Comment by blackeyeblitzar 4 days ago
I was responding to the part about housing being expensive near good schools, and the idea of good schools in general. Expensive housing and associated taxes often affect local school budgets, and those budgets are often stated as the reason the school is good. But my experience has been that the budgets don’t change school quality, it must be other factors. Sorry it may have been somewhat unrelated.
I think it's really housing is expensive near good schools because people (with kids) want to live near good schools so it drives up the price.
I guess also people who buy their house based on education probably have a positive effect of the education in that area but I think it's more of a market effect of the school already being above average.
I tend to agree.
As a parent with young kids moving to a new city a few years ago, we based our house hunting process on being near the best public schools (based on academic achievements; not much else to go by), and paid quite a bit more for our house than we would have otherwise. I know it sounds selfish, but our concern is that if our kids are mostly surrounded by other kids who don't have high academic standards (through no fault of their own, just their environment doesn't support that or it's not even a goal), then they will have a hard time bucking the tide, so to speak.
This sort of aligns with some other comments here. Parents want their kids to be around other kids that are better than the average. So like kids who behave well, aren’t violent, care about grades, have attentive parents, etc. I completely support that way of thinking given what school can be like when you don’t have that, which I did not like or benefit from in any way (even though some claim that mixing with other types of people is somehow positive).
Yeah, fair point.
I don't know whether budgets change school quality, but there is a marked difference in most cities between schools with high and low performance outcomes as measured by test scores, graduation rates, etc. (not that test scores are the best measure of life in general, but they're what's available in terms of academic understanding). And if you look at the schools with high ratings and where they are located, you'll find that it correlates greatly with income, and even more so you'll find that schools with the lowest performance correlate greatly with low income. (These are averages; there are brilliant students at all these schools.)
Families with higher income have more resources and more ability to support their child's education (after school activities, tutoring, a more academically-oriented environment, and most importantly, the absence of financial stress on the family unit which can greatly affect children especially if the parents (or in many cases a single parent household) has to work multiple jobs just to put food on the table much less be able to handle much else.