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.