Comment by wrycoder
4 years ago
The university system may still be world-class, but the public schools are definitely not. CA isn’t a great place to live, if you are blue collar.
4 years ago
The university system may still be world-class, but the public schools are definitely not. CA isn’t a great place to live, if you are blue collar.
This is a big oversimplification the same way that the national news is a big oversimplification.
Many of the nation's best public high schools [1] are in the Bay Area - Saratoga (#16), Gunn [Palo Alto] (#18), Lynbrook [San Jose] (#33), Paly [Palo Alto] (#34), Monta Vista [Cupertino] (#46), Lowell [SF] (#59), Los Altos (#85), Mission San Jose [San Jose] (#89), San Ramon (#96), Homestead [Sunnyvale] (#101), Cupertino (#105), Amador Valley [Pleasanton] (#112), Miramonte [Moraga] (#114), Mountain View (#121), Piedmont (#127), Foothill [Pleasanton] (#164), and this is just the top 170 out of 17,000 (1%). That's a huge portion of the region. SF & Oakland get a bad rep because a lot of their schools have legit problems and they're lottery assignment, so there's no way to avoid them other than going private. But outside of lower Manhattan, Silicon Valley probably has the greatest density of top-ranked public schools in the country, beating out even traditional powerhouses like suburban Boston and Westchester County NY.
And yes, the region is a terrible place to live if you are blue collar, but that's because blue collar people can't afford to live in the region.
[1] https://www.niche.com/k12/search/college-prep-public-high-sc...
Thank you for putting that together!
I’m somewhat surprised that the highest rated were only #16 and #18.
Virtually all of those are in elite districts. Gunn, I think, has a household income of $200K.
Only a couple of miles away is the East Palo Alto high school (a charter school!), where only 12% are proficient in math and 52% in reading[0]. That’s where the service workers live.
Overall, California ranks poorly, around #44 [1], while the New England states are in the top ten, except for the ringer Maine at #16 [1]
Blue collar can’t afford to live on the coast, but they can elsewhere.
[0] https://www.niche.com/k12/east-palo-alto-academy-east-palo-a...
[1] https://scholaroo.com/state-education-rankings/
It's nationwide rankings, so #16 & #18 out of 17,000+ is pretty good.
It's also worth looking at who's ahead of them. The listing includes charter & magnet schools which can select their student body. If you take them out, the only ones left are #3 (High Tech High School, Lincroft NJ), #4 (Stuyvesant), and #9 (Bronx High). Those also are magnet schools, which for some reason are not flagged as such in Niche's database. Saratoga and Gunn are the #1 and #2 general-admission high schools in the U.S, at least insofar as you can have $2M home prices and still be "general admission". #3 is Canyon Crest in San Diego. The next 3 are magnet schools in NYC, then there's University High in Irvine (#32), Lynbrook (#33), and Paly (#34). Take out magnet schools and all of the 6 top general-admission public schools in the U.S. are in California.
California uses housing policy as a weapon. It substitutes for border walls, charter schools, vouchers, militarized police, and a lot of other policies that the Right espouses but most of California finds abhorrent. If most social ills stem from being poor, one simple way to avoid them is to ensure that poor people cannot afford to live in your community.
That famous blue collar of Silicon Valley. If you're blue collar you couldn't afford to live in a mailbox in any of those towns. I don't know what you think has been oversimplified.