Now even the gays will have to leave the city!

I've been told that, in America at least, urban gentrification follows a pattern, no matter the city:

1. The artists move in, buying up cheap property and using it as their base studio
2. Next, come the gays -- men -- who seize upon the opportunity to make a particular almost-gentrified area a base of their businesses
3. Hipsters arrive shortly thereafter
4. Followed by the poseurs
5. Now, with a hip, cool, chic thriving urban neighborhood that's getting lots of attention, restaurants crop up, a Starbucks opens, and soccer moms spend their mornings there and suddenly recent college grads take their dates  to this now thriving locale

I don't know. Not sure there's any real data to support this. Seems more like something somebody made up. 

But I do know one thing: they will all leave. Everyone of them.

For a single reason: and it's not because of cost or because once popular the place was no longer cool or because of crime or because they all soon flock to some other new cool spot.

They all leave because the biological (and cultural) imperative takes over and they partner up and have children.

And the thing about having children is, you want the best for them.

And, in America, sending your child to big city "public" schools is a near-criminal dereliction of duty. The violence in the schools, the drop-out rate, the shockingly high illiteracy rate of even high school students, the obvious waste of resources, the patently clear reality that the institution, not the child nor the child's parents have complete say in the direction of the schools and the overall learning environment. 

No parent will willingly subject their child to Big City schools in America.

That's what keeps the suburbs thriving. And it's why the urban planners and supersiliious "progressives" -- who wed themselves to a early 20th century business model of education -- are constantly proven wrong, every time, when they predict the "death of the suburb".

Yes, I fully realize that we are in Decade 2 of the 21st century and still educate our children at large, centralized schools, where they are segegated by age, must sit all day long, are talked to by a "licensed" teacher who is part of a union which has deep, powerful and very profitable ties into government and thus all the monies spent on education flow not to the parent and not to the child but to the "school district".

Yes, I fully realize that more than ever our children need a great education to help them -- and the nation -- prosper. Yes, I realize this is not happening.

Parents, even the artist parents and gay parents and hipster parents do their best: move to the suburbs and hope to afford a home in a neighborhood whose school district is superior. 

Until the destruction of the archaic, patently limiting, 20th century government-union-education complex, there's not much else parents can do.

There is an alternative, of course: homeschooling.

There are issues with homeschooling, however. At least one parent must be home and most parents need to work.

For those that do not need to work, they nonetheless choose to work because the extra money is good and, well, spending hours and hours every single day educating their children and being effectively cut off from adult interaction isn't terribly appealing, quite frankly.

But for a growing number, all the downsides of homeschooling are easily mitigated. And it is these people, I suspect, that will help America fashion a truly great educational system for our new millennia, and restore America's place as the leader in smart, well-educated children. Our tools are personalized, empowering and accessible. Yet, not our schools. Which is a tragic waste.

From Newsweek:

We think of homeschoolers as evangelicals or off-the-gridders who spend a lot of time at kitchen tables in the countryside. And it’s true that most homeschooling parents do so for moral or religious reasons. But education observers believe that is changing. You only have to go to a downtown Starbucks or art museum in the middle of a weekday to see that a once-unconventional choice “has become newly fashionable,” says Mitchell Stevens, a Stanford professor who wrote Kingdom of Children, a history of homeschooling. There are an estimated 300,000 homeschooled children in America’s cities, many of them children of secular, highly educated professionals who always figured they’d send their kids to school—until they came to think, Hey, maybe we could do better.

Many of these parents feel that city schools—or any schools—don’t provide the kind of education they want for their kids. Just as much, though, their choice to homeschool is a more extreme example of a larger modern parenting ethos: that children are individuals, each deserving a uniquely curated upbringing. That peer influence can be noxious. (Bullying is no longer seen as a harmless rite of passage.) That DIY—be it gardening, knitting, or raising chickens—is something educated urbanites should embrace. That we might create a sense of security in our kids by practicing “attachment parenting,” an increasingly popular approach that involves round-the-clock physical contact with children and immediate responses to all their cues.

Typical urban homeschooled kids do tend to find the space they need by the time they reach those teenage years, participating independently in a wealth of activities. That’s just as well for their parents, who by that time can often use a breather. And it has made them more appealing to colleges, which have grown more welcoming as they find that homeschoolers do fine academically. In some ways these students may arrive at college more prepared, as they’ve had practice charting their own intellectual directions, though parents say they sometimes bristle at having to suffer through courses and professors they don’t like.

Power to the people, yo.