Any organism is driven to reproduce itself. It doesn't want an equal chance for its offspring; it wants the best possible chance.

For the credentialled upper middle class (what I call the mandarins or the meritocracy), reproduction means getting their children the education that will ultimately get them the same or better college and graduate degrees as their parents, so that they will be able to maintain or surpass their parents position in society. Such people work hard to be able afford to give their kids a better education than what everyone else is getting. If they live in the cities, they put their children in private school and pay tuition, on top of the local taxes. In suburban towns like New Trier, or their New Jersey equivalents I'm familiar with, they pay tuition through the level of their property taxes and through the price of their houses.

Every 2 years, New Jersey Monthly magazine ranks the top 75 public high schools in the state, essentially by SAT scores, proportion of kids taking and passing AP courses, and proportion getting into 4 year colleges. The same suburban towns are always in the top 25, and the reputation of their schools puts a premium on house prices. The executives, doctors, lawyers &c. who can pay are willing to pay to give their children a better than equal start in life. That's natural -- literally.

Whether or not it's fair is another question. But every effort to truly equalize educational opportunity in this country runs up against the love of the haves for their own children.

Yes. But New Jersey, unlike Illinois, is at least trying to narrow the funding gap between schools in rich suburban districts and poor urban districts thanks to the state Supreme Court's generation old Robinson v Cahill and Abbot v Burke cases. Money along won't close the achievement gap between Summit and Newark, but at least it provides an equitable foundation by recognizing that public education is a responsibility of the state, and that all New Jersey children are children of the state.

"recognizing that public education is a responsibility of the state"

No. Education is the responsibility of the parent. If you don't love your child enough to properly educate it, don't try to pawn it off on me.

As a NJ resident, my understanding of the Abott decision is that it more than tries to narrow the funding gap, it eliminates it entirely by requiring per pupil expenditures in the poorest districts that are equal to those of the wealthiest districts in NJ. I agree that the poorest districts should not be left entirely to their own resources, but their isn't much evidence yet to show that the increased expenditures in the Abott districts has had a substantial impact in improving education.

of course it won't really change anything. If you transplanted the parents and kids from a wealthy district to the poorer and vise versa, you wouldn't see a sudden switch in outcomes.

In my west side of chicago school, we had to lock the bathrooms except at certain times to keep students from urinating all over the walls. That doesn't happen so frequently at schools like New Trier.

There are many schools in illinois that have a far lower per pupil funding level than chicago. And guess what? Their scores are also higher.

Ignoring the obvious behavioral and familial problems will not lead to a solution. There is a huge white elephant in the room, and everyone is afaid to address it.

The flaw of the Abbott line of cases is that they have focused on equality of funding, rather than on what product a "thorough and efficient" system of public schools is supposed to produce.

Jefferson, who tried unsuccessfully to establish a system of free public schools in Virginia, wrote that the purpose of such a system was to identify and cultivate members of what he called "the natural aristocracy of talent and virtue," so that they would be able to compete successfuly with the "artificial aristocracy of wealth and birth" for the prizes society offered.

That's certainly one purpose -- to identify the brightest children at all levels of society and give the poorer ones what they need to realize their talents and move up in class. For an example, see Jersey City's McNair Academic High School, a selective school in one of the poorest urban school districts that is ranked #1 or #2 in the state by New Jersey Monthly, year in and year out.

But the other purpose is to turn the less exceptional children of the poor into useful and productive citizens, literate and numerate, to be sure, but also orderly, self controlled and reliable, who will show up on time, clean and sober and able to do the work available. That will often mean providing through the schools a substitute for the cultural and, to put it bluntly, moral instruction that the children of the better off receive osmotically through their families.

To those who say that the burden should be on the family rather than the state, I reply that it is cheaper and more productive in the long run to educate the children of the feckless or pathological than it is to jail them. But if the public schools are going to do that, they have to regain the cultural self confidence lost 40 years ago, that the middle class way of life is superior and that the children of the poor should be indoctrinated in the qualities required to live it.

dantespal wrote: "Ignoring the obvious behavioral and familial problems will not lead to a solution. There is a huge white elephant in the room, and everyone is afraid to address it."

Yes, and to be more specific the white elephant in the room is the fact that blacks and Hispanic students tend to have far lower IQs than white and Asian students.

If the black children from the Chicago slums were placed in New Trier schools before very long the New Trier schools would have abysmally low test scores, violence and disruptive behavior and the schools would rapidly gain a reputation of being "Bad Schools". Remember, as the famous Johns Hopkins sociologist James Coleman proved more than 40 years ago, it is the quality of the students (i.e. their IQ level) that matters most. High quality teachers and fancy buildings won't do squat if the student body has an average IQ of 85 (the average IQ level of blacks).

I'm getting pretty tired of the trolling about the IQ scores, so lets put it this way.

What you are basically saying is that studies show the best indicator on how students do on a standardized test (state assessments) is their performance on another standardized test (IQ test). That's Brilliant! I assume these studies come from The Center for Pointing out Really Obvious Things.

You can trot out stats all day long about black kids and Hispanic kids. All I have is my own experience, which is this: some of my very best and brightest students have been black and Hispanic.

My high school is about 85% Hispanic. We are the only high school feeder pattern (including elementary and middle schools within our zone) that has met or exceeded testing goals for the past three years. We are outperforming many of the predominantly white schools in the district. We're also destroying these stereotypes.

"of course it won't really change anything. If you transplanted the parents and kids from a wealthy district to the poorer and vise versa, you wouldn't see a sudden switch in outcomes."

I've often wondered that, if we could switch students/ parents with a nearby suburban school, what would the results be? It is really too bad that such an experiment couldn't be done practically, because it would offer some good insights into how where/ whether we should be spending out money.

Anse wrote: "My high school is about 85% Hispanic. We are the only high school feeder pattern (including elementary and middle schools within our zone) that has met or exceeded testing goals for the past three years. We are outperforming many of the predominantly white schools in the district."

Hey Mr. Anse, I really think you are lying. Prove me wrong by naming the school where you are claiming that the Hispanics are posting higher scores than white students from certain other schools in your district. Please name the schools and the district so that I can check the stats on the web.

You probably won't specify which schools you are refering to because you are just making it all up.