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I purchased a house in Northeast Queens and my son is less than 2 years old right now. Every few days I try to come up with additional reasons to leave. The elementary and middle schools are great by any standards where I live, but the prospect of going to high school here seems unfathomable to me especially considering the war on merit that the mayor is waging. I myself grew up in NYC, and to have my kids go through the same garbage high schools that I went through makes me feel that I've accomplished nothing.
High school is very far away for you so I wouldn't worry too much. By that time who knows how things will change. The school in your area could even improve by then. There are plenty of good magnet and charter schools in NYC, particularly if your kids turn out to do very well academically. Even if you eventually have to move, owning your house for 12 years before selling is still not a bad deal. You could also rent out the house for the years your kid is in HS, rent in the burbs, and then move back when he graduates.
I think gentrification can change public schools but it takes a very long time and requires the area stays gentrified. Of all of the things that improve from gentrification, public schools will be dead last every time.
Inwood is a good example for elementary/middle. The schools there are not the best but they are getting better every year and some good charter options are available.
High school is very far away for you so I wouldn't worry too much. By that time who knows how things will change. The school in your area could even improve by then. There are plenty of good magnet and charter schools in NYC, particularly if your kids turn out to do very well academically. Even if you eventually have to move, owning your house for 12 years before selling is still not a bad deal. You could also rent out the house for the years your kid is in HS, rent in the burbs, and then move back when he graduates.
I think gentrification can change public schools but it takes a very long time and requires the area stays gentrified. Of all of the things that improve from gentrification, public schools will be dead last every time.
Inwood is a good example for elementary/middle. The schools there are not the best but they are getting better every year and some good charter options are available.
Yep that's what I tell my wife that it's far far away who knows maybe I'll make that much more money such that it would really make sense to save on the nyc income tax.
As for gentrification it's not going to improve any of the schools around me. The elementary and middle schools are already top notch which is one of the reasons why I moved here. The issue was the dezoning of the last of the zoned high schools in the outer boros during the Bloomberg years. As much as people like to say that he didn't care about certain minorities he did try to improve the schools for them. During his tenure they shut down multiple schools in the Jamaica/South Eastern Queens area and then funneled all the kids from those failing schools to nyc's top school district, district 26. It turned what was once a top 100 nationally ranked high school, which is a designation that is extremely rare for zoned schools to have any where in the country, into a mediocre one though it's still considered very good by nyc standards.
There are limits to what gentrification can do for nyc public schools. Sure the gentrifiers can push some of the poor minorities to other parts of the city and reclaim the local zoned elementary/middle schools. But once it's time for high school the gentrifying parents' nightmare comes back to haunt them. And that's when they make the call whether to leave or go private if their kids can't make it into one of the specialized high schools.
Pretty much much this ^^....Especially for folks that make between 200k and 350k which is good enough for decent suburbs, but not enough for excellent private schools in the city. It's foolish to punish your children putting them in 95% of NYC schools when you can afford the high taxes.
I purchased a house in Northeast Queens and my son is less than 2 years old right now. Every few days I try to come up with additional reasons to leave. The elementary and middle schools are great by any standards where I live, but the prospect of going to high school here seems unfathomable to me especially considering the war on merit that the mayor is waging. I myself grew up in NYC, and to have my kids go through the same garbage high schools that I went through makes me feel that I've accomplished nothing.
Just curious - what HS did you go to?
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This IMO is the more accurate appraisal of what takes place in schools in gentrifying areas. Long-term, the schools in improving areas DO get better. But that can take a while. The public schools are the last thing to improve --after housing, retail, police protection, sanitation, and parks. Part of it is that early gentrifiers generally are childless or if they aren't, will send their kids to stronger out-of-district, parochial, or private schools -- especially if they're white and the existing school population is predominately black/Latino.
But pressures from the increasing costs and selectivity at private schools do eventually generate more newcomers' kids into the local publics. A generation ago, for instance, nobody broke their necks to get into Park Slope's PS 321. Now they do. Same for PS 8 in Brooklyn Heights, which though never a bad neighborhood, was also once far less affluent than now. I've heard the same gradual improvements that happened there years ago are now happening at PS 11 in Prospect Heights and PS 492 in Clinton Hill.
But these improvements are indeed slow, and do come with conflict between long-time residents and newcomers, often for the reasons noted above. In addition to having more money, the newcomers will also often have stay-at-home Moms who can devote time and energy to the schools that the poorer, long-time residents can't. And we all know that the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Interestingly, at least one school in Brooklyn, is consciously trying to ameliorate this tension:
With the exception of a few points that I'll detail below, I agree with your post. I do agree that gentrification/wealthier neighborhood transplants will (or can/often do) lead to improved school statistics (note, even where this change does happen, school "improvement" often has more to do with better-prepared students attending the schools, which helps lift test scores, etc., rather than teacher quality, etc. improving in my view). One of many examples if PS9 in Prospect Heights. That school was nowhere near as highly regarded (granted, it still isn't exactly among "the best," but is still a very decent school now) as it is today and the demographic change due to neighborhood transplants sending their children there has been relatively swift as far as I'm concerned. Touching on some things you pinpointed, there's more parental involvement (there's actually some confrontation from new transplant parents and parents representing the old guard at this school . . . there were even allegations of two separate PTA's), higher economic support/incomes to support the school, and better prepared students attending the school. And it all makes sense given what I'm seeing (at least in Prospect Heights) with more and more families with school-age children moving into the neighborhood (at least a few such families on my block alone send their children to PS 9) . . . that's not to say that some families with eventually move out of the neighborhood when they have children/their children become of school-age, but I'm certainly seeing a trend in the opposite direction as well. Though I will have to take your word about a similar process unfolding at PS 492, PS 11 (which is in Clinton Hill as well) has long been highly regarded as they had a gifted and talented program, PS 20 and PS 11: A Surprising Statistic - The Local – Fort-Greene Blog - NYTimes.com, (my sister attended the school two decades ago), which is now being phased out (my guess is that it's no longer "needed," though I could be wrong).
Addressing some of your other points, while I agree that housing, retail, and parks generally improve at a faster rate than schools, I don't want to put sanitation and police protection in that category. From my view, police protection and sanitation are generally the same (or even skewed to favor less desirable neighborhoods) throughout communities in NYC. Addressing police specifically, while we may see differences in crime levels throughout different communities, I rarely put the blame on police protection, especially given how aggressively administrations have been in combating violent crime in certain neighborhoods. If anything, if there is a difference in police protection, they seem to favor less desirable neighborhoods due to increased police resources being targeted at those neighborhoods to combat crime, etc.
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