Impoverished schools and making the best decision for our child
March 19, 2018
“…education is the silver bullet. Education is everything.” Sam Seaborn, The West Wing
Is it better to be the comparatively poor kid in a wealthy school district or a relatively rich kid in a poor school district?
I asked this question on Twitter and the responses initially leaned hard toward the second choice, which would be good confirmation bias, except I’m actively second-guessing our decision. Then a lot of responses flooded in pointing out that the first choice is better for the poor kid to have access to connections and better resources.
That brought on a facepalm because I hadn’t thought about it that way and that’s stupid because ….
I lived the first scenario. As a poor kid in a modestly wealthy school district, I got a good education and the relative wealth of my peers wasn’t obvious. Kids weren’t obsessed with designer brand names back then, wealth wasn’t the ostentatious thing that it’s become today between Instagram and new iPhones for ten year olds.
The only bullying I experienced was not my yard sale or homemade clothes, rather it was down to my size. Waaaay down. (Get it? Because I’m short! Ok, I’ll stop now.) Tiny quiet Asian girl with her nose in a book waking and probably sleeping? Perfect target. (Reality: I was a scrappy fighter so joke was on them.) Overall, school was ok. I was awkward, made some mistakes, did well in some areas, lousy in others. There was nothing terribly formative or memorable about my experience to my admittedly flawed recollection.
Now it’s time for us to be on the other side as parents and it turns out that having any choice about the matter feels more fraught than I’d ever imagined it would be.
JB is living the second scenario. We live relatively modestly but we drive 14 year old (good used) cars, our renovated home is small and comfortable, and we have flexible high paying jobs that lets us work with JB’s schedule. We’re basically rich.
We chose this area for diversity. Walk into neighboring (rich) cities, you’ll see a very narrow range of race and ethnicity: Caucasian and some Asian. Walking down the street here, I see people from a variety of races and backgrounds, not just a single shade. I didn’t want JB to grow up thinking everyone is born with a silver spoon in their mouths and that’s normal, nor that academics are life or death, and those are both far likelier in the richer school districts where the competition is paramount and cutthroat. We’re about 30 miles away from the district where high school students choose death by train after “failing” in school. That’s NOT the life I want for my kid.
We also chose this area because we could afford it. If we were only going for “best schools”, we’d double our cost. We already tripled it with this home! We have friends who paid $2.2M for a “modest” place in the nearby, better, school district.
Can you even begin imagining how stressed I’d be over that mortgage? It would have haunted us for decades. It most certainly would have tossed our plans for early retirement into the nearest garbage bin and set them on fire with prejudice and a flamethrower.
I can’t replicate the “poor” conditions that built my character and all that, but I also didn’t want zir to feel the class differences so keenly when ze hit middle school and all the kids clearly had two doctors / tech tycoons for parents. It’s way more obvious now than it ever was for me.
Unfortunately here in Silicon Valley-adjacent Northern California, diversity plus affordable equals poor with few resources. I knew that would be the case but the stats are starting to get to me. These stats for our school district get depressing right quick:
- 44 different languages spoken in local schools – good
- 32% of students are English language learners – good
- 40% of students’ families are low income – *thinks about taxes* oh dear
- 31% fewer dollars per local student than other schools in the county – not good
- Neighboring communities have between $500,000 to $2.2M for additional art , science, and physical education programs. Our city has 0 extra dollars. – Crap
The last bullet point dismays me. Some research says that the first five years of education is most important for kids, being the years when they’re learning foundational concepts like resilience, but I’m worried about the lack of resources to do more than the basics. The elementary school is decently rated for the basics but their school-level metrics don’t look strong; the local high schools are rated as average to low, which is failing by my standards, and doesn’t offer even a quarter of the AP classes that my own high school did.
Don’t get me started on how public schools are tied to property taxes, I won’t have the energy to bake delicious treats if I go down that rabbit hole, but it’s a problem. This is why I won’t whine about our property taxes even though they’re a huge chunk of our annual budget. This problem is why we chose to live where we live – we wanted to be in a place where our dollars make a difference. But is the problem too big, more than any difference we can make?
This all leads to me wondering if we’re starting zir way behind the 8 ball vs the other kids in the region. Was I being an irresponsible parent by being a responsible adult? Was choosing affordability over the best schools a terrible idea?
What’s done is done
We’re not going to sell this house, and our souls, to buy in the expensive great-schools towns. I don’t want that mortgage, property tax, and I definitely don’t want to move again. The trench coat turned up but my grey corduroys are still missing. Personal rule – find everything you lost in the last move before you move again.
Instead of getting down in the dumps over our choice, PiC and I are committing to this choice and searching for ways to make a difference:
- We fund Donors Choose projects to directly support the local schools. Teachers here aren’t highly compensated and they need help getting adequate supplies for their classrooms. I’m doing this regularly from instead of just at the end of the year.
- Local businesses fund mentorship programs, matching students to adult mentors, so we dedicate some volunteering hours there.
- Businesses also support local DonorsChoose projects by matching individual funds so we can double our impact that way.
We have to make choices that fit into our lives, and many priorities, now so we can’t make commitments of more than a couple hours per week or $25-50 a month. We can’t get it done in one big swoop like area m/billionaires could! But we’re also playing a long game here. We’re making a long term investment into the health of our community in the hope that it will yield more engaged students who go on to be successful in the world we live in, not just our own schools and district.
We don’t just live in our own neighborhoods and cities, we live in the world with a heck of a lot of other people. We would be doing a lot of the same things if we had chosen not to have kids, just without a pit in my stomach for the consequences of choosing where we live.
SES status of the parent and SES status of the school both matter in terms of educational outcomes. You can think of parental SES status as identifying the likely band of scores for a kid and schooling moving them up or down along that band. In all likelihood JB, from a test score perspective, will still do above average, especially since ze will likely have parental intervention putting ze in after-school extracurriculars, intervention with learning, etc. Relying just on the school’s resources, ze may not hit 800s across the board on the SAT, but only you can figure out how much those upper levels of achievement matter and supplement appropriately.
Our school district’s stats are pretty similar to yours and for now (ask me again when we actually have the kids ready to enroll), we’re pretty set on bringing them through our current school district. We’re in a rapidly gentrifying area with an increasing commercial tax base, so we’re hoping more money will be coming into the schools before our kids enroll. Even without that, talking with local parents here, I’ve learned that though not as wealthy as neighboring districts schools are diverse enough that students will have a significant enough college-oriented cohort and that parental involvement is very high. I think a lot of these determinative factors– particularly community involvement– can get lost in the data.
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And by “SES status” I really just mean “SES”. Yes, I’m also *that person* that blurts out “ATM machine” on occasion.
Now this has me worried that I won’t do the right amount (too much? too little?) of parental intervention. But that’s my job to figure out no matter what the school situation is.
Not surprisingly, there’s a lot of economic research on this topic. High SES schools matter more for poor kids than for rich kids. IF CA still has the top 8% rule when JB is applying to college, that should help getting into the UCs…
Personally, we didn’t want to be in a school zone with a score less than 7 and were willing to pay for it. (We ended up in an excellent school zone with a very diverse population and a 9/10, meaning it wasn’t just high SES kids causing that change.) If we moved there permanently we’d still have to rent for quite a while because, as you note, we cannot afford a 2.2 million dollar house.
If you’re in a 2-3 star place, do they have any programs that they use to keep high SES people there, like dual-language, school-within-a-school etc.?
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“If you’re in a 2-3 star place, do they have any programs that they use to keep high SES people there, like dual-language, school-within-a-school etc.?”
I’ve been digging but so far I haven’t turned up anything 🙁
We’ve struggled with these questions ourselves over the past couple of years, as we purchased our first home long before having children, at a time when we felt fairly certain that we wouldn’t have them at all. School quality was very much NOT a consideration for us. Once we became parents and our oldest reached the preschool years, we started paying attention, and what we learned is that we are basically big, fat hypocrites. I’m an avowed liberal who values diversity – diversity of both experience and thought – and I’m keenly aware that the model by which schools are funded necessarily gives the kids who need well resourced schools far less than kids who do not. I live in a ‘School of Choice’ state, where any family can opt their children into any public school that will take them, so long as they have the time, patience and capacity to navigate complicated lottery systems and then bear the burden of transporting their children to whichever far flung school they land in. The result of this is exactly what anti-school choice advocates warn it will be: the students whose families have the means to do so opt their kids out of marginal public schools into those that are “better,” leaving behind all of the children whose families DON’T have the means, or the capacity or the desire to do so, and those mediocre schools soon turn into failing schools. And ultimately, these “choices” largely take place along lines of race. Our neighborhood is incredibly diverse, particularly when considering only those families with children (and discluding all of the very white “original owners” of the 60s built ranches who raised their kids decades ago and are now dying off). But the neighborhood elementary school doesn’t reflect this at all, because generally speaking, all of the white families have choiced their kids into some other school in some other neighborhood, resulting in a school that is 74% free and reduced lunch (Title 1), 66% English Language Learners. Given the correlation between SES and test scores, I’m sure you can guess how the school “ranks” by so-called Great Schools measures. Would our neighborhood school be greatly improved if everyone who lived nearby simply sent their children there, such that there was more socio-economic diversity? Absolutely. Should I be the change I want to see, and send my own children there, knowing that I’m actively choosing to send my children to a “failing” school that has had 4 principals in 5 years when I have any number of “better” options available? Probably. Am I big, fat hypocrite whose very next thought is that despite my so-called values, I simply can’t bring myself to make my own children collateral damage? Again…absolutely. This is all moot now, as I recently took a new job in a different city where the SES and educational landscape is very different, but now here I am…considering relative school quality above almost all else in our home search.
Sigh. Clearly we know the same struggle. Thanks for coming by and sharing.
Getting communities involved in schools is huge. Especially schools that don’t have a budget for extras. Of course, the challenge is that many families (especially low SES) families can’t take time off during the day. That’s where school teachers and admins have to get creative and try to schedule things in the evenings or on the weekends. A lot of schools are pushing out into communities as well. If sounds like you, PiC, and JB are going to be huge advocates for your school while helping JB do well. Don’t beat yourself up. The American education system is flawed. There is no perfect school. But open lines of communication and everything else that you’ve already demonstrated will make a huge difference. I wish every kiddo I taught had families like JB’s!
I know I’m SUPER privileged to ever be able to gripe that I’d rather have more things during the school day so I can be done at the end of the day, especially as I know how disruptive it is even to my schedule and would have been a thousand times harder to manage when on shift work.
We’ll do the best we can, but it helps to hear we didn’t fail to pick better for our families.
That’s a tough question. I think being a poor kid in a rich school is better overall.
We live in a good school district and the parents are super supportive. Last year, the school didn’t have funding for PE teacher and a few other positions. They raised the money very quickly to cover those short falls.
In poorer districts, parents don’t have the resources to give. Also, the test scores are not good in the poorer districts here. Students are individual, of course, but they probably get a better education in better schools. Many of my friends in college had a hard time. They came from poorer school and it was hard to adjust to the new level of difficulties.
Diversity is okay at our school. They changed the boundary recently to include downtown. So there are a bit more diversity now. There are many Asian students that live downtown so their kids get to go to the nice school. Not many Latinos or African Americans, though.
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That’s what I worry about – the quality of education may simply not be there.
Of course I, as that poor student both financially and academically, struggled in the richer school district anyway and maybe it was good for me to learn about failure at an early enough age that it wasn’t wholly devastating.
We have this debate often, as we have okay but not great schools in our neighborhood (even though we aren’t too far from that school district and those train tracks). But as you mention, the prices of homes in better school districts in the Bay Area are just frightening. So I’m making peace with the “okay” schools for now, at least until we win the lottery or housing prices fall (both equally unlikely…lol).
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Those options, at this point, are equally (un)likely, aren’t they 🙂
Baguette was the poor kid in the rich school for almost a year and a half, and it was great. Our situation is a little different, due to her IEP, but there are a lot of things I miss about that school. The kids and parents were great, and very welcoming to us and to her. There are some things I don’t miss–the original special ed teacher and principal both were incredibly supportive, but both left after our first year there. The replacements weren’t nearly as receptive to having Baguette there, and we wound up reluctantly moving her to a school that is fine, but not as good–and she is doing much better academically, because she’s getting what she needs to do so.
When we bought our house, we were looking at schools. But housing prices in L.A. being what they are–and what they were in 2008, when we were looking–schools had to take a back seat to a house we could actually afford.
I remember one of my friends said, years ago, that in L.A. you either buy the house you can afford, and pay for private school, or you buy the house you can’t afford because the public schools are better. But you wind up paying either way. And, obviously, this only applies to people who can even afford to make that choice.
“obviously, this only applies to people who can even afford to make that choice.”
That is so true.
I didn’t think too much of the school district situation before we bought a place because frankly, I knew what we could afford (and sometimes it feels like “afford”) and I drew a hard bright line over which I would not go for our budget. That alone limited our search dramatically.
I’m happy for Baguette that even in the not great school, she’s doing well academically, and I hope she’s always happy with whatever schools she goes to.
I was solidly in the 2nd situation growing up, then in the first situation in college. What a crazy difference it was!
In HS, I was ranked top 3 in my class without trying at all (I mean, I did my homework and studied, but I was definitely never challenged). I took many of the few AP classes offered, but the teaching quality was so poor that none of my classmates, nor I, passed the qualifying tests with a grade high enough to get college credit–even though most of us got A’s in the classes.
I was lucky–VERY lucky–that I got into the college I did. It is considered a “public Ivy,” was ranked the #1 public university in the country at the time, and I was in-state so got a great education for cheap(ish). But boy oh boy was I in for a shocker when I arrived with my shi&ty academic background! I was immediately placed in remedial English writing and math classes, despite easily acing those classes in high school. I struggled to pass some of my classes despite not doing anything except studying. It was a nightmare for the first few years, until I learned how to learn and cope with the workload. And I still just barely graduated with a 3.0 GPA…
That was just academically–socially I really struggled to fit in because most everyone was from more affluent families. Even though I was well off by comparison at home, they wore stuff and had stuff that I had never been able to afford: J Crew, Banana Republic, Abercrombie, their own computers, etc. I felt out of place and very, very poor 90% of the time.
At the same time, even though I struggled socially and academically, I had a lot of fun, learned SO MUCH, and my university stint allowed me to make great friends with doctors, Apple & Google managers, lawyers, and people of that ilk/class. Plus having my Uni’s name on my CV doesn’t hurt. It all 100% still comes in handy today!!
While your choice is made, it sounds like you’re already doing a lot by helping out the community! Plus, I definitely think there are things you can do to make up for the gap for LB. I certainly would have done things differently if I’d known what was coming in University!
As the ‘rich family’ in the poorer school, maybe you have access to funds and resources that you can use to make up the difference for LB on a more targeted level? Extracurricular classes in fun subjects like astronomy that may not be offered by your school system (but maybe a nearby museum or outreach organisation does?), extra tutoring for classes (esp APs and SATs!), send JB off to sleepaway or day summer camps with more affluent kids, participate in First Lego League, boy/girl scouts or extramural sports and/or dance classes, etc. in areas where the ‘rich kids’ live, apply to go to a special magnet high school in your area (do you have those?), taking community college classes in high school–there are definitely ways to expose LB to valuable connections and rigorous academic standards even though the school system you’re in now may not offer them. It does take a lot of extra work on your and PiC’s behalf, though. :/
In any case, I’m sure LB will be fine & it sounds like, with your help, LB will have a chance to get the best of both worlds. 🙂
Your point about being unprepared for college is so well made. There’s something about that relative struggle, or lack of it, that I am suspecting is formative for the student. We had some amazing scholars in our high school class but because they were so gifted and it came to them so easily, their transition to top notch universities was like dunking them in ice water. Many of them fumbled, and hard.
I was an average student in a decent school and frankly my somewhat mediocre state school was shocked that I was “well-read”. Our teachers were tough enough during the school year that passing AP tests was not only expected, averaging 4s and 5s was also expected. (NO ONE wanted to face our fire breathing English teacher without a 5 in AP English Lit. Nope nope nope.) I didn’t make any useful professional connections in college whatsoever but that had a lot to do with working 100 hours a week. I hope that relieving JB of that burden alone should make a difference.
Before that, of course, I need to start exploring those extras and planning ahead to bring them into zir life slowly. And affording it, of course, is a major concern. I hope you’re right, in the end!
I went to the “good” public high school in 9th and the “mediocre” one for 10-12. (It was NC, so these terms are relative to my hometown.) The “mediocre” one was better, despite the lack of resources. Maybe it was just the fact that the kids at my second school were mostly army and air force brats, but there were fewer discipline problems than we had in the school with all of the entitled a-holes, At least if you were on the academic track. It may have only had the basic AP classes, but I was plenty prepared for an academically rigorous college experience. (Better than people who went to some of those “better” schools, because I was self-motivated and did the work.)
JB will be fine, especially since you guys are involved parents. The big things are to make sure ze does the best ze can with zir resources.
Like Sense, you raise excellent points about the academic rigor being the most important thing. I need to do more research into how I can tell whether a high school course of instruction is sufficiently challenging – I was a mediocre student myself.
We’ve been doing the second, but I can’t take it anymore. I love the lessons they’ve gotten out of the diversity, and to be frank, they won’t be the rich kids anywhere they attend school.
But we can’t get them the services they need here–even the ones they’re legally entitled to. We’re switching things up and off to suburbia we go in the very near future. The culture where we’re moving is nauseating, but the education is phenomenal. They’ve already got a good foundation in their current school, and we plan to nurture those ideals as they grow–even if the community where our new place happens to be located doesn’t.
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That makes sense – at a certain point, the fact that they’ve already had a good background in diversity makes a huge difference. I lived in the poor part of town for several formative years, our little Asian enclave alongside Korean, Hispanic, and black people, and it definitely set the tone for my preference for diversity later in high school. I had friends across racial and socioeconomic lines the way other people didn’t so I am hoping that we’ll give JB a similar grounding even if we don’t end up keeping this as our forever home.
And you need the services you need, without having to fight tooth and nail for it every day.
I love what you’re doing for your school district. Kids are resilient, and I think the home life you’re providing for JB, paired with the rich diversity ze will be surrounded with at school, and the opportunities you can provide for zir outside of school if anything is lacking will be more than sufficient. I currently live in a very non-diverse area and my partner and I often talk about how we want our future children to grow up going to school with people of many different races, religious backgrounds, languages, socioeconomic backgrounds etc. JB’s school could provide social opportunity and advantages that ze might not get from going to a “rich” school.
Thanks, Emilie, we’ll do our best with what we have. I hope that we’ll have enough time and money to do as much as ze and zir school district needs.
Great topic! I am thinking about this all of the time, now that my kids are approaching school age. Also in the Bay Area, not zoned for great schools, but have decided to look into charter/religious/private schools and stick with our (relatively) low(er) mortgage. Even if we spend the same amount on private ed than we would on living in a great public school district, at least we wouldn’t tie our hands with an exorbitant mortgage! I also think about what would happen if the kids hated their public school. We would really be unable to afford a higher mortgage and private education! I think the kids will be alright regardless. =)
That’s a fair point – if you went the extra miles to a private school, that will end sooner than a mortgage will.
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