Public schools

[centralaustinite]

Originally Posted by gpurcell

Texas schools are way, way better than California. Go poke around the NAEP statistics to see.

Yes, this was in the New York Times today!

When a 2009 McKinsey study contrasted Perry’s home state to the similarly sized and situated California, it found that Texas students were “one to two years of learning ahead of California students of the same age, even though Texas has less income per capita and spends less per pupil than California.”
When it comes to minority achievement, Texas looks even better: On the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress math exam, black eighth graders in Texas outscored black eighth graders in every other state.

see the whole op-ed here, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/22/op...ith-texas.html

[jifie]

While I am mainly interested in the status of Austin schools compared to the rest of Texas or Texas compared to the rest of the country, I wouldn't be too terribly upset if anyone wanted to compare Austin schools to Denver or Raleigh schools since those are the other cities my family is looking at.

[capcat]

Originally Posted by gpurcell

Texas schools are way, way better than California. Go poke around the NAEP statistics to see.

I did look at the nation's report card. It looked like California was somewhat higher in reading and math in the elementary school years and didn't have scores available for 8th grade. Just a glance, followed by an immediate distraction with the performance of a few states I'm interested in.

California's beautiful...I love it there, but the last time I was genuinely interested in CA wrt education was in a very specific area, in a different era, concerning their struggle with reading achievement and the Whole Language debate.

[N. Olikee]

We looked at moving to Raleigh / Cary a few years ago. At that time they had done away with bussing, but were overwhelmed with the amount of new students moving into the area. As a result, they had to get "creative" with solutions such as sending children to schools outside of their neighborhoods, and having schools go year round with a certain percentage of the students in a school at a given time.

Too much of a headache for us, and too similar to what we were trying to get away from. At that point, I couldn't have cared less about the academics. I do know that certain areas of Chapel Hill have a decent school district.

Regarding CA......most people I've known who lived there sent their children to private schools because the public schools were so bad.....of course, that's just hearsay.