I’ve been thinking about this post for awhile and see that Anomie has beaten me to it… We’re facing a similar dilemma and I’d love to hear from those of you who study education or neighborhoods. My knowledge of these topics is mostly limited to the conditions in each that cause crime — this knowledge offers little guidance on the question we’re facing.
We live in an area of the country where buying a house in the open market is simply not feasible — up until a few months ago that is. When we moved here, we assumed we would buy through a job-sponsored program whereby you get a house in a great neighborhood with some of the best schools in the state but you don’t really own it. The appreciation you can earn is capped but you’re guaranteed not to lose money. Now, with the market tanking, we could also buy a townhouse or condo in a good neighborhood (unlike Anomie describes, there are no crack dealers associated with either choice) with good (but not great) schools for the same (or less) than through the job program.
Give my penchant for investigating all choices to the point to craziness, I am now completely unable to make a decision. In the spirit of blogging being a time-saver (rather than a time-suck), I’ve decided to stop reading the research and engage the blogging community as a shortcut.
Here are our thoughts: In the job-sponsored neighborhood, with respect to test scores, the pass rate for standardized tests is roughly 80%, in other locations, roughly 50%. The job-related neighborhood has a lottery-driven school that is the best in the state (and a K-8, which my developmental psych friends tell me is good since you want to minimize school transitions during puberty, especially for girls). This is not an option in the other places we are looking.
Mr. Me hates the idea of the job-related neighborhood for long-term financial reasons (and, doesn’t love the idea of being surrounded by colleagues 24/7 either). The job-related neighborhood also feeds into a high school with some of the wealthiest kids in the state — he’s not terribly pleased at the idea of Junior surrounded by kids who have much, much more than she does.
On the other hand, I like the job-related neighborhood. The houses are nice, more green space, and the schools make me drool. I’m not as concerned about the long-term finances, though I concede that Mr. Me is right that we’d probably be giving up many thousands of dollars and this decision would prevent us from ever trading up to a larger or better house.*
Here are my questions:
- In the lingo of great schools.org, we’re choosing between a 10/10 school and an 8/10 school. Is this an important difference?
- Is the 50% to 80% difference big? Do I just want to find something with a pass rate above a certain level (say, 50%) or is the gap more telling?
- What about the school transition thing? Is this as big a deal as people tell me?
- Is Mr. Me right about the relationship between the class distribution of a school and Junior’s happiness?
- Having spent some time in TX (and attending UT before the 10% rule) and living now in a state that has a similar policy with regard to college admissions (the top x % rule), is there a disincentive to putting Junior in the best school in the state with the children of physics PhDs? Might her chances of getting into a Berkeley or a UT-Austin be better if she attends a good, but not great school rather than the best school?**
- What would you do? What am I missing? What mattered for your own kids and your own neighborhood?
*Another major negative: if the spouse whose job it is that gets us into the job-related neighborhood subsequently loses their job, we not only face a large financial hardship (like everyone else), we also automatically lose our house.
**Assuming, of course, that Junior wants to attend college and is, in fact, the little genius that I think she is. Knowing her, she’ll probably become a Cowboys cheerleader or join the military just to piss me off.
I can only speak to the education research end of this and not anything else. My specialty is California, but many states have the resources like they do. While greatschools is a solid resource, some states, have better resources. For example http://www.ed-data.k12.ca.us is the best resource for parents looking at california schools. It includes almost all the publicly available data and the methods for rating are easy to find.
The schools research says that there are advantages from attending well off schools and there is a whole literature on the importance of school context. Looking at the college going rates and where grads are going to college is importance. Schools where 80% of students go to college tend to have better resources for helping students get into college than schools where 25% attend college.
I went to school in a place where most people had much more than I did in terms of resources, but we all got the same education, and attention from college counselors. It was good for me in the long run to have the college prep public high school. (For example, i was pushed to apply to and ultimately attended a small liberal arts college better than the state school i applied to, because had i gone to a state school I would have gotten no aid, but at a private i got almost as much aid to make the difference in cost between the two very small. It was the savvy of the guidance dept though to know that and make that recommendation to my parents)
As for the K-8, or ES and MS the literature is inconclusive. Basically there are advantages and disadvantages to each. K-8 is the trend right now, but how the schools are structured are secondary to curriculum and teacher quality. Besides, if the K-8 has no transitions and there is poor articulation between the 8th grade and the HS, that is a harder transition than if the ES, MS and HS all work together and think about the 8th to 9th grade transition.
I wish you the best of luck.
claveles: thanks so much, ca is the state i am in and the website you referred me to is great. i’ve been frustrated with greatschools.org because i can’t seem to figure out where the 8/10 schools lost points — some of the things they put in there i don’t care as much about, others i care a lot about. the website you mention gives me more of what i want to know, and much more detail.
interesting on the k-8 as well — we actually found one in another neighborhood and it’s rated terribly.
thanks much for sharing your expertise. blogging saves the day…
And you have been looking at the department of education’s data, as well, right? I don’t know if this is an obvious “duh” place to go first, or if it just is to me because I used to teach in public schools.
That’s weird. Wonder how I screwed up the underlining…
i have seen the department of ed website. it’s more a matter of not knowing which indicators are most important — for example, school size versus class size distinction. some friends who study this say school size is actually more important and i guess that makes sense but i never would have known that on me own.
I’m not sure that I am at all qualified to answer this question. I don’t have kids (nor will we any time soon seeing as how my wife and I are already tripping over each other in our small New York apartment) and so this is all very academic to me at this point. However, academically, I do study neighborhoods (mostly perceptions of neighborhoods/discrimination and health outcomes), so maybe I might be of some help.
The first thing that I thought of when both you and Anomie describe this is that neighborhood-effects models tell us a lot about the world (indeed, if they didn’t, my job prospects would be very, very bad) but that they are also models. Getting a particular significant beta coefficient can tell us a lot, but no matter how well the line fits the data, there is still a lot of variation in outcomes, even at the individual level. In my research, if we explain ten percent of the variation at the neighborhood level, we’re excited (and, substantively, it means something important). That also means that 90% is explained at the individual/family level. The fact that you know all about these effects and their possible causes means that you (and Anomie)will be well-prepared to mitigate those negative effects and your respective children will be that dot well above the regression line.
Best of luck with the decision!
Thanks, Mike! It’s easy to forget that those significant differences can actually be small in effect size. And I think that’s going to be my new goal in life: to become a dot above the regression line. Assuming the regression line is predicting something positive and desired, that is.