Should We Move to a Better School District?

Does the rating of a public school district really matter? We bought our home before we were married in a suburb of Boston that doesn’t have great ratings for the public school district, because we didn’t have kids and it was convenient to where we work. We now have a 1-year-old and are trying to figure out if we should move or stick it out to see if the schools get better. (We are public school kids ourselves and would rather not send the kids to private school.) Thanks! —Joyce On an individual level, this question doesn’t have a direct answer, although I’ll talk through some considerations below. On a societal level, the fact that we have such stark inequality in the quality of schools, and that many students with fewer family resources also have fewer school resources, is a huge public policy problem. That said, to the individual question, it makes sense to me to start by thinking about what these school rankings really measure. You live in Massachusetts, and you can see a set of school rankings here. These rankings are based on a number of categories, but among the notable data they incorporate are test scores, student-teacher ratio, college-going rates, and quality of facilities. To a first approximation, public school district rankings align with test scores. You’d get a similar ranking if you looked more or less only at test scores — not identical, but broadly similar. One interpretation of this is that test scores are a good metric of quality, because higher scores mean more learning is going on. However: test scores are also enormously reflective of family resources. Wealthier school districts have families with more resources who are able to afford more for their schools, and families are also able to spend these resources to support their kids outside of school. When we talk about “good school districts,” we very often simply mean “wealthier districts.” This correlation means that if you took exactly the same school, with the same teachers, and you changed the student mix, you’d likely change the test scores and the rankings. School rankings only in part reflect what is going on at school. Which is to say that the experience that your individual child will have at two different schools may not differ as much as the average experience at each of those schools. It is true, however, that a school district with a higher ranking probably provides more resources in school — more sports, more arts, probably smaller classes. This is because that same wealth that provides family resources also provides higher property taxes, which contribute to better-funded schools. These are considerations that may matter to you. But there are others that also may matter — for example, the diversity of the school, which is unfortunately sometimes at odds with the rankings (for example, the highest-ranked school district in Massachusetts gets a “C–” grade on diversity). In his book How to Raise an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi makes the compelling argument that exposure to diversity is key to children’s development, and that we should value that as a component of our children’s education the same way we value math or language arts. Let me say one last thing, which is: your child is a year old. I wouldn’t move now. Yes, they grow up faster than you think, but I think you have a year or two to re-evaluate.

Should We Move to a Better School District?

Q&A on school rating

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