The Class is Always Keener on Our Own Side of the Street

I've got an op/ed in the Orange County Register today, explaining how it is that Americans can give poor ratings to their nation's and states' schools while simultaneously thinking the schools in their own neighborhoods are peachy. You can find the full text on the OC Register's website (to bypass the free registration barrier, copy the link into the URL window of your browser using right-click). Here's an excerpt:

The NIMBY view on bad schools

By Andrew J. Coulson
Senior fellow in education policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy

When we're asked about the overall quality of our nation's or state's public schools, Americans are fairly pessimistic. But when it comes to the schools in our own neighborhoods, we generally offer a much more upbeat appraisal.

This pattern was repeated yet again in a poll released last week. Four out of five Californians say there's a quality problem with the state's schools - most think it's a "big" problem. But when respondents were asked about their neighborhood schools, just over half rated them an A or a B, and only 13 percent gave them a D or an F.

What gives?

One popular explanation is that most Americans are misinformed about our nation's and our states' public school performance, but we do know about the performance of our own kids and our own schools. The more we know, so this theory goes, the more satisfied we are. Sounds plausible enough - until you look at the facts.

A few years ago, I proposed an alternative explanation for the "class is keener" phenomenon: that Americans know more about the nation's overall performance than about the performance of our own children or neighborhood schools. We read the papers, we see the international rankings, and eventually deduce that U.S. public education is in trouble. Since we have no idea how our own kids rank internationally, we tend to believe - we want to believe - the inflated grades they bring home from school. All the bad public schools must be in other people's neighborhoods. [...]

An edited version with hotlinks to the cited surveys was published on the Mackinac.org website on Monday.