS into a single 5A HS for Football.
2 - Smaller School Sizes. I graduated HS in a class of 350, wife graduated in a class of 750, one of my Corps buddies from Plano graduated with a class of 1100+.
In Australia, the typical school had about 100 students in each class year. The largest school I ever heard of (Riverview) had fewer than 200 in each class year. I think they might have had about 150 per year.
When you're in a smaller school, everybody knows who you are. You can't really be the loner / drifter who disappears into the background or joins the trench coat mafia.
3 - Trade School after Year 10. Things have changed but, the way it used to work was, attending school through Year 10 (10th Grade) was compulsory until you got your "School Certificate". After that, you could attend a vocational school but you did not have to complete Years 11 or 12.
Now I heard plenty of tradesmen complain about the quality of the Apprentices the schools were producing these days but, at least those kids had an avenue and the Journeymen had a source of help.
Side note - the Apprenticeship and Vocational training is really important when you live in a country that enforces Border Security. Without a ready source of cheap / unskilled / semi-skilled labor, tradesmen are charging top dollar.
4 - Make Year 12 the only year that matters. After the School Certificate in Year 10, students would go to Year 11 and 12 to earn their HSC (Higher School Certificate). This is where all the difficult classes were taught. You want Calculus, that's Year 12 Higher Level HSC Maths [sic].
One of the things I couldn't get my head around was that due to the way Australia does university admissions, they're all dependent on a series of tests at the end of Year 12. In Australian schools, it was common for us to see students in Years 10 or 11, not taking school seriously. But, in Year 12, the students had to knuckle down and spend about 8 months preparing for a comprehensive battery of tests which would determine there future.
The good news is that there is no such thing as Senioritis in Australia. None of the Year 12 students check out and don't do any work because they already got accepted to college 6+ months before they graduated HS.
The bad news is that their academic and life future is dependent on how well they do on these tests that are administered a few weeks prior to graduation. The stress these kids are under is incredible.
5 - Stack Rank Students and Schools. In Australia, the results of the HSC Tests would determine which college course students would be offered for admission at each university. This is called the ATAR or Australian Tertiary Admission Rank. It's a % where 99.95% is the maximum possible ATAR and you pretty much never hear of an ATAR lower than 85 or something like that.
The ATAR score gets ranked in two dimensions.
The first one is Class Rank. So how well did you do on your HSC exams versus everyone else at your school?
The second one is what they refer to as a "League Table" of how well did your school rank against other peer schools?
This League Table of schools incentivizes students to help their peers to achieve an overall higher rank for their school. The result is a much bigger focus on study groups and raising not just the top students but all students at the school.
Lastly on the ranking, the results are published far and wide so everybody knows who the top schools are and who the top students at each school were.
If you're in the top 10 academic kids in the state in let's say - Italian, or Chemistry, or Higher Level Maths, that's getting published in the paper for all to see. And if your school does well, everybody knows about it and tries to outperform your school next year.
6 - Eliminate Hyphens from Student Demographics - This is a larger society issue but in Australia, there are no hyphenated Australians, only Australians. As a result, you don't see a report on Whites versus Minorities, etc. You just see a report. If you look at Texas or California school report cards, you always see White, Black, Asian and usually with subdesignations like Filipino, or Mexican or Cuban, etc.
7 - School Funding - Not associated with Property Tax and a function of the State level government. As a result, school buildings would have a much longer life. And since school sports weren't a big thing, there weren't millions of booster club dollars being spent on stadiums.
Two other big differences that I'm still on the fence about:
8 - Selective (Magnet) Schools - Taking the top students out of the local school and bussing them cross town to attend school with other high achieving kids is probably good for the student but bad for the community.
The real down side is that this decision is made based upon score results from a test taken in Year 5 (5th Grade).
9 - School Uniforms - I don't know how much difference this makes but it was not acceptable to be out of uniform and the school uniform included a hat and usually the same backpack as everybody else.
There are a few other factors I could add but this is a good list to start with.
EDIT: Forgot a really big one
10 - Only Legal Residents can attend Public School and if you're on a Work Visa you have to pay - And here goes the story about why my kids wound up in Private Girls School. In Australia, to enrol your child in school, you must produce two pieces of documentation.
1 - Proof of Residence - where do you live so they can figure out if you're in the school's catchment area
2 - Proof of Legal Residency - do you have the right to be in the country and have your children attend public school. So basically, are you a citizen - Birth Certificate or a Permanent Resident - appropriate Visa information.
2a - if applicable such as if you're on a temporary work visa - you will need proof that you have filed with the government in Canberra and paid your $5,000 (AUD) per student per year to allow them to attend public school.
Since I had to pay $5,000 / year to send my kids to public school and they weren't eligible for the Selective School program, $15,000 / year sounded like a reasonable compromise. If we were Catholic, Catholic School for $6,000/yr would have been the best option but those spaces fill up fast.
Edit 2 - those are the 2008 prices. They'd be much higher now, I'm sure. Last school year I paid for in 2015 was over $30,000.
