There is that aspect as well but they also don't have the property tax and federalism issues.

This is why:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Antonio_Independent_School_District_v._Rodriguez

As far as I can tell our problems relate to federalism.

European schools seem largely more equal because the standards and subjects are taught dictated at a national and centralized level. Everyone seems to marvel at Finland's schools. However, most European countries are also much less diverse than the United States. Homogeneous societies seem to care a lot less about federalism.

For better or for worse, education is done at a state and local level in the U.S. For better, it saves us a lot of strum und drang culture war issues (well maybe not). For worse, it leads the horrible way we fund school in the United States.

That sounds about right and very familiar.

James,

The Supreme Court gave an all-clear to vouchers in this case:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelman_v._Simmons-Harris

Basically following the Private Choice Test, it is okay for parents to use vouchers to send their kids to fundie schools as long as there are adequate nonreligious options for parents who do not want their kids to be sent to fundie schools.

I suppose allowing this is market based but I stand with the dissenters on this one.

Well the critics did not attend schools where teacher retention is a problem nor do they send their kids to schools where teacher retention is a problem.

So yeah....

This is a very good comment.

I know a lot of people who did the same thing that Conor did, teach for a year or two in NYC (or other large school districts). Conor, did you do the NYC teaching fellows program?

These programs are often very manipulative or at least advertised in very manipulative ways. The NYC ads for the program seemed designed to appeal to idealistic, college students with a strong passion for doing right. I would always see ads on the subways that had lines like "Take your next business trip on a big, yellow bus" or appeal to some sense of mission. The same kind of do-gooder spirit that causes people to be chuggers even though that is also a fraud.

What the ads do not say is that people will be placed in the worst of the worse school districts and probably end up burnt-up after a year or two because they were assaulted and such.

Is this the best we can do? Is all we can give these school districts are idealistic 22-year old kids for a year or two, let the kids get chewed up, and then move on to a new batch?

This is a very wicked problem indeed.

I think it sends a message that the structural problems facing poor-school districts are daunting that we are not going to even try.

I pretty much thought this would be the case.

If I have kids, they are not attending any school that thinks teaching evolution denialism is valid. Creationism and Intelligent Design have no place in any biology class.

This seems to be a wicked problem between two intractable sides who just shoot past each other.

I think M.A. is correct that vouchers can be a lotto ticket and do nothing to solve the structural problems.

However, I am not sure what the solutions are. I am not a parent yet but do fit Kazzy's portrait of brain drain. I am a professional who is part or on my way to being part of the upper-middle class. If I ever get married and have kids, I will likely move to a suburb that is also filled with upper-middle class professionals because I think public school is important but I am not willing to take a gamble on the public schools in large cities and private school tuition is crazy.

What is the solution? Do we encourage people like me to stay in urban areas and send their kids to public school? When I lived in Brooklyn, I had a very specific neighborhood that I wanted to live in. Said neighborhood had two public schools, one was good and the other was considered not good. My real estate agent always pointed out which apartments were part of the good school district. Even though I was a 26 year old single guy, she saw me as being part of the class of people who would care about such things.

I think NYC has a lot of parents who are willing to send their kids to public school for K-8 but not for high school unless their kids get into one of the handful of magnate schools like Bronx Science, Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, etc.

I agree but I am not sure that I would qualify the fundie schools that take school vouchers as being decent. Though this is largely because of socio-cultural biases of mine.

I can't tell whether you are being sarcastic or not but do you think one would be helpful?

I think it would just become another part of the culture and pundit wars. You would have the social conservatives v. people like me who want K-12 students to have well-rounded educations including plenty of arts education v. the STEM STEM STEM crowd v. the vocational people.

Ah yes the infamous rubber room.

My mom spent most of her careers in NYC public schools. First as a teacher and then in administration. She was laid off briefly during the 1970s but hired back because of her union I believe. She was never sent to the rubber room.

Though as someone who went to NY suburban public high schools, I do like the Regents system and thought that it tried to teach actual knowledge instead of better test taking skills. Though I was in high school before NCLB so who knows what it is like now.

I agree with Mike Dwyer on the voucher issue. Voucher students seem to rarely go to elite private schools like Dalton, Horace Mann, St. Ann's, etc. My examples are all NYC or East Coast because that is what I know. I can tell you the stereotypes associated with almost every elite NYC prep school. For example, DWIGHT's joke nickname is Dumb White kids Into Getting High Together. Dwight's most famous students are Paris Hilton and Truman Capote. Make of this what you will. Dalton and Trinity are for overachievers. St. Ann's is for arty/hippie kids.

Rather voucher students tend to go to parochial or evangelical schools which historically had much lower fees than their secular counterparts. This is why vouchers were a big deal for the Separation of Church and State crowd.

So I think Mike is partially right: The really elite private schools are able to use tuition as a barrier. This is not to say that every student who attends is a star or from a rich background. All those fancy schools have scholarship students but they probably have a bigger share of rich dolts.

I think you are hitting upon a really good point. The issue is not what kind of school it is but largely how involved the parents are.

I went to a public high school that could rival the most elite private schools in the U.S. This is probably because it was in an upper-middle class school district and most of the students were the children of professionals: lawyers, doctors, engineers, professors, MBAs, etc. Our parents made their incomes based on professional degrees and expected their children to do the same.

Here is a counter-view on Market-based education reform:

http://www.texasmonthly.com/2012-08-01/bookrev.php

The apt sections of the review note that the school in question:

"He describes, for instance, how Garza works to meet the state’s goal for the “completion rate,” an approximation of the number of students who graduate or get a GED in four years. Garza points out that if students fail to enroll or are absent often enough that she can kick them out, then they won’t be counted among the students who are expected to finish. And voilà! Reagan’s completion rate rises. “I’m going to run it till somebody stops me and calls me on it,” Garza says, explaining her plan to drop students with unexcused absences.

Brick slips that quote in without making it clear that Garza has admitted to engaging in one of the most pernicious pitfalls of education reform. Pushed to meet her numbers, she has chosen to cut loose her weaker charges—those for whom reform was invented in the first place. Garza, for her part, doesn’t defend the practice as fair or right; it is simply what she has to do to meet her numbers."

In short, some aspects of education success seem to have resorted to fancy accounting tricks and cooking the books."

The review further goes on to note that education reform is hard and has simply become another aspect of our political culture that gets lost in strawmen and culture wars.

I am also sure that a lot of people go into programs like Teach for America and emerge as champions of the Charter Schoool/Waiting for Superman idea but I think they have those aspects of the left that people complain about the most often. Either they intend to do it for a year or two as a resume booster before going on to their positions in the 1 percent or close to it* or they have that pundit-air of "Democracy is pesky. Why doesn't anyone listen to my preferred policy choices?" Michelle Rhee comes into the pundit-air version. So does my pundit bete-noir of Matt Yegelias (though I don't think he writes about school-reform, he is certainly a good example of a contrarian beltway pundit who is too clever by half and seems to willfully miss any point that is not economic)

Before we can decide on what reforms work, we need to decide on the point and purpose of K-12 education. Do we want critical thinkers and writers with a solid and well-rounded education? Do we want people who can be productive employees? Both? Neither? Then we will get into the huge culture war of what to teach and when. All I have to say is that federalism probably works here to keep the culture war at bay. New York does not want their education policy dictated by South Carolina and vice-versa.

Wow this was a maxi-rant. I am not really sure what my point was except that school-reform is very hard and we should all be able to agree that cooking the books is not a good way to boost completion and graduation rates.

In other news,

Franco is still dead.

/Ducks

Scary. This would probably get me to consider moving to a small town in the mountains with a pile of books and no internet for the next four to eight years.

No doubt but not for all of them. I know plenty of boomers who are on Team Democratic and fully supporting of gay marriage but there are also probably plenty of older voters who are like your mom.

I don't have any punishments for PSU as they exist in themselves.

However lots of people including people who have been very hard on PSU think that the NCAA is largely just trying to save their own collective asses instead of realizing that the NCAA was the enabler of the corruption that created Penn State.

http://deadspin.com/5928204/the-ncaa-is-using-penn-state-to-justify-its-own-horrid-existence/

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/07/23/the_ncaa_s_sanctimonious_sanctions_against_penn_state_football.html

Again, I have no problems against the punishments leveled against Penn State. I would have also supported the so-called death penalty. There is a lot of stuff about college sports that needs to be reformed especially the NCAA. Division I sports (and how much money it rakes in) is madness and I thought about this long before the Sandusky scandal came into the public view. Sandusky is the toxic end to what happens when people have too much power.

Mike,

It is true that young people tend to move to the suburbs once they start families (or at least when their kids are young enough for elementary school.)

There are still plenty of liberal suburbs though. Or at least suburbs filled with social liberals/Clintonesque moderate Democratic voters. I grew up in one and can tell you which suburbs of SF and NYC are blue and which ones are read. I can also kind of do this for DC and Chicago. Marin County is wealthy and blue. Much of South Bay is also well off and blue (though the ultra-wealthy towns tend to run red). East Bay is more diverse and has a more sizeable Republican/conservative population but I think still swings largely blue especially in Alameda county, Contra Costa county is more red. In NYC, it is much more on a town to town basis.

Perhaps my experience is different but while I see many of my classmates moving to the suburbs eventually (some of the married with kid ones already have), I don't see many of them becoming Republican. We will see in 20-30 years. They might become fiscally more restrained but I don't see them joining in with the current ranks of hardcore social conservatives of the Bachman/Santorum mode.* It would be horrible for gay rights and gay marriage for it to be an issue supported by young people who then think twice.

I'm always up for the explanation that being Jewish and therefore part of the Democratic base skews my prospective on liberal to conservatism.

*Though who knows whether they will become hypocritical on marijuana and drug use in general. I hope not but suspect you are probably right on this issue. Drug use seems to be an issue in which many people become hypocrites once they become parents including smoking pot on the side while telling their kids not to.

Eh. I consider Moynihan to be a liberal. He certainly consider himself to be one and a staunch Democratic Party man and that is good enough for me. He was one of the great voices of dissent during Clinton's Welfare Reform during the early 1990s. This is all despite his working for Nixon and Ford. Though that was a very different time. And for all of Nixon faults, he still gave us Associate Justice Harry Blackmun*. Though he also gave us William Rehinquist.**

Personally I have always been fond of Daniel Bell's line of being a "socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture." Though Daniel Bell might be to the left of me economically. I'm just a welfare-state mixed market guy in economics.

*Law school made me develop a very soft spot in my heart for Harry Blackmun. I'm a huge fan of Brennan and Marshall but the world would not be a bad place if there were more people like Harry Blackmun. He gets dismissed as a sentimentalist but I think of him as a very thoughtful Justice even when I disagreed with his decisions.

**Nixon's joke that kept on giving. He might still keep on giving.

Though I would point out that conservative policies like mass incarceration and attacking the unions as a social experiment are plenty to blame for the current state of affairs.

The guy who wrote Bowling Alone talked about this at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

He thinks that class is much more of a problem now than race. Basically upper-middle class culture is upper-middle class culture whether White, Black, Asian, Hispanic, etc. You are taught to study hard, delay certain aspects of gratification, get into a good college, good grad school, get a good job, etc.

Underemployed culture is the same whether among Blacks, Whites, Asians, Hispanics, etc.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/thenextamerica/demographics/robert-putnam-class-now-trumps-race-as-the-great-divide-in-america-20120702

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/06/robert-putnam-class-now-trumps-race-as-the-great-divide-in-america/259256/

I don't know if I could say that I became more "conservative" or not.

I've always identified as a a liberal Democratic voter but in college I was a liberal on a radical campus. Perhaps I've just followed the old Robert Frost line about never daring to be a radical when young, lest it make me a conservative when old (Paraphrase, I saw it once and have not been able to find this line since. Google fails me.)

Economically, I am still a firm supporter of the welfare state but as co-existence with what is essentially a mixed-market but capitalist economy. I once met a person from the UK who immigrated to the US. She complained about needing to finally go to university because the US allows for income-discrimination based on educational status. This is apparently not allowed in the UK. My thought was it makes perfect sense to pay someone with a graduate degree more than someone with a high school education." I imagine this thought is not very fashionable in certain parts of the left.

I also tend to role my eyes when a certain kind of leftist begins talking about anti-consumerists politics and goes about calling people corporate sheep for wanting material comforts or luxury goods. My general thought is that such things are done by upper-middle class kids trying to be radical and that they will cool it quickly enough. Or "Shut up. You are going to want nice things as well." I suppose my main feeling is that I have no desire to live on a commune and neither do most people.

"Privilege" is another one of my least favorite college left words. It is a very useful concept that has been abused into a base attack and really just translates as "You are bad and should feel bad."

None of this is annoying enough to make me become a libertarian or a Republican though. Perhaps in another time, I would have been a Rockefeller Republican but probably not. Right now, the social conservatives, ultra-hawks, and hard-core supply sliders/Paul Ryanites make it impossible for me to consider voting for any Republican.

As a former resident of New York and now San Francisco (and someone who grew up in suburbs of NY, this makes sense to me)

You can't escape poverty if you live in NYC or San Francisco. I have always lived in fashionable and gentrifying neighborhoods in both cities. Neighborhoods filled with young professionals, destination restaurants, hip bars, and convenience stores that sell fancy beer and food stuffs (domestic and international) but you still see poverty. I probably see at least two to four homeless people a day in San Francisco. Sometimes a lot more. There is still a lot of mixing despite gentrification. When I lived in Brooklyn, I lived on a small street filled with brownstones worth millions of dollars. Many were single family homes to professional families (I rented the bottom floor from one such family). One cross street was filled with the type of stuff as described above. The other cross street was a huge housing project.

I guess living in a city makes you more aware of poverty and if you are doing well, maybe it increases feelings of guilt and wanting more economic justice. Most of those million dollar partners do not have enough money to truly insulate themselves*, they probably still take the subway to work and walk and see the multitudes. Suburbs don't always but can lead to a more bubble because they tend to be economically more homogeneous and it allows for the poor to become more like an intellectual abstraction or an inconvenience.

*This requires tens of millions of dollars, living in an area like Pacific Heights or Park Avenue and having a private driver (not a cab) take you everywhere.