In response to last week’s argument that bad people send their kids to private school, Megan McArdle suggests urban private schools have kept wealthy families in big cities.

However, I think that Benedikt isn’t thinking through what would actually happen if everyone felt a moral obligation to send their kids to public schools. What would actually happen is that Allison Benedikt wouldn’t live in Brooklyn, because New York, like most of the rest of the U.S.’s cities, would have lost all of its affluent families in the 1970s — the ones who stayed largely because private school, and a handful of magnet schools financed by the taxes of people who sent their kids to private school, allowed them to maintain residence without sending their kids into middle- and high-schools that had often become war zones. Anyone with any choices left that system, one way or another. But because New York had a robust system of private and parochial schools, they didn’t necessarily need to leave the city to leave the violence behind…

Now, Benedikt could lecture you until the cows came home about your moral obligation to public schooling, but you still wouldn’t leave your kids in a school where the teachers were being set on fire (and neither, I imagine, would Benedikt). If you couldn’t send your kids to private school, you’d just move. That, in fact, is what happened to most urban school systems; any resident who had any means at all picked up and moved outside the city’s borders, beyond the legal limits of busing so that there could be no question of bused students importing these problems to their kids’ schools…

Benedikt’s dictum makes sense only if parents can’t move. If they can — and bid up the value of real estate in good school districts — then making parents send their kids to the local schools probably doesn’t mean that all the parents in mixed-income neighborhoods will put their children, and their effort, into the local school. It probably means that they’ll leave the mixed-income neighborhood, taking their tax dollars with them.

This is nominally public schooling, but in fact, as I once remarked, parents who think that they are supporting public schooling by moving to a pricey district with good schools are actually supporting private schooling. They’re just confused because the tuition payment comes bundled with hardwood floors and granite countertops.

Cities need and/or desire to have wealthy residents because they provide tax dollars. Perhaps this is the deal cities make with such residents: we need you so we will provide you with the opportunity to spend your money how you wish regarding the education of your kids. So, cities and politicians try to support public schools but also allow space for private schools, setting up a two-tier system where wealthier families can buy into the second track.

Another thought: McArdle’s argument makes the assumption that schooling is the primary factor that pushes families out of the city into the suburbs. Schools are a huge factor but not necessarily the only one. Her argument also highlights an interesting feature of middle/upper-class American society: do all you can for the children.

It would be interesting to look for data to test McArdle’s argument but it seems like you would need a city or a few cities where private schools weren’t available in order to make a comparison.

h/t Instapundit