It’s Not All About Poor Kids
Education reform has really focused on improving the quality of education for our most disadvantaged students. This focus is not entirely without reason, since large, urban school districts serving low-income students are clearly dysfunctional.
But this nearly exclusive focus on improving the education of the poor has concealed the sub-par education being provided in many of our most affluent school districts. As the new article Josh McGee and I wrote for Education Next shows, suburban public school districts may look good when compared against their urban neighbors, but when compared with students in 25 other developed countries many affluent suburbs barely keep pace. That is, our best is often mediocre.
If the children of affluent suburbanites want to maintain their parents’
