You will notice that Lonnie’s quote applies to city and county schools in equal measure.

As I said…

…or at best is not very different than any other unimpressively average school system.

Best, AC

I would ask whether TrvInMn has any direct experience in this regard, and if he has, what his comparators are.

My opinions are based solely on my own personal experiences. Enough familiar faces still remain from the time I was a student for me to believe that not much has changed. That and the simple fact that public education is a bureaucracy which resists change.

Lonnie captures the essence of it perfectly when he wrote:

Each school in the city and the county is effective two schools – One for middle and upper-class students, and one for lower income and minority students.

[...]

The upper level classes are not necessarily harder than the lower ones. Basically the kids in the upper level classes had parents that would advocate for them, and the students in the lower level didn’t.

To make it worse, they put all the kids with behavior problems (regardless of how intelligent they are) in the lower level classes. That means that kids that are having trouble catching up, then have to deal with screw ups, making it effectively impossible to learn.

So, I see what Lonnie sees w/r/t tracking, and I also agree with him as to solutions. Fed’l intervention has been a huge net negative. The states should be in the drivers seat, and funding should be equalized via state uniform taxation and distribution.

And — so that Jim doesn’t think we’re going off track — this all relates right back to the real estate market. The price of gas is going to drive future real-estate densification. To make that work, we have got to make sure that we straighten out the school funding issue. Otherwise, the market and the government are going to be working at cross-purposes.

Seriously though, someone else’s point about tracking is correct, but I don’t think vouchers would fix it. Each school in the city and the county is effective two schools – One for middle and upper-class students, and one for lower income and minority students. I recall a classmate once saying to me that there’s this whole other group of people that you only see when you play sports. Then you go back to your separate classrooms where you almost never mix.

The thing here that parents need to know is that it has nothing to do with how intelligent your kids are. The upper level classes are not necessarily harder than the lower ones. Basically the kids in the upper level classes had parents that would advocate for them, and the students in the lower level didn’t. I can’t tell you how many under-achieving students I saw in upper level classes whose parents were members of Farmington. To make it worse, they put all the kids with behavior problems (regardless of how intelligent they are) in the lower level classes. That means that kids that are having trouble catching up, then have to deal with screw ups, making it effectively impossible to learn.

The solution is far too complex to summarize here, but to start with the Feds need to get out of the education business, and give control back to localities and teachers. I’d also suggest that school funding be done state-wide, so that every school averages the same amount of money per student.

In any event, everyone has an opinion, but school quality is a very difficult thing to gauge. Test scores don’t send a good signal, b/c scores closely track socio-economic status, and the diversity of, say, C’ville’s elementary schools vs. those in Albemarle County make comparisons difficult and misleading. A school that manages to raise test scores of a cohort of students with a socio-economic status that would predict lower test scores is a good school. That is true even if the scores are lower than those in an elementary serving almost uniformly upper-middle-class whites. The question is what the school does with the hand it’s dealt.

The test score comparison is difficult, and of course focus on test score often becomes a proxy for people wanting their kids to attend school with the “right” kind of students. The subject is also difficult because the question facing a parent is, of course, “Where is my kid going to do well?” The answer to this question is different for different kids. But I will repeat — and the large number of high-achieving kids coming out of the C’ville public system will bear me witness — that if a kid is delivered to school healthy and ready to learn, the C’ville schools are a fine place and not much different, over the run of cases, than schools in Albemarle. Plus there is a value for kids in experiencing some racial and economic diversity, which is part of the experience in C’ville. AC

New York City Schools can probably credit a lot of their improvement to Mayor Bloomberg’s massive overhauls”.

W/r/t the topic – higher gas prices, I suppose it could work to prop up the inflated real estate prices in some areas, at least if everyone got it in their head to move “closer in” to cut that fuel bill.

W/r/t other cities, well, it’s a mixed bag. Urban public schools can be quite good — for example, in New York City, which has many fine urban public schools (the best of which — such as Bronx Science or Styveusant — outclass even the best suburban public schools). Or they can be very bad, as for example in Philly or Washington, DC. But the same can be said about suburban schools. The very affluent inner-ring suburbs tend to have excellent schools. My mother, for example, had a long career as a public school teacher in one of wealthy New York City suburbs in Nassau County, Long Island. The schools she taught in were first-rate. On the other hand, the schools in outer suburbs are sometimes awful. My father had a long career as a public school teacher in one of the outer suburbs of NYC, in a school with every imaginable dysfunction.

The upshot — public schools are a mixed bag. Quality tends to follow money, rather than the urban/suburban divide. As people with money are re-urbanizing — and I think this is a big trend that gas prices are only going to accelerate — the trend is toward improving urban public schools. AC

Thanks for the comment; I like the way you think – big, nearly impossible, and right all the way.

I think there is a threshold that may prevent people from buying more and more gas.

It seems that people’s behaviors may already be changing: –

Is oil-guzzling America changing its ways? Some think so, though it’s worth noting the U.S. still consumes one-third of the world’s annual gasoline output. “It appears we’ve finally hit the ceiling that’s causing the U.S. population to rethink how and where they use their vehicles,” says Paul Weissgarber, who heads the energy practice at consulting firm A.T. Kearney.

I’ve never heard anyone mention school choice (vouchers, etc) as a way to reduce sprawl, but it makes perfect sense.

I’m afraid the very outer ring suburbs where are never coming back. They worked well as small towns, but how do you go back to that? What if the hundreds or thousands of homes built for commuters simply can’t attract buyers?

Amen, but for those of us who live close – Crozet, Lake Monticello, Greene, etc – that’s just not an option as we don’t have reliable public transport, and not everyone has the chance to work from home.

Lonnie –

Agreed, and I think that if we can get the people to be less short-sighted, we’ll be able to come out of this better than before.

What most people don’t realize is that a huge chunk of our taxes were subsidizng artificially low fuel prices. It might not be popular politically, but the best thing we can do for the economy and the environment remove all oil subsidies so that people have to pay the real cost (Although we might want to wait until the price goes down again). We can never change our behaivor until we actually see what it is really costing us. In countries that do pay the real cost of energy, they make very different choices.