It's not racial mix. It's the competitions. More trained and competent graduates compete for elitist jobs. In the old days, blue collar kids got blue collar jobs, white collar kids white collar jobs, rich kids management jobs. Now blue collar jobs are all but gone, blue collar kids go to college...

Hill and Bill are rich. They sent their precious kid to the best school in their neighborhood. The rich bright kid got into a top college, and a graduate degree from the oldest college in the mother country. The rich kid got a 6 figure job right out of college. That 6 figure is about what a low to mid level manager gets when he is close to retirement. The rich kid's parents are against vouchers on the ground that vouchers would take all bright kids from the public school system, and destroy the system. The rich kid's parents pulled their bright kid from the system depriving the system one of its brightest star and financial contributions from one of the richest parents. The poor's bright kids stay with the system to save the system. The poor bright kids' parents support the rich kid's parents as their saviors. Go figure.

Vouchers arn't about shifting poor inner city kids to rich white public schools as Oj suggests but rather to newly funded private schools as an alternative to public schools.

As even Oj points out, rich whites have been taking their kids out of public education in favor of private education for a long time now so it is only natural that the poor will want the same advantage.

Big Ed is the loser and the main opponent to the progress.

ic:

Something else that's interesting to me is that we are now so unbelievably rich that most of the smart and hard-working folks are guaranteed good jobs. There's just not a lot of slipping through the cracks if you meet those two criteria -- heck, you can make good money with only one of them.

I wrote a college report once on Thomas Bonner, who was a professor at the University of Nebraska-Omaha who ran for Congress in 1962. He lost and wound up being a college president at a number of institutions, making himself a favorite whipping boy for the conservative Manchester Union-Leader when he ran the University of New Hampshire at Durham.

Anyway, the only reason he wound up in academia was because one of his high school teachers drove to his house after he graduated and encouraged him to apply for a scholarship to a particular university. He most likely would've spent the rest of his life doing manual labor if not for that teacher. Things like that don't seem to happen much anymore: If you're gifted and motivated, then there's probably a job somewhere with your name on it.

The idea that Science and Tech results than perceived is not outside the realm of possibility, but OJ's continuous beating of the Government Education Drum is off base.

First, Business Weak citing Urban Institute Studies is hardly persuasive. Both are shills for the Government Ed. bureaucracy.

Second, with "remedial education" making up 20-30% of freshman classes in 4 year colleges, the idea that Suburan Skools are doing their job is risable (love that word, OJ)

Third, Read This. Where they educate, suburban skools do so at an obscene price, and they educate far less well than the ding-bat soccermom and her emasculated husband believe.

Bruno gives the sense of someone who thinks he gets every Jeopardy question right, it's just sometimes they have the cards wrong....

To be impervious to facts is to be an ideologue.

NPR had a short bit on the 8:00 AM headliner today.

Some outfit in Atlanta announced that almost 50% of the overall population of children in poverty in the South is in the public schools. In LA, it is almost 80%; in MS, it is 75%; in FL, it is over 60%; in TX, it is about 55%. Just 20 years ago (according to this group), the overall rate was about 37%. In 20 years, it will be over 60% for the entire region. I have no idea if this is accurate, but it seems so.

There are many reasons and many inferences to be drawn, (including NPR's obvious political slant) but for this post, there is just one.

The middle class in the South doesn't give a tinker's damn about public education. In many areas, it is dead to them. Perhaps it is different in Hanover, but in Charlotte, it is a fact of life. And the same is true in many middle- and upper-middle class suburbs in various Northern cities as well (Pittsburgh, Philly, Cleveland, Boston, certainly D.C., etc.).

If your child is in private school, of course you are happy with the education hive. You don't have to deal with it. Just pay the bill.....

jim,

I've often wondered why, whenever "failing schools" are discussed, we never hear of such schools in places like Dallas, Phoenix, or Las Vegas. You would think that high-growth areas like these (and in my state of Colorado) would have considerable difficulty in providing an education system to such a high-growth population. Yet Arizona and Colorado are among the states with the lowest per-pupil costs.

Sadly we aren't importing Latinos at the same pace yet and never had many blacks. But we'll catch up and our schools will be mostly "poor" kids too.