Social Capital

An addition to the "District Comparisons" page on the Hamilton Central Options website...
On the end-of-the-world solstice (12/21/2012), I see a note about Hamilton as #11 in Forbes' "America's Friendliest Towns:" 11. Hamilton, NY says

Population (2010): 6,690
This tiny historic Central New York town -- home to a village by the same name -- was founded in 1975 as Payne's Settlement. Today it is perhaps best known as the location of prestigious Colgate University. Crime rates are markedly lower than the national average and despite being a college town, the rate of homeownership is more than 60%. The Village Green offers local eateries and merchants as well as some of the area's most historic homes. Neighbors gather for fundraisers, holiday parties, safety awareness events, holiday charities and fitness groups, according to Nextdoor.

Now, it seems that Forbes has confused "1975" with "1795", but otherwise it seems accurate. Is it unChristmassy to note that Morrisville didn't make this list? Hamilton has a lot of social capital to lose...

Failure is Good

The international test scores are out today, and as always US kids rank fairly low in performance, high in confidence. Yong Zhao comments that Numbers Can Lie: What TIMSS and PISA Truly Tell Us, if Anything?

So far all international test scores measure the extent to which an education system effectively transmits prescribed content.
In this regard, the U.S. education system is a failure and has been one for a long time.
But the successful transmission of prescribed content contributes little to economies that require creative and entrepreneurial individual talents and in fact can damage the creative and entrepreneurial spirit. Thus high test scores of a nation can come at the cost of entrepreneurial and creative capacity.
While the U.S. has failed to produce homogenous, compliant, and standardized employees, it has preserved a certain level of creativity and entrepreneurship. In other words, while the U.S. is still pursuing an employee-oriented education model, it is much less successful in stifling creativity and suppressing entrepreneurship.

We failed...hooray! Let's design schools that don't even try to do what we're failing at!
Or then again, maybe not. (Actually, we do need to transmit a fair amount of prescribed content; as Salman Khan puts it in One World Schoolhouse, this should take about 20% of the school day.)

Consolidation Context -- M-E

A note I should have posted earlier, from March's Syracuse Post-Standard, says New York state school districts won't merge even when offered extra money

In 2007 and in 2008, Newsweek magazine recognized Morrisville-Eaton High School as one of the best in the country based on the number of Advanced Placement courses it offered its students.
This year, the Madison County school doesn’t have a single AP class. The district jettisoned them as enrollment and state aid dropped, costs rose and it cut staff and spending to balance its budgets...

Well, maybe some school districts will merge when offered extra money. Or then again, maybe not.

Consolidation and Real Estate Values

Just a note, citing Duncombe & Yinger How Does School District Consolidation Affect Property Values? A Case Study of New York (38 page PDF) from August 2012:

This paper explores the impact of school district consolidation on house values using a sample of house sales in New York State from 2000 to 2010. During this period, three sets of districts consolidated. ... the impacts of consolidation on house values are more negative in high-income census tracts, where parents may have a relatively large willingness to pay for the access to teachers and other non-budgetary advantages of small districts.

Plausible, at least as part of the explanation.