Best School Districts in NH

[NH2008]

Nh is a state, Beverly Hills is a city. Compare the performance of the Beverly Hills school district to the performance of an East LA school district and see what you get. Compare the rankings of Seabrook schools with the rankings of Hampton Falls schools and see what you find. This isn't pretty to think about, but it isn't particularly subjective either. The Trumps may well be morons, but for the most part in our country affluence requires a college degree. Not genius, but more education than poverty requires and enough native intelligence and work ethic to achieve it. And the more educated a parent is, the more educated his/her children are likely to be.

[maestramommy]

Another interesting point in the article was that urban schools spend more, but they aren't necessarily spending on programs. For example, they talked about Manchester schools (I think?) spending money on updating the buildings to comply with the current fire code. Very necessary, but it doesn't do much in terms of bringing up student performance. Whereas smaller towns with newer schools spend much more of the money on actual programming or lowering class sizes, teacher development, etc. Also, urban schools constantly deal with issues such as immigrants who don't speak the language, lower income students whose parents/families/neighborhoods have many obstacles. A lot of these students require some kind of remediation, and that also costs. ESL and bilingual ed in particular are VERY expensive. Many of the smaller more affluent towns simply don't have these types of students, at least in numbers large enough to be significant.

As for the example on Beverly Hills, when I was getting my credential in the 90s, the high school there was supposed to be very good. That doesn't mean there weren't morons whose parents could care less what they did. But having enough money and fewer side issues makes a big difference. And since they were an affluent district, that meant getting less money from the state. CA education is funded similarly to MA. The towns do get state funding based inversely on property values AND also from other tax bases.

[rmcewan]

All true NH2008 - especially, thanks for pointing out the state/city thing. Who knew! I guess I should have gone to college...

Anyway my point is basically that I don't think wealth is the dividing factor, I think it is - as you say - parental education to some extent, environmental, but also TIME. Busy folks with no time for their kids will likely have badly adjusted kids with mediocre grades. Plenty of rich folks with crappy kids. You don't need to be poor and work two jobs to be busy.

[NH2008]

You're welcome. Glad I could help. My point, obviously, was that you have to compare like with like.

Yes, there are plenty of rich folks with crappy kids. Schools rankings aren't judging crappiness, though. They're judging (theoretically, at least) how well prepared the students are for college. There will always be kids from every social class who are unmotivated, do drugs, etc. But if you look at kids from wealthier families - whose parents tend to be more educated, have better nutrition, better prenatal care, hire better help if necessary, have higher expectations for their offspring, are more likely to delay childbearing until adulthood, are more likely to be fluent in English etc than poorer people - you will see kids who have a head-start from the moment of conception and a gap that widens through time. This isn't fair or nice, but it's not something that can be corrected by simply throwing money at schools in low-income districts, either.

We moved to NH from an extremely wealthy city in CA (not Beverly Hills). The schools are ranked in the top handful in the country. We were friends with a child psychologist who grew up in NH so we often talked about how child-rearing differed in both areas. He said that kids in our town seemed pretty miserable. He saw a lot of drug use, alcoholism, cutting, eating disorders, etc - mostly stemming from the almost impossibly high expectations of a culture that expects every kid to go to Stanford. His theory was that the kids in his middle-class town in NH were much less likely to have those issues, and much happier in general, but also less likely to go to a school like Stanford. And these parents, like most highly paid professionals, were working crazy hours.

Well, time to go help my own kid do some reading...