A little more than a year ago, I got a phone call from my brother-in-law. He, my sister, and their two children had recently moved to a new city, and they were shopping for a house. At the time my nephew was two and my niece was four months, but the family was planning in advance, and they wanted to be sure that they could count on schools where ever they bought their new home. They were looking at a specific property, and he sent me the link to the local elementary school.
He explained that the neighborhood was undergoing "transition" in terms of property value and the socioeconomic status of the residents, and when I checked out the school's "report card" I could see some evidence of that as well. Over the last three years, the percentage of minority students and those on subsidized lunch had declined. Over the same time period, their standardized test scores had gone up a bit, but they had met the state standards to begin with. Even so, the scores were not as high as in some of the less diverse schools around them, and that concerned my brother-in-law.
I told him what I've told many parents who have asked me similar questions: your children's test scores will be pretty much the same no matter what school they attend, and for a more accurate picture, look at the disaggregated test data for the kids of your race and SES. I also pointed out that schools with more affluent families tend to offer more opportunities for the students, mostly because their parents (along with their greater resources) are more involved. So a family in the situation that my brother-in-law was describing faced a choice: would they join their neighborhood school and, working from within, commit their time and resources to improvement for all the children there, or would they go someplace else?
The deal on that house fell through, but some questions remain. If a school isn't good enough for your kids, which kids is it good enough for? When something as important as that is broken, whose responsibility is it to try and fix it?
You are asking hard questions here, questions that may or may not have answers. It reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell's article for the New Yorker (http://www.gladwell.com/2008/2008_12_15_a_teacher.html). This article is all about what makes a good teacher, and is a cousin to his book Outliers where he talks about how parents of a higher SES enhance their children's learning by the very things you talk about.
ReplyDeleteOn a purely pragmatic point, homes in areas with good school scores have higher resale value. We took that into consideration when we purchased some 20 years ago, but what you can't account for is the changes the schools undergo, in demographic shifts, that change the premise under which a house was purchased.
Does your last question have an answer at all?
Elizabeth
(e-dot-eastmond-at-gmail-com)