posted by Heretic
That is a good point. There are some on this site who constantly harp on the conditions of large cities run by Ds...while completely ignoring the large percentage of the lowest-education and/or poorest states that are known to be Red States.
I'm not sure the answer is that simple. Education is related to wealth, which is related to jobs/companies and tends to be somewhat "sticky". Very difficult to lure jobs away from another state in any meaningful way.
It's a popular liberal talking point, but the reality is there are red and blue states that do well on economics and education, and also poorly. Most gaps would probably disappear if you could control for all factors. I just looked at several studies and a common factor is "quality of universities", which aside from being pretty subjective is mostly meaningless is evaluating a state's educational system (unless you want to inject some good bias into your study).
My very crude analysis looked at SAT scores. Among states with nearly 100% participation, WV was lowest at 943. 50-100 points lower than other states with near 100% participation. Probably not a huge gap, and probably driven by income and education of the parents (and not Republican educational policy). Doesn't appear to be much correlation between blue and red states.
Not something I've done much research on, but it seems pretty obvious that attempting to compare Alabama and Illinois is apples-to-oranges. Probably also funny given how much we hear about "bias" in testing, that it's never occurred to ivory tower liberals that their testing might be biased against rural people. You're not smart because you can't read a bus schedule - why would I need a bus schedule when I can navigate the woods on my own without getting lost?
I keep going back to that Freakanomics study that found, after controlling for other factors, schools and teachers really don't make a difference. I think on a national scale we'd see pretty much the same thing. That, for instance, children of wealthy educated parents in rural AL do just as well as children of wealthy educated parents in NY. How do kids growing up in poverty in Chicago do vs. kids growing up in poverty in little town Arkansas? My guess is not that differently.
