The Perfect and the Free

Immigration's $3.7 trillion windfall

You don't have to come here for coverage of the new report, issued jointly by the Partnership for a New American Economy and the Americas Socity/Council on Americas, documenting that immigration has boosted home values, particularly in some of the US's hardest-hit urban neighborhoods.  But if you haven't seen the report yet, I encourage you to check it out.

You may have heard arguments that immigrants take jobs away from Americans.  Here's the right way to think about it.  About 79% of jobs in the modern American economy are in the service sector, and the service sector -- from haircuts to auto repair to tax preparation -- depends on having people to serve.  When there are more people to serve, there is more work to be done.  Immigration has helped to stem the tide of manufacturing jobs flowing offshore: the study reports that for every 1,000 immigrants who arrive in that county, 46 manufacturing jobs are preserved rather than shipped overseas -- not bad when only about 80 out of every 1,000 workers are in manufacturing to start with.

More than 3 million immigrants have created their own job -- and potentially created jobs for others; the rate of entrepreneurship among immigrants is much higher than it is among natives.

All these factors add up to immigration creating, rather than destroying, opportunities for natives. When 1,000 immigrants move to a county, the native-born population increases by an average of 250 (subtracting out natives who are really just the US-born children of immigrants).  Growth, in turn, helps to keep property values from declining.  Immigrants' entry into tough neighborhoods like the Bronx have stabilized what had been downward spirals.  Immigrants have turned around declining rural areas in places like North Carolina as well.  To check out the impact of immigration in your local area, just feast your eyes on this map:

Learn About Tableau

Wading into the Humanities debate

In the public middle school I attended, precocious eighth graders were encouraged to enroll in a course called Critical Thinking and Problem Solving.  I opted out of this course, instead taking an elective course called Computer Enrichment.  In that course, I learned to type, and learned how to write programs in Logo.  I'll never know exactly what I gave up by foregoing the critical thinking class, but the typing and programming skills I learned instead yield tangible benefits on a daily basis.

The dichotomy between learning to "do" and learning to "think" -- a false one, as it turns out, but a commonly cited one -- comes up frequently in the higher education sector.  Recent reports have suggested a crisis in traditional liberal arts education.  Students at elite universities are shying away from fields in the humanities toward more pratically oriented subjects.

How can we tell there is a problem?

Is there a crisis in liberal arts education, and in the humanities more specifically?  A report released today suggests that is the case.  Anytime anybody asserts they've found a crisis situation, the first question to ask is "how do you know?"  Here's the evidence that the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences cites in its new report:

1. Parents don't read to their children as often as they used to.
2. K-12 humanities teachers are not well trained.
3. Federal funding for international training and education has been cut by 41% in four years.

Let's deconstruct these arguments just a bit.  The report links to evidence showing that reading to children essentially did not change between 1993 and 2005.  Then, all of a sudden, there's a big drop between 2005 and 2007, primarily among children whose parents posess no more than a high school education.  Among children with college-educated mothers, there was actually a slight uptick in the rate of being read to every day over the same time period.

If a graduate student came to me with this evidence, the first thing I'd tell them would be to check the data source: an oddball finding like that might be the result of some sort of change in the questionnaire from one survey to the next.  I've looked through the documentation for the underlying data and there are indeed some changes to the survey that might explain the sudden dramatic shift in reported behavior.  But let's take the finding at face value.  Parents who have never set foot in college stopped reading to their kids as frequently sometime within the past 8 years (noting that the most recent data are now 6 years old).  This is supposed to illustrate some sort of crisis in higher education?

On the subject of teacher training, this certainly isn't the first report this week to suggest that we have a problem there.  The question you have to ask yourself, though, is whether this means we need to reform liberal arts education or teacher education, which are quite different things in this country.

And last but not least, funding has been cut.  For lots of things.  Funding cuts in themselves are not a crisis, though.  If there is a crisis, one must make the argument on the basis of the consequneces of that funding cut.  If you cut funding for the police, they'll tell you that crime will go up as a result. What are the comparable consequences for defunding international training and education?

To be fair to the Humanities commission, there are a few other data tidbits provided in the main body of the report.  But they're flawed as well.  The commission presents some data on NAEP History test scores (page 26), which are up significantly for 4th and 8th graders, but not 12th graders.  As I've had to explain in courtrooms and various other places, the 12th grade stats can be misleading because we have a higher proportion of students making it all the way to 12th grade over time, skewing the results.

The commission reports that half of employers consider liberal education "very important" and three-quarters would recommend it to their own child.  We economists prefer to study employers not according to what they say, but what they actually do in terms of hiring.  More on that below.

The commission reports that the percent of adults visiting art galleries declined between 2002 and 2008.  Take that for what it's worth.

Finally, the commission notes a series of correlations between foreign language learning and various good educational outcomes.  Correlation does not establish causality, however.

Among its admonitions, the commission urges practitioners in the humanities to make a stronger case for the importance of funding support to the general public.  It appears they did not intend to lead by example.

Does the United States face a shortage of liberal arts graduates?

A couple of weeks ago a report out of Harvard noted the decline in the proportion of undergraduates majoring in the humanities.  Across the broader spectrum of four-year colleges, the story looks a bit different.  The pie charts below are based on an analysis of 87,248 college graduates born in one of four years: 1940, 1955, 1970, and 1985.  One slice of the pie is bigger than all the others for each birth cohort: what you might call "practical" majors, the type that aren't even an option at a place like Harvard.  The most popular majors among American undergraduates, for at least a half-century, have been things like agriculture, business, communications, and education.  The practical subjects have declined just a bit in popularity since their peak among those who attended college in the mid-1970s, but still account for more than three out of five college graduates.

Since the late 1950s, the humanities have never accounted for more than 6% of all bachelor's degrees.  The "market share" in the humanities hasn't changed all that much, fluctuating between 4.8% and 5.7% over time.  Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics accounts for a fairly steady one-fifth of all degrees over time.  The big winner in terms of enrollment shares has been the social sciences.  Much of the expansion can be attributed to psychology and political science, which account for 60% of social science degrees in the most recent cohort.  International relations, as a subject distinct from political science, has tripled its market share of social scientists over the past half-century.  It appears that international training is alive and well, funding cuts notwithstanding.

The notion that there is no shortage of liberal arts or humanities majors is bolstered by basic labor market data.  History and English majors have much higher unemployment rates, and much lower earnings, than those who focus on practical subjects like engineering or nursing.  If you're an employer lamenting the lack of a liberal arts perspective among your prospective employees, you just haven't been looking very hard.

The Mitt Romney hypothesis

It is perhaps ironic that the New York Times highlighted former English major Mitt Romney in its coverage of the Humanities Commission report.  For there's a story to be told about the real reason that the humanities are declining on elite campuses, though not necessarily in the population at large.

Once upon a time, elite universities weren't the bastion of striving young achievers with perfect SAT scores and a slew of volunteer activities on their resumes.  They were a bastion of privilege, for sons (primarily sons) of (almost exclusively white, protestant) wealthy families who weren't necessarily all that bright.  You might be able to identify some such students on today's elite college campuses, but they are less prevalent.

For the privileged, there was no need to focus on acquiring practical skills as a college student, for their future well-being was assured.  From college, they would always have the fallback option of taking advantage of Dad's connections.  A student like Mitt Romney had the freedom to major in English, never giving a second thought as to whether an English major would make him employable.

The rise of the merit-driven elite University has changed the nature of major choice for many students.  These students' prospects are by no means guaranteed, and practical skills are the key to economic self-sufficiency.  One might argue that a strong liberal arts grounding will benefit these students in the long run, for they will know how to think as well as do.  But one needn't sacrifice learning to think in order to learn to do.  One can hone one's logical thinking skills in a philosophy class, but these skills are also key to success in computer programming.  And guess which choice gives you better employment prospects.  In economics, we often speak of "learning by doing," and one can certainly learn to think through the applied art of doing.  

Moving the humanities debate forward

Much of the modern humanities debate begins with the premise that universities are giant vocational training institutes, tasked primarily with giving modern workers skills they will need in the workplace.  That premise belies the true mission of the University, which is to produce graduates who are on a path not only to employment, but to enlightenment.

The practical subjects taught in a University are the clearest route to getting a job and earning some income.  But how will you translate that income into happiness?  Of course you need to take care of the necessities of life first, but once those are accounted for, perhaps you might want to travel, or patronize the arts, read, or pursue spiritual fulfillment through service to others or to a deity of your choice.  The University's role is not only to prepare the student for labor, but to prepare them to envision a higher purpose for that labor, whether by enjoying the fruits of the income that labor provides or by using it for activities that bring direct fulfillment.

Arguing for the humanities on the basis of labor market outcomes is counterproductive.  If labor market outcomes are your measure of success, there will never be a substitute for practical skills (or well-connected parents).  Ultimately, the humanities matter because there is more to life than being a worker bee.  America should aspire to have a system of higher education that serves not only the needs of the labor market, but the human needs of those who pass through it.

MOOCophilia/MOOCophobia

Here in the ivory tower folks are all atwitter about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).  Some see them as a revolutionary tool to democratize access to collegiate education, enabling anybody with an internet connection to receive instruction in a wide variety of subjects from expert faculty.  Others see the other edge of the sword: MOOCs threaten to upend the way universities do business, cutting costs by substituting MOOCs for human beings, causing mass faculty layoffs in the process.  I'm inclined to see neither edge of the sword as particularly sharp.  A full deconstruction follows.

Asssessing MOOCophilia: Will MOOCs revolutionize education?

Suppose you want to learn about Beethoven's piano sonatas.  Not just listen to them, but understand the various musical influences that shaped them, what makes them special as compositions, and how they shaped music that followed.  There's a MOOC for that.  You can spend 1-2 hours per week for 5 weeks hearing about them, for free.

Of course, you could also pay a bit of actual money to download a set of 24 lectures on the same subject, which you can then listen to whenever you like, internet connection or not.  This option has been around since 1999, when the lectures were first recorded (although back in 1999 you probably needed to order some audio CDs in the mail).  This costs a bit more than $0, but if you wait for a nice sale you'll end up paying well under $100.  Having listened to a few of Robert Greenberg's course titles myself, I can attest that they are both informative and highly entertaining.  

You could also just order yourself a set of 101 mp3s, constituting virtually the entire set of 30-plus sonatas, for $1.99, then add a 288-page Yale University Press companion volume to read alongside them for $29.16 (with free shipping!).  The book was published in 2001, and recordings (albeit not MP3s) date long before that.  In fact, the pianist who recorded all those mp3s died over 60 years ago.

If you have access to a decent public library, you can probably go the recording-and-companion-book route for free.

Will the $0 MOOC revolutionize education in this case?  In the grand scheme of things, the $0 MOOC is not all that different from the recorded lectures, or the $31.15 do-it-yourself book and recording combo.  What difference could the MOOC possibly make in this instance?  I suppose you could argue that the capability to schmooze with other course-takers in internet chat rooms and discussion boards adds some value, but we don't really need MOOCs to establish that functionality.

You could also argue that these various materials have been around for a long time, but the MOOC makes things easy for the lazy person who does not want to conduct the 3 extra Google searches necessary to find the materials.  I'll concede that point.

The existence of close substitutes for MOOCs -- nearly free methods of learning new stuff without a whole lot of human interaction -- implies that there is a limit to their moneymaking potential.  There might be some potential there, if bricks-and-mortar universities start offering credit towards real degrees, but that's what leads us down the road to MOOCophobia.

Assessing MOOCophobia: will MOOCs kill bricks-and-mortar universities?

The promise, and threat, of MOOCs is to offer instruction to many students at very low costs per student ($1 per student is a number I've heard bandied about).  So what is to stop universities from substituting MOOCs for their much more expensive faculty?

The key limitation of MOOCs is the absence of opportunities for faculty-student interaction.  To be fair, there are certain university courses that offer few of these opportunities as well.  When you're sitting in a lecture hall with a few hundred other students, you have to understand that the professor can't hang out with each of you for 15 minutes per week.

Here's the thing, though.  Although large lecture courses are a significant fact of life for many college students, they actually represent a small share of the teaching effort expended by the faculty.  Most every college aims to combine these lecture experiences with small-group learning environments, which by their nature are much more labor-intensive and in which faculty-student interaction is essential.  

Large lectures and MOOCs are efficient vehicles for delivering cut-and-dried content.  There isn't much need for classroom debate about Newton's laws of motion; they are what they are, you either know them or you don't.  The characteristics of your classmates matter only to the extent that they influence the instructor's pacing; you aren't expected to learn directly from them.

But the value of education lies not only in mastering cut-and-dried facts and figures, but in learning how to think rigorously about complex, messy problems that occur in settings from laboratories to street corners in blighted neighborhoods.  These problems are rarely solved by one person in isolation; when interaction is necessary to solve a scientific or social problem, the world needs people who know how to interact.  In the interactive classroom, you learn from instructor and classmates alike, and there are clear advantages to attending classes with people who stand to teach you more.  The smaller the class, the greater the degree of distinction between more- and less-selective institutions.

Suppose a college serving 10,000 full-time students aims to evenly mix students' learning experiences between lectures and seminars.  Just to make things concrete let's suppose that the lectures are about 10 times the size of a seminar, say 200 versus 20 seats.  When students take 4 courses per semester, the college must offer 40,000 seats each term.  To achieve a 50/50 balance of seats in lectures and seminars, we'll need 100 large lecture courses and 1,000 seminars.  So in a scenario where students experiences seminars and lectures in a 1:1 ratio, the actual set of courses offered -- and taught -- reflects a 10:1 ratio.  Even if you wanted to offer students just one small course for every 3 large lectures, you'd need to teach them at the opposite ratio -- more than 3:1.

For at least some universities, this hypothetical exercise actually understates the tilt towards small classes.  In a recent fall semester at Duke (based on the Common Data Set report), the university offered just 31 undergraduate courses with enrollment above 100, compared to 1,067 courses with enrollment 19 or lower, a ratio of more than 30:1.  Replacing all courses with enrollment above 100 with MOOCs would leave 98% of all course offerings -- and thus about 98% of the faculty workload -- untouched.

As shown in the graph below, not every university is like Duke.  At two semi-randomly selected state flagship universities, the proportion of course offerings in the large lecture category is closer to 10%.  Universities with less selective admissions stand out not for their reliance on large lecture courses -- percentages rarely get out of the single digits -- but by their substitution of medium-size courses (enrollment 20-99) for small ones.  Think of it this way: the extra money you pay to attend a place like Duke and Stanford doesn't get you out of large lectures entirely, but it means you can anticipate spending a higher percentage of your time in small courses, to better capitalize on the instructional resources that your peers bring to the table.

In summary, the large lecture course format could die entirely, be replaced by MOOCs, or what have you, and the teaching workload at expensive, highly selective colleges -- that rely very little on large lectures -- would barely budge.  This also implies, of course, that costs and tuition levels at these colleges would barely budge as well.

There would be a more significant potential impact at colleges that rely more heavily on large courses.  Perhaps this explains why the backlash against MOOCs associates more clearly with them.

The big question for more selective universities is not whether MOOCs can replace big in-person lectures, but whether technology will introduce a means of delivering the small-class experience -- with discussions and chewing over messy problems -- without actually having to staff more than a thousand small classes each term.  It's interesting, in this context, to think of the opposition some of my Duke colleagues expressed to an administrative effort to join a cross-university consortium permitting virtual enrollment in smaller classes.

Technology is a potent disruptive force.  But sometimes the disruptions end up not panning out the way people predict.  When I was studying urban economics in grad school, there were prognostications that the internet was going to kill cities -- empowered to get their work done anywhere, people would opt for the lower costs of living in smaller places.  In fact, the internet may have had the opposite impact, by providing tools to manage urban lifestyles -- from avoiding traffic jams on the daily commute to avoiding the new restaurant that hasn't worked out the kinks yet, according to patrons.  MOOCs are going to help a lot of people learn a lot of things.  Kind of like what books have been doing for centuries.

More perspective on Wake County Schools

Some folks have expressed surprise that I've thrown so much cold water on Wake County's public school system.  And some have opined that I've been relatively opaque in doing so.  So let's shed more light on the subject.

First, look up the five North Carolina school districts with poverty rates closest to Wake County.  These would all be districts where the free or reduced price lunch participation rate falls within three percentage points of Wake's most recent number.  Among these five, two (Currituck and Union) are a bit better off than Wake and three a bit worse off.

Second, look up North Carolina Department of Public Instruction data on graduation rates.  This is all online, no sleight of hand here.

Here are the results:

Conclusion: districts with similar demographics beat Wake by 5-10 percentage points.

Observe how things stack up if we compare the same set of districts according to the graduation rates of economically disadvantaged students:

 

Wake does particularly poorly by its disadvantaged students, falling 20 points behind the leader in the category and at least 6 points behind every other district.

As a final point, consider the comparison between Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and Wake County.  CMS is about the same size as Wake but poorer, just below the state average in terms of affluence.  Overall, Wake's high school graduation rate beats the CMS rate, 80.6 to 76.4.  But consider the following:

Thus, even though Wake has a higher graduation rate overall, both disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged children are more likely to graduate in Charlotte-Mecklenburg.  Once again, the secret to Wake's apparent success lies in not having very many of the economically disadvantaged students to start with.

This may be a bit hard to swallow for those who associate Wake County with efforts to keep schools balanced by socioeconomic status -- efforts that Charlotte ceased about a decade ago.  But these are all public numbers, so please have a look yourself if you don't believe.

 

A serious proposal for tax reform in North Carolina

With state tax reform proposals in the air, I've written previously about the fact that North Carolina's state and local revenue collection system is out of whack compared to other states, and that current proposals to reform the system don't solve the problem.

The problem is that the state doesn't make enough use of the property tax.  The property tax has a couple of nice features as a revenue tool.  It's much more progressive than sales taxes.  And it isn't subject to the same kinds of efficiency concerns as income taxes: income can leave the state, but the property can't.  A proposal to move towards the property tax promises to improve both efficiency and fairness, without starving state and local government of revenue.  Who could argue with that?

So here's a concrete proposal, with three main planks:

• Eliminate the 2% sales tax on groceries.  Local governments levy this tax in North Carolina.  Let's forbid them from doing so, with a promise to replace the lost revenue in other ways.
• Cut personal income tax rates in half.  The top rate, currently 7.75%, would be reduced to 3.875%.
• Make up for lost revenue with a statewide property tax.  The two propsals above would cost state and local government somewhere around $5 billion in revenue.  That amount could be raised with an 0.59% (59 cents per $100) tax on assessed property in North Carolina, worth about $844 billion at last count.  Residential property accounts for about three-quarters of the total.  If you wanted to apply exemptions for the elderly or other favored groups, the rate would need to be a bit higher to compensate.

With about 10 million North Carolinians in residence, the property tax increase would raise about $500 per capita.  As it happens, recent statistics indicate that NC's current property tax levy is about $500 per capita below the national average.  With the increase, property taxes would be about the level that they are in Kansas, and about half what they are in New Jersey.

Like any tax reform, this one would create winners and losers.  But compared to proposals currently floating around the state legislature, this one would stand to benefit families across a broader range of the income distribution.  The really big losers would be owners of very expensive homes, particularly out-of-state owners of vacation homes at the beach and in the mountains.  But even those losses wouldn't be gargantuan.  If you bought a home with a 30-year mortgage, putting 20% down at a 4% interest rate, then the property tax hike would amount to 13% of your principal and interest payments.

Low-income households with large property holdings, including retirees, would also stand to lose unless covered by homestead exemptions or other circuit-breaker policies.  North Carolina already has such policies in place to cover local property taxes, and they could be easily exempted.

One might argue that higher property taxes would make homes less affordable in North Carolina. While that's true, given that housing prices in this state are below the national average and this proposal would only bring property tax revenue per capita up to the national average, housing would continue to look pretty cheap in perspective.

Grading Wake County's School System honestly

Today the Raleigh News and Observer featured a front-page story on the status of Wake County's public school system, one of the 20 or so largest in the nation by enrollment.  The goal of T. Keung Hui's extensive analysis was to benchmark Wake county against four other large districts.

The title of the article reads "Wake schools at risk of losing their edge."  The article thus begins with the somewhat conceited premise that Wake County has an "edge" to begin with; that the school system manages to do a better job of educating students than other systems in North Carolina, or the United States more generally.

To grade Wake County's schools more honestly, let's start with a different premise.  Specifically, Wake County serves a more affluent student body than most school districts in North Carolina, and certainly a more affluent student body than most other school districts in its size category.  About one Wake student in 3 qualifies for a Federal lunch subsidy, compared to just over half for the state of North Carolina as a whole.  (You can look up all the data for yourself here.)

Affluence matters.  There is very strong evidence that socioeconomic factors play a strong role in student achievement; even on the first day of kindergarten there is an achievement gap between students from rich and poor households.  Evidence indicates that the magnitude of this gap has grown over time.

Because affluence matters, and because Wake serves disproportionately affluent students, the school system is predisposed to look good even if the schools actually do a lousy job of educating.  Affluence is a touchy subject in Wake, of course, because of continuing squabbles regarding whether to continue the district's practice of spreading poor students evenly across campuses.  The subject would no doubt be much touchier if Wake County actually had a fair share of poor students to start with.

With that introduction in mind, let's review the evidence provided in the N&O article.

1. Wake's graduation rate is ahead of the state average by 0.2 percentage points, but lags Fairfax County VA and Montgomery County MD.  Fairfax and Montgomery are both large districts in suburban Washington that serve a population even more affluent than that in Wake (about one-quarter of the students in Fairfax receive lunch subsidies; three in ten Mongomery students receive them).  So I wouldn't wring my hands too much about failing to match their graduation rates.  Note, as well, that Virginia's legal dropout age is 18, compared to 16 in North Carolina.  The comparison to North Carolina as a whole is much less flattering.  As advantaged as the district is, they should be achieving much better results.  Grade: D.
2. Wake's students beat the NC average on the SAT, but again lag students in Montgomery and Fairfax.  Not every student takes the SAT; one reason that some districts might look bad by this measure is, paradoxically, that they do a good job of getting low-performing students to take it.  So it doesn't make sense to grade by this measure.  Grade: N/A.
3. Wake's students don't take AP exams very often, but are likely to pass them when they do.  This really exemplifies the previous point.  Consider Gwinnett County, GA, where just over half of students receive a lunch subsidy (making it comparable to NC as a whole).  This district has both a much higher AP participation rate and lower scores.  The really tough data point for Wake is Montgomery County -- as noted above, Montgomery is more affluent than Wake, but only slighly so -- which has nearly tripled Wake's participation rate while maintaining a similar pass rate conditional on participating.  Grade: C.
4. Wake's teachers are more likely to have advanced degrees than the typical NC teacher, but lag behind districts in other states.  Since research hasn't shown a very strong connection between advanced degrees and classroom effectiveness, there isn't much reason to care.  Grade: N/A.
5. Wake spends a lot per square foot to build facilities.  Depending on how you look at it, either they're pouring money down the drain or setting themselves up for lower maintenance costs in the future.  Hard to take a stand on this one without more data.  Grade: N/A.
6. Wake teachers earn salaries about equal to the state average, but well below levels seen in other states.  Research has shown that teachers will often take a pay cut to work in lower-poverty schools, so the average pay-affluent student body combo probably works well for Wake relative to its competitors in central North Carolina.  Hui's article rightly points out the cost-of-living differences that make the bigger salaries in places like Montgomery County not look so great.  The issue with grading teacher salaries is that they aren't really an outcome.  Grade: N/A. 
7. Wake's class sizes are comparable to competitor districts.  A bit smaller than Charlotte-Mecklenburg, a bit larger than the NC average.   Given the rapid population growth in Wake County, this track record doesn't look too bad.  But once again, class sizes aren't outcomes.  Grade: N/A.
8. Wake spends less per pupil than the NC average, and quite a bit less than Fairfax and Montgomery.  Spending is a tricky issue.  We don't want to give out high grades just for spending a lot.  Grading a district on spending is like grading a student on studying: it's not really the outcome you care most about, and there are certainly ways to spend/study more without really accomplishing anything.  Personally, I do think that the best evidence indicates that higher spending promotes better results, but that doesn't mean we should focus on spending and not results.  So we'll stick with Grade: N/A.
9. Wake has a "market share" (percent of kids enrolled in the district's schools) about the same as Montgomery, a bit less than the NC average.  Market share will be lower in more populous areas that can support more non-public school alternatives.  So it's hard to begrudge Wake for failing to keep up with the state average.  Grade: B. 
10. Wake has a heck of a lot of National Board Certified Teachers.  Research does indicate that certified teachers are better in the classroom, but certification is designed to recognize great teachers, not create them.  So other districts might not have them simply because they don't have the financial incentives built into their pay structure.  NBCT's get an automatic step-up in pay in NC.  Grade: N/A.

So if we tally up the report card, we get a B, a C, and a D, along with a bunch of information that doesn't really help us understand whether Wake County students do better than equivalent students elsewhere.  That's a 2.0 grade point average.

How do we square Wake's mediocre performance in the categories that matter with the district's self-image?  In the end, once again, it's all about affluence.  Wake County gets to work with a lot of children who tend to do well no matter where they go to school.  So when we see summary statistics that basically state "Wake County students do well" it's less a statement about what the schools have accomplished with their students than about what the students brought in the door with them when they first showed up for Kindergarten.