How about letting parents and kids decide?

The ODT reports:

Dunedin secondary school pupils may be forced to attend the school nearest to them if one option proposed by the Ministry of Education is adopted.

The ministry has put up for discussion four options for improving the efficiency of the Dunedin secondary schools network.

It is efficient to force people to attend a certain school, but that doesn’t mean it is right. Educational outcome is more important than efficiency and if parents want to send their kids to a further away school, they should be able to.

Roll figures for 2015 show the city’s secondary schools have capacity for 9252 pupils, but 1513 spaces are not used in Dunedin – the equivalent of two secondary school rolls.

To make the network more efficient, option one is to implement a system in which the majority of an area’s pupils attend their local schools.

In other words force people to attend a school they don’t want to. This means poorly performing schools will not lose students, and hence have no incentive to improve.