Quote:
Originally Posted by dr.strangelove
If you do not think drug crime is a problem in the high schools in the richest parts of the county, you are not paying attention to the schools. The other parts of your post are far more interesting, but I wish you were right with respect to drug crimes in our schools. It is a problem that is getting worse, not better.
As for the rest, I am not assuming things outside the "brick and mortar schools" are somehow irrelevant, my whole point is that those things are FAR MORE relevant than what goes on in a "brink and mortar school." Of course there is a hard time setting a working definition of what is a "better school" since most people want to argue that their schools qualifies, but they all can't. But you raise the main point of my post when you say the real issue we are discussing is how parents view a prospective school when they are considering moving to a new community.
Lets take your two identical high schools. Now, in the community with wealth, lets take a family who would be on the lowest 10% of wealth in that area. While their classmates can hire tutors, have no obligations but school work and can go to expensive SAT prep classes, our example family can not. The numbers for this school are skewed by the wealthy, and the kids that can not afford these things will not reflect the "data" that makes this school so good, the high SAT scores and state testing grades.
Now take the other school and put a wealthy kid in it. He gets the private tutors, SAT prep classes, supporting home environment and gets amazing SAT scores while pulling up the curve on everything else. The "brick and mortar school" has very little to do with the success, or lack of success, each kid will demonstrate. Of course there are exceptions to everything. There are poor ids who will rock and wealthy kids given all the best chances who will fail, but the odds favor falling in the majority in each set.
Which school is the better school, I would argue neither. Which is why I think, and tell my clients, there are schools that are considered bad and schools considered great and many in between. While I would not recommend attending a school where I grew up without body armor, Ossining and Peekskill schools will serve a family better if they can live there and afford the after school extras than they would being the among the poorer families in a different school district.
I completely disagree that parents who can't afford to buy where the former is located would try to rent so that their kids could benefit from the schools. I am in the real estate industry and I see this in such a small percentage of my clients, if I had to guess it would be under 2%. The vast majority buy where they can maximize their options rather than rent someplace else. As for illegally enrolling kids at schools using a fake address, it happens constantly. Its far more common than you would think, and its incredibly difficult to stop unless its not a relative's home.
Anyway, my point is that schools are what the families make of them. You should not price yourself into a school based on its reputation only to realize you priced yourself out of your children actually competing in the school district. Just because a school would be considered "better" does not mean one should try to go there if they can not afford it. The school has little to do with success on tests and such. There is no chance of switching the student body at Briarcliff and Peekskill, but there is a very good chance that the same family that has an option of buying a home in Briarcliff and have not much more disposable income than a family at Peekskill, can buy the exact same home for 30% less in Yorktown or Croton be comfortable enough to buy the extras we discussed. I am merely suggesting the family in Yorktown will probably have a better education (in terms of test scores and class rankings) than the and same family in Briarcliff, and it has nothing to do with the schools, it has to do with the wealth of the families in each area.
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I didn't say there was not a drug problem in rich schools - I simply said the problem is worse in poor schools.
I would put Yorktown much closer to Briarcliff than to Peekskill in terms of the issues we are discussing, so I would agree that a family that would have to squeeze into Briarcliff would probably be better off with their kids in Yorktown. Then again, I don't know that I would necessarily say that Briarcliff is a better school than Yorktown. I think the Yorktown families share all of the characteristics I mentioned in an earlier post, just maybe with less money than those at some other places. Upper middle class school districts are just as good as upper class school districts in most instances, simply because the upper middle class communities are the same as the upper class communities on matters that I think make a good school. I guess I would encourage a family to stretch from Peekskill to Yorktown, but not necessarily from Yorktown to Briarcliff.
I don't agree that it's high SAT and test scores that make a school great - its simply true that high SAT and test scores are a great identifier of a good school. The "poor" kid at Rye may not be able to afford the SAT prep classes (especially if his family is stretching to be there), and as a result, his test score may be lower than classmates with similar aptitude, but I think he or she would be much better off at Rye than at an urban Yonkers HS. And he or she would probably be better off than at Ossining or Peekskill, but such is a closer call.
A thing that is not being discussed is a student's happiness, which is a huge aspect of their overall success. Parents need to place their kid at a school where they believe the child will fit in and be happy, while understanding that their may be certain fixed variables affecting their kids happiness that are not school/community dependent. Being at a better school is of little value if the child will not be happy. But its so hard to quantify such because it may be true that a kid's (and their parents) behaviors and choices would render them unhappy everywhere.
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