Amy asked me to post an open thread on how parents can choose a good school for their kids.
It’s mildly amusing that strong voucher opponents argue against the notion of choice in schools, because truthfully the middle class and wealthy already have that choice. They choose their schools every time they decide which community to live in. The more money you have, the more choice you have. The wealthiest can even choose to send their child to a private school.
When we were deciding which Jersey suburb to move to, we took into account two variables — commute time into New York City and the quality of the schools. In fact, I even made a chart with one column with the time spent on a bus and the other with percentage of high school students who went on to four year colleges. Certain towns were eliminated, because we couldn’t afford the homes there. We went to the town that was at the top of the chart and put a bid on a home immediately.
So, now that Amy is shopping around for towns and schools, what variables should she examine? I just went with the four year college statistic. All that information is available online. But what other factors should she check out? Since there is such a strong correlation between SES and schools, should she just buy a home in the wealthiest town that she can afford?
Apt. 11d 
Thanks, Laura. Now don’t let everyone jump in at once!
Just to provide a bit more information, we need a house at or under 400K, a neighborhood within walking distance of the metro, good public or parochial schools, and room for a growing family. I’ve lately been looking hard at Silver Spring and Rockville in MD, but am open to DC and VA. My preliminary impression is that schools are better in Silver Spring than in the equivalent Rockville neighborhoods, but that Rockville is shinier and more upscale. Advise away! If you would prefer to share information in confidence, write me at pruss at runbox dot com. So far, I’ve been working with greatschools.net and zillow.com, as well as reading the housing bubble blogs.
Thanks for any help.
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By the way, where is the four year college statistic available?
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So many education discussions, so little time…
I moved recently, schools (esp. elementary school quality) were a big driver of location, and I think that I made a suboptimal decision. In retrospect, I’d put a lot more weight on the communication available from the school, principal, and district. So things like, does the school/district have a website, is there a principal’s message on the website, is there readily available information, on-line or elsewhere, on curriculum, schedules, policies, etc. If there is no web presence, is the information available in a readily accessible public place (library, newspaper). What does the principal stress in any message that is found, what school topics come up in the town paper, what is mentioned about schools when talking to people in the town, and so on.
We steered clear of one elementary school because of a history of reports of bullying in the town paper. Possibly that was a good choice, but I wish I had gone with my gut on my impression of school communication. Doing any of this might require more work than looking up the test scores.
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Affordable housing…. good schools
The only funny section of an otherwise forgettable move called The Hebrew Hammer comes when the protagonist has his big seduction scene with his moll, Esther. From the screenplay: ESTHER: Mordechai? HAMMER: Yes Esther. ESTHER: I want you to talk…
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I don’t know as much about the Maryland schools, but my offhand reaction is that in DC and Virginia there is no combination of under 400k, walking distance to the metro, and good schools. I’m not sure you can even get two of the three in a place with at least 3 bedrooms and inside the beltway.
In DC, a lot depends on your willingness to do lotteries for admission to charter or out of district schools.
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I think there are a ton of ways to qualify what’s a “good” school. There are schools here with very high test scores that do nothing buy drill. The children aren’t allowed to speak unless spoken to. Parents are rarely welcomed into a classroom. I wouldn’t want that.
I would try to figure out what my educational philosophy was, then look for schools who closely match that.
As mentioned previously, I would look at principals, districts, and what the school is projecting about itself. What do they think is important? Because that will probably be their strong suit. I also would make high schools secondary. First get elementary and middle schools out of the way. You may change, the schools may change, you may move. Right now your child needs a solid foundation. My oldest and youngest are 10 years apart, the amount education in general has evolved is enormous in the generation between them.
You might also want to look at focus, magnet and charter schools. There are some that my fit with your ideals and standards.
If your district has open enrollment you have the ability to move to a school out of your boundaries because it better suits you.
Also, I really would visit some schools in the flesh. Some may be open and warm and give you a tour, others may be less welcoming.
I would not just go by test scores. It’s one factor, but not the only one.
And it the end, I believe it balances out for most kids. Your child will have some great teachers, some weak teachers, good years, bad years- just like we all did. We can do what we can to make school a positive experience, but we can’t make it a perfect experience.
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I did extensive research both in Los Angeles and New Jersey (well, less exhaustive in NJ, but the choice was a lot easier). I too relied some on greatschools.net, especially in CA. Also word of mouth among friends and friends of friends (don’t be shy, ask everyone you know if they have friends with school-aged kids in the towns you’re considering). And I certainly looked at the schools’ web presence to get a feel for the overall message.
Some towns also have online message boards, either web-based or email lists, and they can be valuable though you have to take them with a grain of salt, because they’re usually bitch sessions. Still, good to know what kinds of things people are complaining about regarding schools in their town.
But I found the best method was the good old fashioned school tour. Of course they’ll show you all the shiny happy aspects of their school, but you can still read between the lines. If you’re lucky, the principal or assistant principal will be available to give the tour and you can get a sense of their personality and focus. But even a parent-led tour is useful, especially for the glimpses into the classrooms.
For me, test scores were less important than a nurturing environment. In LA, our home school was harsh and strict; the assistant principal scolded kids as she walked us through the school yard. A nearby school was much warmer; the principal greeted kids by name and complimented them, but it was clear too that the school was tightly run, not slipshod. Another nearby school seemed warm but ramshackle; the playground equipment was scarily rundown and recess was a zoo. So you totally can tell. (We chose the second school, in case you couldn’t guess!) When we moved to NJ, we chose a town with a progressive approach to teaching rather than one with a competitive academic focus, and then chose the school with the most dedication to hands-on, small-group learning because that’s my personal educational preference as well as the environment that best suits my son’s learning needs.
One last comment, this one about housing prices: I strongly recommend you consider renting for a while instead of buying. If you’re following the housing bubble blogs, you know what’s happening. Wait a year or two (or three) and your price range will buy a lot more. (That’s incidentally what we’re doing right now. We sold before moving east and are now renting.) This will also give you more flexibility if you learn that your choice of town wasn’t as good a fit as you’d hoped.
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Choosing a school is just like buying blue jeans: one size definitely does not fit all. It’s all about body type for jeans; for school it’s all about what’s right for your kid. In the city of Chicago, where we live, this is perhaps more obvious because there’s very little connection between where you buy your house and what school the kids attend. And so the school choice conversation becomes very overtly about specific aspects of specific schools.
For our family, our biggest criteria was finding a calm, relatively under control environment. This to keep our oldest, who can be pretty fragile in the face of too much stimulus, from shutting down. We particularly paid attention to turnover rates in class and wild playground scenes. When we found a school that would also take her little sister in their pre-school program, we were done looking.
I know other families, however, that sought out these crazy playgrounds. They did not view them as crazy — they saw a place where their very high-energy boy could get his ya-yas out before class and would not be tagged as ADHD. Some other friends chose a school with an immersion Spanish program because one set of grandparents speaks Spanish and it was a huge priority for them. Other friends chose another school because many of their shy son’s pre-school friends would be there.
I haven’t seen much connection between a school having a web site and the overall quality. And as someone else mentioned, I am suspicious of test scores on their own. Many parents in Chicago mutter about the infamous suicide rate at New Trier High School, one of the top-scoring schools in the country. Test scores are part of a bigger picture.
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Tamar, what she said. Why buy now? Prices are not rising, and if they aren’t, then you compare the rent you would pay for a pleasant house in a nice district to the cost of mortgage payments. People buy to have a roof over their heads, and with a component of investment (‘we’ll be rich, dear! rich! rich!). In our neighborhood, we have a lot of houses available for rent, people who bought for speculation and can’t stand the notion that they’re not going to make the 10% per year that they saw someone else make last year.
I have three kids in the Arlington VA schools – love our school, have heard good things about most of the others. Arlington lets you enroll your kid in a pretty wide array of schools (if you don’t live near the school of your dreams, you have to drive the kid there and back, bus service is mostly for your neighborhood school and some designated magnets).
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We’ve got an unusual company-housing living situation that will eventually be ending, so renting then buying would mean suffering and paying for two moves rather than just one. If not for that, I would definitely heed the bubble bloggers. Maybe rent-to-own is the best choice, reserving the option to renegotiate the price down? I’ve never done this before, so it’s a whole new world.
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By most of the above mentioned criteria, we’d be in big trouble.
My daughter goes to an elementary school with the following statistics: 66% get free reduced lunch; 64% are ethnic minorities; only 42% go to a 4 year college (at the high school level) and the test scores are average. I could go on – but trust me that if you went by statistics alone, anyone with half a brain would steer clear of this school.
But….we are having the most fantastic experience. Her teachers for the last two years have been phenomonal. They welcome parental involvement. They let her work ahead….in fact, they have created special work just for her. I’ve been treated with nothing but respect by the teachers and principal alike.
For me, it’s not just academics. Tonight, we were reading a book about Martin Luther King and segregation. My daughter looked at me with a very worried expression and said, “I’m so glad that isn’t true now because I wouldn’t be able to play with my best friends: ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C,’ ‘D,’ and ‘E’.”
Yes, there are challenges. Many, many challenges. Many classes can’t go on field trips because there are only 3-4 kids in the entire class who can pay the $4 field trip money. Poverty brings particular behavioral problems….And so on….
But I just wanted to chime in that in our case, we are having a onderful experience at a school that many wouldn’t even include in their search.
And I did get a warm and fuzzy feeling when I realized that in my mother’s generation – schools could legally be segregated…but in my daughter’s generation, five of her best buddies at school are black. It’s not much – but to me, it is progress.
Sometimes I worry that whites are segregating again…not by laws this time, but by vouchers and charters and flight to the suburbs. Myself included: our small neighborhood is 99.9% white. But that’s a whole ‘nother topic….
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Funny you mention New Jersey. I was the editor behind the infamous rankings of NJ high schools. Now I am finishing a PhD in educational research and policy.
What I know now that I didn’t know then is that classrooms vary more than schools. Within any school, you can have vastly different experiences depending on the teacher. School statistics gloss over this by aggregating student achievement.
If you are white and affluent, you will get a good education no matter where you go to school. In study after study, the children of white, educated, affluent parents do well in school and beyond.
There are lots of questions about value-added from schools that cater to affluent whites. What exactly do schools add? I had someone tell me that the teachers in a private school were terrific, and I asked, how do you know? How do you know they are better than those who teach the poor kids in a nearby town? You don’t actually because the rich, private school kids would perform better on tests regardless.
If I had to pick a school, I would look for one where the superintendent and other administrators were welcoming to parents who wanted visit, but adamantly prevented parents from involving themselves in the education going on there. There’s a difference between helping and meddling, between observing and getting in the way. A good administrator knows one is valuable and the other is destructive. That administrator also protects the teachers to do the work they do best–teach.
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Amy,
I’m an economist here in DC. I don’t have any children myself, so I’ll let the others outline the best criteria for choosing a school in the area – there are a great many good ones here. (I do have several friends whose children attend the bilingual Oyster School in DC and I’ve heard wonderful things about it.)
I’m going to repeat much of the advice above. First, you will likely find that your criteria of (a) house < $400,000 and (b) metro accessible is a null set, even before you add the decent school criteria. However, do not dispair, or move your family to West Virginia. Or sign yourselves up for the nightmare of a $550,000 mortgage you can't afford.
This is an unusual moment in real estate cycles, a tipping point in a market that has been characterized by heavy speculation and easy credit. The DC market, particularly Northern Virginia and Maryland suburbs, was overrun with real estate speculators that drove prices up 50% in 2004 and 2005 (prices are currently 125% of 2000 prices) Prices are projected to drop even further.
My advice, to save both your money and your sanity (you don't want to sign up for one of those long DC commutes just to own a house, trust me), is to rent for a few years. Rent a house in Arlington, Alexandria, Bethesda or Silver Spring. You will pay *so* much less. You will avoid potentially putting your family in financial peril. Yes, moving is a pain, but it is not as bad as being stuck in house because you can't sell it for more than $100,000 less than you owe the mortgage. Now is *not* the time to buy a home in DC.
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Re: buying a home in the most affluent district you can afford, this is essentially how my parents chose a public school district for my sister and me back in the day. They asked around, everyone pointed to this one town, and they bought a total dump at the peak of the market so we could go to school there. Now that things have come full circle and my husband and I are looking to buy our first house, I can say that I wouldn’t wish the affluent, high-test-scores schools I attended on my own children. It’s not because I didn’t get a good education, because I did – it’s just that I didn’t enjoy any of it. There was no community; before tracking, I was constantly bored; after tracking, I was a slave to homework and extracurriculars.
Now, I know that one could do a lot worse. There are schools where kids are physically threatened, don’t have enough textbooks to go around, etc. Obviously, you don’t want your kid in a school like that. But while an affluent district generally does guarantee decent academic achievement, it does not guarantee a positive educational experience.
Re: the housing bubble, we’re looking in metro-area NJ and some houses we’ve looked at currently have tenants renting for $500+ more per month than we’d pay for a mortgage on the same house. It must vary a great deal even in the eastern corridor.
(By the way, I’m a different Tamar…fulfilling a long-unrealized dream of needing an initial after my first name.)
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I’ve been doing quite a lot of craigslisting, zillowing, and checking the Washington Post, mapping out school locations and homes. It’s looking like a single family home very close to metro and under or slightly over 400K is actually feasible, and growing more and more so all the time if one is willing to live in a circa 1950 house in Rockville or Silver Spring, although Rockville doesn’t seem to have good public schools in those areas. Parochial school is an option (and if we had unlimited resources would probably be our pick), but that would mean ruthlessly pushing the house price down as far as it will go (I have noticed, by the way that Silver Spring seems to have a number of lousy parochial schools). In any case, I wouldn’t touch a 550K mortgage with a ten-foot pole. And I solemnly swear to stick to a 30-year fixed mortgage and not get involved with a dubious “exotic” mortgage! We won’t be buying until the spring, in any case, by which time quite a lot may have happened in the market.
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We were having tech problems with Typepad yesterday. Let’s see if comments are working now.
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Good luck, Amy. I hope this advice on the housing market and schools helped you out.
It was interesting to hear the various perspectives on how to measure good schools — test scores, graduation rates, parental involvement, diversity, choice within district, economic make-up of a neighborhood.
I’m sure the interests of the parents and the needs of the child affect matters. Strongly opinionated parents are going to be frustrated in a hierarchical school model. Super smart kids can thrive in many different types of schools.
We came to no conclusions, but the experts haven’t either, so this matter may be impossible to rap up in a comment section of a blog.
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I don’t know how well this would work in the DC metro area, but here in
Philly we chose a place to live before we had our first baby, and liked
it enough that we’ve decided to stay in the same neighborhood and look
for good schools where we are.
This is a bit tricky because most of the city public
elementary schools, including the one for the catchment area
we live in, leave much to be desired. But there are a lot of charter,
parochial, and independent private schools in the area to choose from.
Some of them are quite expensive, but many of them offer financial aid
to families that need it (and some of the high-tuition schools also have
good-sized endowments for financial aid, so the net cost to the family
can sometimes be similar to lower-tuition schools). And some of the
charters seem quite good too, and not at all homogeneous, though many of
the best have enough applicants that getting through their lottery is no
sure thing. (I’d echo the suggestion earlier to not just go on test
scores; one of the charters with some
of the highest scores here showed definite signs of “test-drill
sweatshop” when we visited.) There are also some good city magnet
schools, but they don’t start until grade 5 or so, and our kids
won’t be that far along for few more years.
It might have been an easier choice to just move out to a suburb with a
decent public school system, and sometimes we wonder if we’ll need to do
that if educational costs get too high. (Of course, there’s a tradeoff,
since many of the “best” public school districts also have substantially
higher housing costs than where we live now. In our neighborhood, lower
property prices when and where we bought meant we could put more money
into tuitions and less into housing-related payments.) We
like living in a place that’s multi-hued and multicultural, where you
can say hi to your neighbors on the porch and walk to the store or the
park or hop a train downtown instead of
having to drive everywhere; and where we don’t lose awareness of the
less privileged because they’ve been priced or zoned far out of
town. And we like getting the chance to choose a good match for each of
our kids from a set of schools with a wide variety of philosophies,
curricula, and
teaching styles, instead of just settling on the same kind of public
school for both of them. So far that’s worked out for us; we’ll see what
the future brings.
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More hijacking of this comment thread: rent versus buy. Let’s take the following: $400000 price, 6% interest on a mortgage, taxes $5000, you can deduct taxes and interest from income so they cost you 70 % of their nominal value: your cost per month is ($29000 x .7)/12 = $1700 a month. And let’s say the rent would be $1800 on the equivalent house. Looks pretty good. You are up a hundred a month, which can help pay for toilets and dishwashers going out, though it won’t do much for you when you need a new roof (cf Laura’s recent post about her hot water heater of sainted memory).
Now, think what happens if the place goes up 4% per year, stays exactly level in price, goes down 2%, or goes down 4%. Well, you make $16000, or nothing, or minus $8000 or minus $16000, every year. You can assign a probability to each if you want – say 10% likelihood of appreciate 4%, 10% for appreciate 2%, 40% no movement, etc etc. And that’s your expected appreciation. And if you need to sell, you pay your realtor 6% off the top.
So if three years into this, you either decide the school you thought was so swell, wasn’t so swell, or the principal you thought kept the whole thing together gets run over by a truck, or you have another child who is blind and you decide that the special ed services in Falls Church are the ones that kid must have or the mister gets a job in Vienna and you have one in DC and you absolutely have to be on the Orange Line instead of the Red – ONLY if you have made two per cent appreciation or more are you not going to have to bring a check to the table. And if prices go down more than four per cent, it’s going to be a BIG check.
So in my view, you need to be pretty sure you want to be where you are buying for it not to be a really risky thing to do.
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Jay Matthews wrote a column on this topic, “Lazy Parents’ School Guide,” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2003/04/08/AR2005032304321.html.
One thing to remember: chacun à son goût. Outside of catastrophic circumstances, the difference between “good” and “tolerable” schools is a matter of definition. Your children’s own needs will color your judgement of a school. Do your kids need a school with certain programs, such as reading specialists trained in specific techniques, or a gifted and talented program?
Before you buy a house in a district, try to speak with someone who has older kids in the school district. Take everything with a grain of salt, of course, and remember that a change of administration, or the normal turnover of teachers, and turnover in families living in a district, can change the character of a district.
Good luck!
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What are people’s thoughts about Montessori schools? I’ve only heard wonderful things about them, but that their styles vary.
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Montessori is quite self-directed, so it depends on close monitoring by teachers to make sure that the kid is not developing any holes in their learning through their choices. It is also based on the premise that early childhood education is largely developmentally driven (i.e. that through the ages of 5-8 you have a large variety in skills acquisition that is due to developmental stage of the individual child, and not on the method of teaching). In addition, I’ve heard from early-childhood teachers (K-3) that switching from the montessori method to conventional systems within that period can be difficult, because in montessori, children are not expected to acquire any particular skill in K, 1, or 2, but instead distribute themselves. So, a kid who switches from 1st grade in a montessori to 2nd grade in a public school might have significant skill holes that have to be addressed.
So, I found montessori great for 2-5 year-olds, but findit problematic for 5-12 year olds, because I want older kids to acquire a stronger set of particular skills (i.e. multiplication tables, reading skills, etc). For 2-5, though, I had no real expectations of particular skills. Others may set the age level differently (i.e. group 2-3 together, and 5-8 together), and come to different decisions.
bj
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Thanks BJ- that was very informative!
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A good school should be child friendly and should focus on children to the core.It should keep children as it’s priority rather than anyone else.
The way they are dealt should mean something more esp. to keep the self esteem of children to better level.
Staff must be better trained and have better attitude to handle children.Besides the lessons they should reach & teach them life.They should be able to get the best of every child from him/her.
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