City living means pretty much apartment living in the US. It's a problem, because neighbourhoods can be walkable and still feel spacious. There's some fantastic low rise downtowns in Savannah, Charleston, New Orleans,.... Problem is, there's so few of them that they've all become expensive and tourist destinations. If more cities were like this, I think people would like their city centers a lot better. Now, it's either the car wastelands of urban renewal in the middle of the country, or the insanity of massively crowded downtowns on the coasts. No wonder people prefer to move out.

>More often than not schools in suburbs and rural areas are head and shoulders above their urban counterparts.

a school in a rural area isn't automatically better than a school in an urban area because its rural.

There are plenty of shit rural schools. I'm saying if you take a random rural school and a random urban school the rural school often performs better in standardized testing. And the suburban school often outperforms both.

I'm not arguing rural/suburban schools aren't often better, I'm arguing that they're not often better just because they're rural/suburban.

You're arguing against a point I never made.

The GP is talking about the need for walkable cities, you said urban schools are bad as if they're bad just because they're urban.

If less people commuted into the city from the burbs urban schools would get better for the exact same reasons the schools are often better in the burbs now.

In terms of actual quality of education I'll agree with you on the last point. But in my experience -- having spent a lot of time in both urban and rural schools -- the quality of education in urban schools is typically better than or similar to that available in rural schools on average.

Most urban areas have a mix of terrible and excellent schools. The excellent ones rival or exceed the best of the surrounding suburban schools (except with more in-school variance in terms of quality of instruction and background of students), while the terrible ones are truly toxic. Conversely, rural schools are more uniformly "meh" -- generally not toxic, but also pretty underwhelming in terms of instructional quality and available learning opportunities/resources.

Also, IMO, test scores are not great indicators of school quality. Even if you could perfectly control for all confounding factors, test scores probably still wouldn't be great indicators. They're simply, de facto, measuring the wrong things.

What you are missing is that "good schools" doesn't actually mean good schools. It's a dog whistle.

When I say "good schools" I mean "good schools." If you want to call me a racist why not just come out and say it?

Or better yet, say something constructive.

"Good schools" mostly means "wealthy students".

If rich people move into the cities, and form little neighborhood clusters to exclude poor families, the schools will become more attractive by all standard measures.

Now, the trick is that it's much easier to build out segregated wealthy communities in the suburbs, than it is in cities, since tight geography works against the informal segregation of suburban development projects.

My sister just moved to Wyoming and has a daughter in school there. They live a few blocks from a school, but she's not able to attend that school because it's in high demand. Apparently parents are able to apply to go to any (public) school in the district, and are accepted based on a lottery with no preference given to proximity to the school. (I could be wrong about these details, this is just what she told me.)

I guess that system is designed in part to account for the effect you're describing - if one school starts to become known as a better school, the kids in the poor parts of town are just as likely to be able to get in as anyone else. I have no idea if it actually works that way, but I do know it's a pain for my sister who now has to drive her kids to school several miles away when they could easily walk to the closer one. Can't please everyone, I guess.

This is how Boston works. Implementing it accelerated white flight in the 60s and 70s.

> "Good schools" mostly means "wealthy students".

Be careful there at teasing out the real motivation. If you want "wealthy students" because poor people are icky, then you're a jerk. If you want "wealthy students" because you want schools to be well-funded, that means you do in fact want good schools.

How to tell the difference? Maybe by putting the person somewhere where all schools in a very large area are funded at the exact same level. I don't know. But assuming it's a dog whistle isn't a good idea.

Yes, we do have a measurement problem. I was going to propose a solution, but it's a hard problem and any solution will necessarily have side effects on the surrounding communities as well.

Okay. One constructive remark coming up...

What's your definition of "good schools"?

Actually teaching the kids some things. What other definition is there?

The suburban/urban school divide is less potent than it was 10 or 20 years ago. For example, this program on a school district that's 99% african american and has huge rates of poverty with terrible failing schools is about a decidedly suburban school: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/t...

In many cities, poverty is highly concentrated not only in urban areas but also in some of the surrounding suburbs. So the suburban schools -- or at least some of them -- end up as bad or worse than the worst of the urban schools.

So the old surburb/urban school quality divide is slowly breaking down. As a result, affluent urban areas often have high quality schools while impoverished suburbs often have terrible schools.

That said, it's generally true that living in the "good" suburbs is cheaper than living in the "good" parts of urban areas.