Will Wilkinson - Latest Comments in Robert Frank Missing the Story on Schools and Positional Competition Again

Re: Robert Frank Missing the Story on Schools and Positional Competition Again

Slocum — Thu, 01 May 2008 22:15:59 -0000

Eric Barnhill: Slocum and suburban districts, your observation certainly doesn’t hold up in Westchester. Scarsdale, Kisco, Katonah, Tarrytown, Rye — great schools.

Right -- and if Kisco schools are slightly higher status than Katonah, do all parents who can afford to choose Kisco over Katonah? Or do they figure the schools are good enough in any of these towns and make their choice based on other criteria?

Personally, I find the suburban schools with their high test scores and absolute whiteness as much less attractive than the schools in Minneapolis and St. Paul which both have district wide school choice and many different magnet and charter schools to go along with a very diverse student body. But I think I’m a minority thinker on this part.

Which is another chink in Frank's great chain of school status -- different parents have different conceptions of what constitutes 'the best'.

The situation is similar here. The Ann Arbor district has the most funding in the area, and the highest scoring students, but it is also ethnically diverse with some fraction of underperforming minority students. Some of the surrounding districts (Saline, Dexter) have scores that are now quite close to Ann Arbor's, but they are very white and suburban with lots of sprawl developments. My wife and I had no interest at all in those districts and spent a lot of money to live in the middle of the city. But other families have no interest in living here and spent equally large amounts of money for McMansions out in the townships.

But we didn't choose our house only for the school situation. That it's in a quiet, green neighborhood near a park and within walking and biking distance of downtown, is close to work, and has bus service -- these were all factors in addition to the schools.

Re: Robert Frank Missing the Story on Schools and Positional Competition Again

Eric Barnhill — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:20:07 -0000

A bus station ad in Harlem reads, "Don't settle. You can choose your child's school." Which is basically true at this point in NYC, in a soft way, something I don't thing has been well brought to light in the press.

Re: Slocum and suburban districts, your observation certainly doesn't hold up in Westchester. Scarsdale, Kisco, Katonah, Tarrytown, Rye -- great schools. Right smack in the middle, Greenburgh -- awful schools. No one has ever figured out why but Greenburgh keeps the Catholic schools (shudder) in business.

Re: Robert Frank Missing the Story on Schools and Positional Competition Again

alex — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 07:27:54 -0000

re: RSS stuff. You're possibly running into an older known bug which can be fixed if you toggle the RSS to show summaries, and then back to full text. If this works you should upgrade your wordpress installation though, your version has unpatched vulnerabilities :)

Re: Robert Frank Missing the Story on Schools and Positional Competition Again

KJ — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:59:39 -0000

Perhaps you have a point when looking at most metro areas but my experience was more aligned with Frank's vision. We lived in the Bay Area and worked in Berkeley. In terms of schooling many parents felt that Oakland, Richmond, and Berkeley, the 3 largest cities were inadequate driving many parents to either Albany, a very small city (15,000) connected to Berkeley or over the hills to Walnut Creek and smaller surrounding communities. There was quite a premium in terms of both rentals and home ownership for these particular cities and conventional wisdom was that it was the schools. Perhaps this was an overstated benefit but everyone believed it thus driving up prices. I even remember reading an op-ed where a parent connected how well his kid scored on state exams and the property value of his house in Albany. He was considering financial awards for his kids for helping move the scores up. He was kidding but less than one would think.

But then we moved our 3 kids to the Twin Cities where perhaps I can better see your point but not entirely . Personally, I find the suburban schools with their high test scores and absolute whiteness as much less attractive than the schools in Minneapolis and St. Paul which both have district wide school choice and many different magnet and charter schools to go along with a very diverse student body. But I think I'm a minority thinker on this part as people seem to rave about the suburban schools. But again, inner ring suburb towns like Edina and others have the highest property values and supposedly the best schools. They also seem to have the best amenities producing the highest local tax revenue giving them extra cash to spend on schools. So I guess I would say that the amenities you discuss such as close commute, good shopping, etc often help increase the quality of the schools attracting the wealthy who demand good schools, have capable kids, pay high property taxes, and, well, it's all inter-related.

Re: Robert Frank Missing the Story on Schools and Positional Competition Again

Slocum — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:20:40 -0000

A valid point. But people may not choose only on schools in the district but they certainly will avoid a district based on a bad school no matter how good the other amenities are. So the effect may not be as large as Frank suggests but it is there nonetheless.

But it's not just a question of a strong or weak effect. Avoiding a few bad districts and then choosing among the many remaining housing options based on other factors is absolutely not the zero-sum status competition that Frank envisions.

If that view is correct (as I think it is), then people are choosing districts for utilitarian reasons rather than for status, and they routinely pass up available opportunities to maximize their 'status scores' once they've avoided schools & districts that would actually be educationally harmful for their children.

Re: Robert Frank Missing the Story on Schools and Positional Competition Again

KJ — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:32:54 -0000

Slocum,

A valid point. But people may not choose only on schools in the district but they certainly will avoid a district based on a bad school no matter how good the other amenities are. So the effect may not be as large as Frank suggests but it is there nonetheless.

Re: Robert Frank Missing the Story on Schools and Positional Competition Again

Slocum — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:50:47 -0000

Except that this notion that 'good' public schools are in terribly short supply is just reality. The differences in test scores among the many suburban districts in a metropolitan area are not that great and the differences that do exist are better explained by the characteristics of the students than the schools (e.g. the wealthiest districts do better mostly because their students come from wealthier, more educated families).

This being the case, most people don't actually spend every last cent trying to get into the best possible district, but take into account a whole host of factors (amenities, house size, lot size, commuting distance, neighborhood, traffic, freeway access, shopping, etc, etc).

I know it seems tempting to turn Frank's argument into an argument for school choice, but we don't want to tacitly accept the pernicious idea that house-shoppers are all engaged in a knock-down, zero-sum status competition for slots in the 'best' districts they can possibly afford. That's just not the case.

Because we know what Frank's proposed solution to this zero-sum status competition 'problem' is -- confiscating a much larger fraction of incomes with the idea that we'll all be just as well off if we engage in the status competition arms race with fewer arms. Since the cash is confiscated from everybody equally, everybody will presumably end up at the same point in the hierarchy and, since (according to Frank) status is all anyone cares about, everybody will be just as happy or miserable as before.

Nonsense (but potentially dangerous nonsense).

Re: Robert Frank Missing the Story on Schools and Positional Competition Again

KJ — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 10:24:42 -0000

I don't see the sense like Will or Tim Lee. Funneling money away from a strapped Public School system seems like folly as it seems obvious that you'd hurt the kids who need it most. Instead, the solution seems quite simple without the bureaucratic mess that would be vouchers (Talk about potential for abuse when the government starts handing out vouchers). Allow unfettered school choice of all public schools and change the funding model so the money doesn't come from local government just like pretty much every other 1st world nation does it.