I disagree that “It’s possible to imagine a country where the schools are good everywhere.” The trouble is that schooling is largely about signaling. What makes one particular school “good” in the sense that matters isn’t that it meets an objective minimum standard but rather the fact that the “good” school is better than other schools — a zero-sum game. Back when most people didn’t finish high school, simply finishing any high school sent the necessary signal but as the minimum expected amount of schooling increases, those who are on that treadmill need to spend ever more resources on quantity and “quality” of schooling if they want to signal to potential employers that they are especially smart, hard-working, conformist, and conscientious.

(Bryan Caplan is currently writing a book about this called The Case Against Education.)