Matthew Yglesias complains that you need to pay more to live in a neighborhood with good schools:
Look at this chart showing the correlation between the price of a family-size house and the reading proficiency scores in the local school (the outlier, Garrison, where the reading scores are terrible and the houses are expensive anyway is my neighborhood public school):
It doesn’t take a socioeconomic genius to see the logical problem here, as many already have on Twitter:
The plot correlates a measure of a) how smart the students are vs. a result of b) how wealthy the parents are, binned by school. And lo and behold it reveals the (wholly unsurprising) fact that higher family wealth correlates with kids who do better on tests.
What’s that got to do with how ‘good’ the school actually is? (Unless of course by ‘good’ you mean something else entirely.)
The liberal conclusion would be to put academic underperforming children and their families in $1,000,000 homes. Problem solved.