Vouchers, Sprawl and Trade-Offs
29th March 2016
Currently, the American public school system is a sprawl-generating machine: urban public schools are less appealing to middle-class parents than suburban public schools, causing parents to move to suburbia.
This is the sort of democracy that ‘progressives’ would love to suppress.
This result arises from school assignment laws: because students must attend school in the municipality of their residence, residents of the most diverse municipalities (usually central cities) must attend diverse schools. By definition, diverse schools have lots of children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
I.e. Fashionable Minorities.
Because children from disadvantaged backgrounds often learn less rapidly than middle-class children, these schools quickly get a reputation as “bad” schools, causing middle-class parents to flee to suburban schools that are more socially homogenous.
They also tend to have high percentages of NAMs with behavioral problems that prevent any education from taking place. Cities run by Democrats are the poster children for this sort of thing — even in otherwise rational states like Texas. Nobody in his (or her) right mind will send kids to public schools in Houston, Dallas, Austin, or San Antonio.
The common progressive answer to this problem is to fund urban schools more generously: this strategy has not, when tried, succeeded in bringing middle-class parents back to urban schools.
Because it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem of Kids Behaving Badly. That can’t be fixed by throwing money at the problem; it can only be fixed by Good Culture on the part of the parents and neighborhoods from which the problem students come.