Like most people, your links confuse people by combining St. Louis city with St. Louis county. However, St. Louis county is not part of St. Louis city. The statistics, such as this and the too often ballyhooed crime stats, are falsely skewed. It's like taking the crime stats of the baddest part of your town alone to represent the crime (or education) of your city as a whole.
Here's another example. The City of St. Louis has a population of under 300K. The County of St. Louis has a population of over one million! And that does NOT include St. Louis city. It's both fair and unfair to not include St. Charles City in this (for reasons I won't go into) which includes another 300K. So most stats you read about St. Louis are based on 300K out of a total population of 1.6 million! And the city is the baddest part of town.
Not that I don't agree that there is disparity but, as someone else pointed out, it's by choice, not anything the government does. That's another story, a truth, that no one on HN wants to believe and would downvote me into oblivion if I stated it.
People from St. Louis tend to over-play this -- it's pretty normal for cities to be separated from their surrounding suburbs in these sorts of statistics. Almost all of the mid-sized Midwest cities have populations in the 300k range and regional populations in the millions. St. Louis really is an exceptionally segregated city and region -- the city vs. county population trope is more of a favorite local excuse than a legitimate explanation.
Speaking more specifically, compare Normandy to Ladue. St. Louis County isn't just a mirror of its city -- if anything, it's a magnification of its city. This American Life did an excellent story that discusses this ( http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/t... ):
* nearly 1/2 of black students in the St. Louis region (not the city -- the entire region, those 1.5m people) attended unaccreddited or provisionally accredited schools.
* Tellingly, the first wave of desegregation in St. Louis included County schools because, according to the judge, the county suburbs shared equal blame for the segregation of city schools.
In this case, they're not. Specifically, FBI crime data only only covers the city, so often used in news stories, only covers the city which, if it weren't for the state separating the city and county in the 1850s, would have also included the county.
It's not true of many other cities. There are only about three to five others in the USA with the unique separation of city and county government that St. Louis has.
In case you don't understand, the city is not part of any county but has both a chief of police and a sheriff. There are personnel that handle duties that cities don't typically have but do exist for county governments. The county is not part of the city and has no relationship with them whatsoever (this has changed slightly over the last decade or so but essentially still true).
I just realized I can get into a too long a list of the differences but there are articles online and, I think, a Wikipedia article.
> There are only about three to five others in the USA with the unique separation of city and county government that St. Louis has.
But a lot of other cities with a comparable population split, so St. Louis's situation isn't as special as its county's residents like to proclaim.
> In case you don't understand
Having spent several decades in St. Louis, I understand and disagree with this piece of regional folk knowledge:
1. The trivia that creates the population split in reporting is rather exceptional (and a nice testament to the dismal state of Missouri politics for the past N decades), but the occurance of city/county population splits on the order of 100,000's to millions is not nearly exceptional as people claim. St. Louis City really has been an exceptionally bad city for a while now.
2. This folk knowledge is usually used as an excuse to ignore the fact that the county is as segregated into rich/white and poor/black as the city is. I suppose I don't have to remind you that Normandy is in the County. The St. Louis that's been in the news for the past year absolutely 100% IS the County everyone pretends is so drastically different from the city.
3. This factoid also ignores the fact that White Flight defines the political geography of the St. Louis region (go to Main Street some time -- you won't have a hard time finding people proudly proclaiming that's why they live there, and after a few beers the language isn't even very coded; it's always funny to hear an apartement dweller cite home values as a reason for living in St. Charles...).
If this factoid were used with any degree of historical honesty or presence of mind toward improving the region, then it would be a harsh indict of the region and a call to reflection, rather than essentially an excuse for complacency.
In short, this factoid captures everything that I hated about St. Louis (and there was a lot I loved about it).
> The county is not part of the city and has no relationship with them whatsoever... but essentially still true
The city and county are tied together in a lot of ways that matter -- public transit funding, funding for major public parks in the city, regional city planning, etc.
I think for the past couple of decades at least, the degree of political inter-connection between the suburbs and the city rivals that of similar cities, even in spite of the weird political arrangement.
More to the point, we're quibbling over a detail that is irrelevant to the fundamental truth of the original post in the subthread -- St. Louis County school districts are strikingly and exceptionally segregated. There are only a few high schools in the entire region that have anything resembling a representative mix of the demographics found throughout the region.
I do agree on the point that it is a choice for those exiting for private schools, or exercising their economically-empowered physical mobility. But to say that those students attending St. Louis Public Schools all choose their school is ludicrous. They are assigned a school, and many cannot afford to move into an area with a better school or attend a private school.
Here's another example. The City of St. Louis has a population of under 300K. The County of St. Louis has a population of over one million! And that does NOT include St. Louis city. It's both fair and unfair to not include St. Charles City in this (for reasons I won't go into) which includes another 300K. So most stats you read about St. Louis are based on 300K out of a total population of 1.6 million! And the city is the baddest part of town.
Not that I don't agree that there is disparity but, as someone else pointed out, it's by choice, not anything the government does. That's another story, a truth, that no one on HN wants to believe and would downvote me into oblivion if I stated it.