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Reason isn't even a school

As someone from Belgium that now lives in Columbus OH because of marriage, you're spot on with everything. Safety? Limited. Sprawl? Terrible. Rent? Eh it's not that bad. I make a base salary of $82.5k and my wife makes $50k. Our 2br 1ba apartment's rent is about $1000. It's a nice place, but it has some flaws. Our next place will be around $1500. I've told my wife I don't like the sprawl and lack of public transport here and I want to move to a place where that is less of an issue: Chicago, NYC or Boston. However, the latter two have crazy high rent.\n\nI must add, the terribly unsupported public education system in Columbus is by far the worst reason. My wife is a teacher at a Columbus City School that's almost 100% black. White families put their kids through private schools. The rest of the kids have terrible home lives and are therefore incredibly ill-behaved and under-educated. So much so that the teachers just CANNOT keep up with Ohio's learning standards. By the time these kids graduate (and that's a big IF), they would have learned about 20% of what a regular 18-year old would have learned in most of the world. This is in part due to:\n1. Parents that do not involve themselves in what their children do, and therefore do not discipline appropriately.\n2. Terrible school admins that force teachers to lower their standards to have a high passing rate for the school (otherwise it gets shut down). Also, due to the No Child Left Behind Act, admins also force teachers to teach how to pass state tests (repetitive bullshit) instead of important learning materials and/or critical thinking skills.\n3. A lot of these students are pushed into the gang lifestyle and see no future in their education. They don't even try.\n4. Burned out teachers that grew tired of the negative ROI and start giving out poor and inadequate work packets. However, I don't like blaming teachers, especially because my wife is the hardest working person I know.\n\nIt's hard to see my wife come back every day, exhausted. It pains me both for her and her kids. America doesn't give a fuck about education. The big theory is that they're purposely not giving public schools attention so they can be phased out and private education becomes the norm. And if you can't afford it? That's great, we need factory workers.\n\n\nI might convince my wife to move to Europe eventually (luckily a European marriage visa isn't as stupidly hard to obtain as it was for me to get here). Having kids in America is not something I'd like to think about. For now, I'm taking advantage of this high salary to save as much as I can and focus on advancing in my career. Sadly, that's really the only thing America is good for...