No, I totally disagree with you.
It's about capacity. Say for example we have an area with 1,000 kids and there are three schools with a capacity each of 400 kids. One school is excellent, one school is okay and one school is awful.
What happens with choice? The excellent school gets to pick which students it takes in. All the good parents want to send their kids to this school. So they get the best, or the richest students. Perhaps the school demands people pay some money to go to that school. So "choice" here is based around ability to pay. Or it's based around the choice of the school.
Imagine a kid who lives right next door to this school but either his parents can't pay or he doesn't get the grades to go. So he has to trek somewhere else to go to school.
Then the okay school will get its fill of students. 800 kids going to these two schools and then the rubbish school has 200 kids. It can't afford to operate with a half school so they close it down. Where do the other 200 kids go?
The reality is in the UK where there is CHOICE, schools are limited in how they do things. However what happens in the UK, because the UK is less crazy than the US when it comes to politics (and education) is that teachers are trained to a high level and they have inspectors who give grades to schools. They're trying to get principles (head teachers) who know their thing and getting them to be in charge of various schools so that there can be standards across the board.
In the US there are ghettos. With such ghettos you end up with lots souls who go into school not seeing the point and because funding is due to the local housing tax conditions, there probably isn't much point. This doesn't happen in the UK.
As for choice from those who have actually done it, it doesn't really work as conservatives are trying to make out.
"School Choice in Chile: Is It Class or the Classroom?"
By "class" they mean, upper class.
"Based on this evidence, we argue that unfettered choice may reduce the pressure on schools to improve their performance and could potentially increase stratification."
We could look at universities. Choice is immense in universities in both the UK and the US. And people end up choosing universities, not based on how good the university is at teaching students, but at how well they market themselves.
The UK has a ranking system:
New for 2023! Our league tables rank the best universities in the UK, overall and in 74 subject areas
www.thecompleteuniversityguide.co.uk
There's also a world ranking system
The Times Higher Education World University Rankings, founded in 2004, is a vital resource that provides the definitive list of the world's best universities.
www.timeshighereducation.com
This is how universities go about telling ignorant kids and ignorant parents about how good a university is. They market themselves, the ranking system is a marketing tool, especially in the US. People don't know what they want. You'd have to go to two or three universities to be able to compare, and these kids have never been to one, obviously.
Schools for younger kids will be the same. I've worked in private education and I've seen some horrendous things.