Now that Kim is leaving us, the rest of us will maybe pick up a little of the school blogging beat.

In that spirit, I give you Ezra Klein on the relative quality of big-city school systems*. He points out that if you control for income, many big cities’ school systems are equal to or better than the national average. And you’d never know it from the way schools are discussed:

The average K-12 private school cost $6,779 per year in 2000 (it’s certainly much higher today). Let’s say you send your kid to that school for eight consecutive years, and the price stays constant. That’s more than $54,000. $54,000 that could have been spent on a broad array of other projects and experiences for your child. You could give them Summers abroad, send them to space camp, or install two bionic knees. You could get a Congressman to come over each night, read them a bedtime story, and discuss the finer points of participatory democracy. You could pay for a lot of their college and let them graduate without debt. But lots of folks don’t know they have that choice because they’re sure — sure — that all urban schools are a cross between the Watts Riots and Srebrenica. It’s a misperception that does everyone a disservice. Except, of course, folks who have an ideological commitment to privatizing the public school system.
Now, Klein doesn’t address the need to improve the achievement of those who need extra help–the upshot of his post seems to boil down to “relatively well-off kids’ll do just fine, even in New York or Boston”–but the study does challenge the notions that by moving to San Mateo you’ll automatically be getting a better education for your kid.

I would love, though, to see a direct comparison between a city school district (like SF or Oakland) and a suburban one (like, say, Danville) to see if this kind of comparison holds true within a region.

*Unfortunately, the source study does not include San Francisco.