Anyone who lives in West Hartford or is looking to buy a house in West Hartford, could tell you that the main draw to this lovely town if ours is the great schools. People are willing to take out huge mortgages and pay well above the average for homes in West Hartford because it means they don’t necessarily have to send their children to area private schools.
The cost of education as part of the cost of a home, not necessarily any economist or politician’s first thought when it comes to the housing bubble and the subprime crisis, but one that should definitely be considered:
Education There’s a lot of focus on the interest rate deduction that is embedded inside a mortgage. I think the most obvious embedded option inside a mortgage that isn’t discussed is the option to educate your children at the local school district. If sending 3 kids to a private high school at your old houses costs $5,000/year, and if the new house’s public high school is free and equally good then taking a $60,000 bath on the house is break-even. Completely rational.
The value of this option has increased, both with the returns to education but also with a general worry about the robustness of our educational meritocracy. The amount of money and energy that goes into securing access to high-end education has skyrocketed over the past decade, and part of that budget, though it isn’t treated as such, is in your house. And though we often think of educational inequality as a function of a Kozol-narrative of the poorest against the richest, this bidding may be most driven by inequality between the middle and the highest parts of the inequality curve. I’d really like to see some hard research into how much our desire to educate our children in the best way possible has driven subprime and the housing bubble.
Filed under: Education
Via NYT:
But black students have made important gains in several Southern states over two decades, while in some Northern states, black achievement has improved more slowly than white achievement, or has even declined, according to a study of the black-white achievement gap released by the Department of Education this morning.
As a result, the nation’s most dramatic black-white gaps are no longer seen in Southern states like Alabama orMississippi, but rather in Northern and Midwestern states like Wisconsin, Nebraska, Connecticut and Illinois, according to the federal data.
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By 2007, the widest black-white gap in the nation on the fourth-grade math test, (not counting the District of Columbia, which is not a state) showed up not in the deep South but in Wisconsin.
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Connecticut is another Northern state where achievement gaps are larger than in states across the South, the federal study shows. That is partly because white students in Connecticut score above the national average, but also because blacks there, on average, score lower than blacks elsewhere. [Italics mine]
This goes back to a discussion my mom and I were having on Sunday – Conard vs. Hall. Hall ranks nationally higher on achievement – higher SAT scores, higher grad rates, more 3+ on AP tests, better statewide scores than Conard. Conard ranks higher nationally when it’s scores are stabilized for the percentage of students receiving free or reduced lunch. See unlike the other high-performing Connecticut Valley (and Fairfield County schools for that matter) like Greenwich, Simsbury, Farmington, Hall, and Avon, Conard has the lowest family income per student (i.e. more free and reduced lunches). Conard is performing as well as it does across the board, across the racial and socioeconomic bounds of the school, albiet lower than the scores of neighboring school districts with less diverse student population.
And this all boils down to – my name is Amy, I was born and raised in Connecticut. I had the opportunity to attend Catholic school and then graduate from the #1 public high school in the state, and no, I am not a spoiled rich kid. And yes, I had the most diverse and rewarding experience at Conard High School that I have ever experienced in my educational career, including while attending Boston University. In the end, you learn best when the people around you are different from yourself.
