The CATO Institute, October 24, 2007

Expensive homes mean an expensive, but not necessarily a good education.

The Wall Street Journal reports on a great new book from the Pacific Research Institute, Not as Good as You Think: Why the Middle-Class Needs School Choice. It’s packed with great statistics on under-performing, over-priced schools in some of the wealthiest California districts and case studies on fiscal mismanagement normally associated with big city schools. The findings are eye-opening, as the WSJ reports:

At Dos Pueblos High School in ritzy Santa Barbara, only 28% of high school juniors tested college-ready for English in 2006, slightly better than the 23% of students who did so at San Marin High School in Marin County, where the median home price recently hit $1 million.

That’s just a taste of the dirt they dug up with widely available information. And other state think-tanks can get a lot of mileage with the same model.

Kudos to PRI for advancing the argument for school choice with the middle class and up . . . that’s where the battle for educational freedom will be won or lost, and the school choice movement has largely failed to speak to middle-class concerns like the rising tide of mediocrity and skyrocketing property taxes that support over-funded and horribly inefficient and under-performing suburban school districts.

PRI’s not-much-bang-per-buck argument is particularly likely to resonate with the crucial two-thirds of the electorate that doesn’t have school-aged children but gets slammed in taxes for the schools. This constituency is typically left out of parent-centric arguments for school choice, but non-parents are the key to expanding school choice.