why oh why are schools so crappy in SV? (San Jose: home, prices)

[dburbs1975]

lots and lots of little kids here, people are not moving out when they have kids.

[wsugrad03]

I do agree with another comment about the lower-income immigrants bringing down the API scores. SV is a mix of very wealthy and very poor. When you have this kind of mix, you ultimately end up with very spotty schools. Where we live homes are over a million, but there's enormous trailer park communities as well. Not surprisingly, schools where I live score very poorly. I don't have a problem with the teachers though. They all seem very caring and committed to teaching. But the school is overloaded with kids, and every year there's the threat of being bumped to a different school. School districts here haven't kept up with the population growth and seem chronically underfunded. The underfunding likely comes from the fact that homes here are not taxed on their assessed value, but rather the last sales price. People in SV tend to buy homes and live in them for a long time. So the tax revenue is typically much lower than other regions that have property tax assessments.

Schools play a big factor in where we ultimately decide to buy a home. We will either buy something much smaller (townhouse/condo) in the uniformly good school districts that are closer to where we work. Or we buy further out where the homes are slightly more affordable and put our kids in private school close to where we work. The private school is more of a necessity to make work/life balance work since it's not always good to have to leave work at 4:30pm every day to beat the traffic to pick up your kid before the 6pm deadline.

[darkeconomist]

Originally Posted by joyinthejourney

i don't get it. the residents are highly educated. home prices are extremely high. i would think this is a recipe for high performing schools but most schools in the SV/San Jose area are rated very poorly. Can someone explain this to me?

Costs are high as a function of the skewed state of the SV labor market; a large plurality have high incomes, meanwhile supply has been slow to increase due to city council's choices, resulting in lots of dollars being thrown at a few homes and pushing all costs up. But it would be a mistake to confuse high incomes (which can be skewed and hollowed out by high costs-of-living) with high wealth, and wealth is a better measure than pure incomes.

Ironically, if it was cheaper to live here but average incomes remained high, school might do better as more people could afford to be teachers.

[BayAreaHillbilly]

Originally Posted by mysticaltyger

I think part of it is that smart, educated people see the mess we have in the Bay Area as far as costs, crappy schools, etc, and if they want kids they either move out of the area or opt out of having them if they decide to stay.

Good point. If you look at fecundity, the two general buckets are:
1) Poorly educated folks who are at the margins.
2) Immigrants, who tend to either locate in places with good schools and work like dogs to afford it, or, go for private.

Well educated non-immigrants just are not making very many bambinos to populate the schools.

[mysticaltyger]

Originally Posted by dburbs1975

lots and lots of little kids here, people are not moving out when they have kids.

The rich and the poor aren't, but many in the middle class do move. That's why California's gap between rich and poor is larger than many other states.

Why Middle-Class Americans Can't Afford to Live in Liberal Cities - The Atlantic

[mysticaltyger]

Originally Posted by BayAreaHillbilly

Good point. If you look at fecundity, the two general buckets are:
1) Poorly educated folks who are at the margins.
2) Immigrants, who tend to either locate in places with good schools and work like dogs to afford it, or, go for private.

Well educated non-immigrants just are not making very many bambinos to populate the schools.

Exactly.

[Wintermomma]

Originally Posted by bigdumbgod

Lots of rich people sending the kiddies to hoity-toity private schools.

And lots of middle class people struggle and make compromises to send their kids to private schools, too. The public, IMHO, are either focused on testing for better scores or just not a good/safe place. It's sad, and I don't think it's a problem unique to SV, it just feels very strange when we are paying so very much for housing that the schools aren't better.

[LexusNexus]

Originally Posted by joyinthejourney

i don't get it. the residents are highly educated. home prices are extremely high. i would think this is a recipe for high performing schools but most schools in the SV/San Jose area are rated very poorly. Can someone explain this to me?

Rated very poorly by whom? What criteria are being used and what do you mean by "crappy"?

Which schools are you referring to in San Jose and SV?

[ANIM]

You just need to change your definition of very expensive. Schools in Cupertino and Palo Alto are not bad. Many people have enough money to sustain housng prices at these areas. So areas with poor schools become cheap. And these people are very focused on good education for their kids hence they all flock to areas with good schools. It is hard to admit but many people who think they should be well off based on their income are actually not. Abudance of low income immigrants with no emphasis on efucation makes the problem even worse.

It is the parents that make schools good, not tax money or teachers. So schools reflect demographic trends. People who are not making education their first priority (ie not willing to pay and work hard to afford old little house in good school district) just move out of the area.

[SportyandMisty]

I posted the following in a thread a while back, and it is still relevant.

By the way: one of the issues is the way the State funds local School Districts. We all pay property taxes, much of which is scooped up by the State and then reallocated to school districts based on a formula that is fairly complicated. The result is simple: Silicon Valley school districts tend to get much less money from the State, while school districts in other areas get much more - even 3 times as much per pupil. Where are these highly funded school districts? They tend to have underperforming, poor, non-English speaking immigrant families (I would say citizens, but, well...). Silicon Valley area school districts are typically called "basic aid" which means they get the minimum from the State.

At any rate:

Originally Posted by SportyandMisty

We started our daughter in a well regarded local elementary school (Regnart in Cupertino). Our experience was that even good public schools teach to a "one-size-fits-nobody" approach. Both my wife and I had full-time professional careers which made before-school and after-school logistics and inclusion in activities VERY challenging.

Beginning 2nd grade we switched to private (Harker). One of the things we really appreciated was that both before-school and after-school activities and supervision were included. Another was the broad curriculum including fine arts, and also that at an early age they offered multiple levels of core subjects so a kid could be in "high" math but "regular" English, for example - as early as 2nd grade.

Our daughter is a senior at Columbia in NYC now, and her Harker elementary education prepared her very well. I've lost track but a few years ago Harker had something liike 11% or maybe 15% of their graduating senior class enroll at MIT as freshmen. My point is their student body is definitely from the deep end of the gene pool.

*******

At the end of the day, there are only a handful of things we as parents can do to materially effect how our children grow up. Perhaps most important among these is choice of schools - but not for test scores.

When we as parents choose a school for our kids, we are in effect choosing the population from which our kids will select friends and determine their peers. I can't stress enough how important that is.

When our daughter was ready for high school I looked at her maybe returning to the public school system. I interviewed the Principal at our local high school (Monta Vista) and asked him in essence what his secret sauce was for student success. If we were to swap student bodies with, say, a low-performing high school on the the east side, how would the students perform, I asked.

The Principal's answer was telling.

The Principal continued:

"If we were to swap student bodies, the local Cupertino kids would fare just as well in the east-side school, and the students from the east-side would fare no better at Monta Vista. It is all about the families and peers."