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Intelligent_End6019 OP t1_j47xfdl wrote

Reply to comment by GM_Pax in High property prices in poor school districts by Intelligent_End6019

This is a question in the right direction: I haven't looked carefully, but I don't think spending per student accounts for the difference.

The typical correlation is expensive houses (relative to area) -> affluent parents -> better school performance. This holds true pretty well in most school districts around Boston, but not in a few.

I suppose, as another poster proposed, it is the location bonus that raises the prices, but I'm impressed that a location bonus would be so strong.

Another poster mentioned that some Boston schools are stellar. I know there is a lottery to get in, but I suppose if you have the right connections the lottery isn't so random.

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bobby_j_canada t1_j4ckycd wrote

Nah, the wealthy parents end up leaving Boston because the lottery is fairly nepotism proof. The BPS lottery is frankly too complicated and confusing to be easily gamed -- I don't even think the people running it even understand how it works. If it were that easy to game, the rich parents would have had it locked up decades ago.

There was a huge dust-up recently about exam school seats, because they changed the rules to give seats to a more geographically diverse set of students. This resulted in a lot of angry upper-class parents, because (surprise surprise) those upper-class neighborhoods had previously been overrepresented in exam school admissions.

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GM_Pax t1_j4857rp wrote

On the one hand, I was thinking that maybe despite relatively high revenue, that those towns might be underspending on their public schools.

Or, it's also possible that the money being spent on the schools, however much it is, just is not being spent wisely or effectively.

...

For example, I went to HS in Dracut, and while I was there, the athletic teams got a larger chunk of the school's budget than some entire academic departments.

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