Charts: A Middle Class Measure For School Reform

Chicago Magazine's Whet Moser dug up this chart, variations of which you may have seen before, noting that not only do big metro areas vary widely in terms of what percentages of their residents live in the central city -- 30 percent in LA and 43 percent in New York -- but also what percentages of their core residents have college educations and stay (or arrive) with school age kids.  

His prime example of course is Chicago, which has 30 percent of metro residents, a reasonably high rate of college educated adults (also 30 percent) but just 16 percent of college educated parents with school age kids.  The parent flight problem is just as bad or worse in other places, however, including Washington DC.  New York City and -- yes -- Charlotte do really well by comparison. (Denver's not listed here, I wonder what it's numbers would look like.)  

Comments

[Sarah]

I find it very interesting that the two cities most statistically similar are Chicago and LA, given that, in reality, they’ve faced very similar education crises.

[James]

I wonder if there are numbers out there that break this down even further to look not just at the percentage of college-educated parents who have school-age children, but the percentage of college-educated parents with school-age children who attend neighborhood public schools... as opposed to those with school-age kids who engage in a sort of "flight without fleeing" by arranging for their kids to get into charters or test-in schools, or paying for private schools instead.

I'd wager the percentage would be even lower—thus creating a self-reinforcing loop where kids whose parents are less likely to be able to help and motivate them to succeed, are put in schools that continually get fewer and fewer resources, and are thus declared "failing," which only chases more college-educated parents and their children (who are more likely to have the resources to get out) out of the system.