The Brunch Table

This database lets you pick as many states as you like, and measure their public-school educational stats side-by-side. I decided to work from my own personal experience, and use West Virginia as my baseline…and I was really surprised. New York and California aren’t a hell of a lot better off, by these numbers.

What’s especially interesting is that you can check up on standardized test scores, by grade, for the categories “white,” “black,” and “hispanic.” Reliably, “white” scores hover at 30-40% passing grades, “black” scores at 10-15%, and “hispanic” scores at 15-20%.

So I started thinking, this doesn’t just rank the three biggest ethnic divisions in the United States–they’re giving us a snapshot of our remaining middle class (assuming that the upper class isn’t really involved in the public school system). That’s not very many people, if you apply those figures to the whole population.