Chicago schoolteachers go on strike

[Jim in CT]

Originally Posted by sokinwet

Jimmy - I don't know how Texas schools are funded...local property tax? I'm sure as "leaders in a major financial institution" you and your wife did your homework and picked a nice area and good school system. Facts are facts however and it doesn't take much research to find that overall Texas is at the bottom of the barrel. Thankfully I don't have kids in school anymore...my son was a National Honor Society HS graduate and went on to graduate with honors at UNH at a time when public school teachers weren't demonized. I would have said "as the manager of multi-million dollar housing developments" but I would have felt like a pompous ass.

"Facts are facts however and it doesn't take much research to find that overall Texas is at the bottom of the barrel. "

You can't compare these statistics for TX to the same stats for other states. Texas has a huge number of Mexican immigrants, who will be disprortionately poor, and many who do not speak English. Of course TX will not stack up well to, say, Greenwich CT. If you are going to look at test scores or graduation rates, you need to adjust for the socioeconomic and demographic differences.

TX has very low taxes. Yet the TX debt-per-capita (1.2%) is lower than CT (7.9%), and people want to move to CT. CT has a shrinking population, TX does not.

You could argue that TX has an unfair advantage to other states because of the oil. But here in CT, even if they found a trillion barrels of oil underground, we wouldn't exploit it, no more than the liberals would embrace an economy based on clubbing baby seals.