I’m fascinated by these charts that Matt had on his blog. Matt writes that on first glance, urban schools appear to be much worse than schools nation-wide. However, when you control for school lunch eligibility, urban schools fare about the same as nation-wide schools. Except for schools in DC, which suck royally. 
Matt’s conclusion is that urban schools aren’t all that bad and the middle class is foolish to leave them.
As Matt’s commenters pointed out, nationwide schools are very different from suburban schools. The kids in the suburbs surrounding Manhattan are getting a much better education than their urban peers, despite all my griping. These charts really bring home for me how bad rural and small town education is in this country. Not enough has been written about those problems.
Apt. 11d 
That chart sort of points to teacher quality again, doesn’t it? Suburbs can attract the best teachers. Who wants to live in Downsville, NY when you can teach in New Hyde Park, NY and take the train into the city whenever you like?
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I’ve noted what you say about rural schools, too, partially because of the experience of Darcy Burner (who is running against Dave Reichert in the WA-08 congressional district. She grew up in Montana, and is one of those “extra-bright” people. If she’d grown up in urban New York city, she would have had a world at her fingertips, regardless of her school — the mass of extraordinary universities, scientists and labs, public libraries, museums. Instead, she talks about writing her research projects based on what books were available in the library.
I think there really is a lack of access in rural schools around the country, but think the only real solution is access to on-line resources (and that might be a mighty solution, for children like Darcy Burner was). I don’t know how well it helps everyone.
My major concern about urban schools, though, is the safety issues. I actually think many urban schools have decent teachers, and decent facilities. But, that doesn’t matter if kids and teachers are worried about being assaulted.
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While I grew up in a wealthy public school area, my mom now lives in a rural school district. The problem of lack of resources is clear -plus the fact that the school board, like many small-town political offices, is usually filled with people who like power more than they value good education. As a result, those with the means to either home school or send their kids elsewhere for high school do so and the only students left are the ones whose parents aren’t involved.
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Dividing my school lunch eligible vs. ineligible is a pretty rough approximation of poor and middle class, though.
As we learned in a post last week about NYC Gifted Programs, if you have a gifted kid (or, a 6 month old baby who looks like she’ll probably be gifted in five years when she starts kindergarten) you may not care about who does best among the “School Lunch Ineligible.” You may realize that the city has a much more limited Gifted program and head for the hills.
Also, as others have suggested, rural and small town may be significantly worse than even “Urban,” so that the “Non-Urban” group may just be an average of above-urban suburbs and below-urban rural schools.
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From my experience, a small school reveals how much the students make the school and just how variable things are when you are dealing with small numbers. I went to a Catholic school in a small town. We had classes of about 20 to 30 kids. Until the last two years of high school, your class was pretty much together for every subject. And, probably half of your class had been with you since first grade. It isn’t that the teachers had no impact. I had many good teachers that I’m still grateful for. I also had a few bad ones (Mrs. V, even in 8th grade, I knew that Mongol was not a synonym for Muslim). There were patterns established that were much stronger than anything else in the school. For any individual, the pattern wasn’t set in stone. I watched several people get more serious about their education at various points between 16 and 22. But, each class had its dynamic that didn’t really change much.
You had some classes where five or six of the kids were basically concerned with getting an education and you had some classes where it was only one or two. In the former type, you would see even kids with very marginal grades going to college and you wouldn’t see DUIs and pregnancies. In the later type of class, you would see more problems and fewer kids looking at college.
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