Once upon a time, New York had public schools that were as good as any elite secondary schools in Europe. Today, it is unusual, going on eccentric, for successful families in New York City to send their offspring to public schools, and the same is true in Washington. Over most of the south, meanwhile, with roughly a quarter of the population of the whole country, white middle-class parents deserted the public schools en masse after racial desegregation in the 70s, and most send their children to private day schools. For two reasons, I think. The first is that the US is becoming a much more conservative country, in social terms, than it was.
Class consciousness is far more open and less apologetic than it used to be.
Suburban families, their cars covered with stickers recording the expensive schools their children go to, expect to pass on their financial advantages to their children. Politics divide on ideological and therefore on class grounds far more than they did even as recently as the 60s, when the differences between the two major parties had more to do with the Civil War of the 1860s than with the economic and racial issues of the 1960s. The second is that, from Tony Blair down, people in Britain have got into the habit of thinking of the US not as it is, but as they want it to be. Partly this is the result of exposure to the philosophy of American exceptionalism, which holds that the US is not just richer and more powerful than other countries, but is somehow morally superior. To Margaret Thatcher and her friends, it was a paradise for businessmen, with no unions, no taxes, no radicals and no class envy.