From what I understand, you can’t choose what elementary school or high school you go to in the US. It’s based on school districts. My question is, are there rich school districts with dirt poor areas in them? If so, do those poor kids get better opportunities than the poor kids living across the school district line and are appointed to a poor school district?
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As always it probably depends. In general, I would say there aren’t dirt poor areas in most rich districts, but there can be more middle class, working class, or less affluent neighborhoods in the district and those kids probably would benefit from better schools.
Sure, school districts can cover a pretty wide area and have an overall above-average income with some poor areas. School quality within a district can also vary, though.
That said, lower income areas within good school districts tend to increase over time as they’re desirable to move to.
Yes, high school I went to was featured on Oprah when it was built yet something like 2% of the population required food assistance for lunches.
I went to one of the wealthiest public elementary schools in Los Angeles County. I lived in an average neighborhood that just so happened to be within its orbit. There was also a trailer park tucked away not far from the school, and the kids who lived there got to go to that school.
I remember the 6th grade party at a classmate’s house. It turned out they lived in a gigantic mansion (not a McMansion, but a *mansion* mansion), and they had an Olympic-sized swimming pool in grey slate. Not to mention several acres of very expensive L.A. area land. I knew they were rich but I didn’t know they were *that* rich.
I don’t think this was a very typical situation, though. Also, the non-rich kids didn’t always fare so well. Some of us might have been better off at an average school full of kids from average families.
Edit: I should note that this was back in the 1980s. The real estate/school district dynamic wasn’t nearly as cutthroat in those days.
Yes, of course. In the city I’m moving to, there is a trailer park 3 blocks from the wealthiest high school from the wealthiest district. The parents of those students are considered doing well for the type of work they do, and they’re proud they’re able to send their kids to schools that will give them a strong start.
School districts can be extremely large, OP. Sometimes one school district will encompass an entire town *and* the surrounding rural areas. So of course the socioeconomic status will be as varied as the town the district serves. Also, you can sometimes still choose your district or school. You have to apply and be accepted, but it’s not uncommon. There’s a district in my city that will accept almost anyone who can argue that attending will improve the school’s diversity.
Yes, but that doesn’t happen very often. Districts are carefully drawn. But what does happen a lot more is that a poor kid can get a transfer to a school in a different district. Sometimes they have to pay a fee, but more often they just have to have a reason that’s approved by the school administration.
The high school that Kobe Bryant attended, Lower Merion, is in generally one of the wealthiest areas of the Philadelphia suburbs. There are, however, plenty of middle class and blue collar neighborhoods in the district and even some public housing.
I didn’t attend that high school, but I can imagine that even though the student population probably skews much higher income than the national average, certainly not everyone there comes from a rich family.
It depends. In our district, with about 15 elementary schools, some of which are title I (poor) and some of which draw from very affluent areas, students from disadvantaged backgrounds don’t tend to do any better at the “nicer” schools when you look at their test scores. Anecdotally, one of my daughter’s friends from k-2 moved in 3rd grade to a less well-off area, and her mom did not petition her to stay at her original school, bc it was so socially challenging for her to fit in. Each year she would only invite my daughter and a cousin to her bday.
Yes and yes. I went to a well-funded public school district where something like 40% of students qualified for free lunch (an income-based program). I had classmates who were undocumented immigrants with parents who couldn’t speak English and classmates whose parents were execs at Fortune 500 companies. This isn’t the norm but it definitely exists. Poor and even middle/lower-middle income kids benefitted greatly from living in this district. I certainly had opportunities that many people with my family’s income level living elsewhere didn’t.
In many areas, you can go to a different school than the one you’re assigned to. You have to lottery in, though, and it’ll depend on whether there is available space at the desired school.
>From what I understand, you can’t choose what elementary school or high school you go to in the US.
that’s not true, there are ways to choose. Depends on the rules in that specific district though. But none of the schools I went to were my base schools.
>My question is, are there rich school districts with dirt poor areas in them?
the school district usually encompasses the entire county, so yes.
>If so, do those poor kids get better opportunities than the poor kids living across the school district line and are appointed to a poor school district?
yes, that can happen. But there are variances between schools even within a district, and magnet and bussing programs that intentionally vary the socioeconomic mix of kids going to any particular school as a way to try to combat that stratification.
It depends on the area. I grew up in a rural area, so the school district was the entire county (~330 square miles). You could freely attend a different district (just had to request it), but your parents would have to deal with transportation themselves, and because the districts were so large, it could be a ~45min drive each way to the next districts’s school, so not many people did it.
That said there were some kids who lived right at the edge of the county border and it was easier/faster to go to the next county’s school than ours, or one of their parents worked in that town anyway so it was easier to just take them with them, so they did that. Got it approved no problem.
There wasn’t really much of a difference in quality though so it would’ve been more for convenience reasons than school quality. In a couple of cases it was because they’d had issues with a specific kid and wanted to separate them (again, ruralish area, most of the time there was only 1 class per grade, so you couldn’t keep them separated while being at the same school).
Yes, sometimes there are poor areas in rich districts. And yes, sometimes those kids may get a better school than another district.
There was a small area at my child’s elementary school like that. It was about two streets of very old trailer parks tucked between really big, nice homes.
Where I’m from (Michigan) you can “school of choice” into whatever district you want to. Only downside is that the school bus will not pick you up from outside your district, so the parents have to provide transportation. Otherwise you can go to school wherever you want.
But yes the district I lived in had plenty of rich and plenty of poor kids. Covers a wide area.
When I went to school in SC, they worked really hard to draw insane school districts to keep the poor kids out of the nice schools.
When I went to school in NC, they had racial integration mandates and I had to ride the bus more than two hours in each direction so the inner city school would meet it’s quota of white kids.
My Dad works in one of the wealthiest school districts in the state and his school receives Title I funding (a US Department of Education anti-poverty) program).
Yes; it can definitely happen. The school district where I attended growing up covered the entire county. There were a lot of very wealthy homeowners in the county, and local property taxes funded our district well. But not everyone in the county was affluent; some families were very poor. They all went to the same schools. We had nice facilities, small class sizes, and lots of “extras”.
But cross the county line, and you get into school districts that didn’t have that same upscale tax base to draw from. Their schools were often shabby and cramped, with noticeably worse equipment and not all the same support and opportunities.
My district is like that. We are above average for income and tax revenue but we have some trailer parks.
Sure, but you’re going to have more poor kids in a poor district than a rich district.
Education funding and performance also varies by state. Some states are more local funding, other are more syate funding. Poor districts also get added funding from state / federal budgets.
States also vary a lot in terms of teacher standards. If you’re in a state with high standards for teachers you’re more likely to have a great teacher no matter where you’re at in the state.
Most certainly. The city of Chicago is covered by one school district. There’s incredibly rich areas in Chicago and there’s some of the poorest areas in the country.
I’ve taught in a “dirt poor” town and in a middle class town, and I have to say the “quality of the education” isn’t much different. At least in California, they’re likely to have similar facilities and similar standards implemented. Other factors do affect things of course. I suppose “better” teachers tend to be tempted to go to nicer, easier schools. However, I do know a number of very good teachers who stay at lower performing schools as well.
Hypothetically, yes. There are also different avenues for poorer kids from outside a district to attend school in wealthier districts, through things such as magnet programs. However those aren’t as common.
In New Jersey, there’s a long history of wealthier communities seceding from larger towns so they can form their own towns and school districts to explicitly exclude poorer kids. The phenomenon is called [boroughitis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boroughitis) or “borough-ization”, and it’s what creates our super messy town maps and borders across the state. Many of these lines were drawn to keep the community’s wealth for the wealthy kids and cut the poor kids out of the equation.
It’s all about zip codes and property taxes if you live in an area with a good property value or decent, school would be better than area with less value, reason why some densely urbanized areas has very bad schools because most people living there are worker class/middle class On the contrary, suburbs has ok/excellent schools
I live in a large school district that is overall considered wealthy. But, there are less affluent areas and a fair amount of low income immigrants whose first language isn’t English.
My district attempts to balance the desire of families to have their kids attend a school close to their home, while simultaneously attempting to have an economic mix of kids – they don’t want a school to be “the poor kids’ school”.
These competing ideologies are sometimes at odds, but overall they do a decent job, I think.
The elementary school my kids attended was a Title 1 school (a specific % below certain income level) but it was also a new building, located in an upper middle class neighborhood, so was still appealing to many mid+ income families. Those families tend to have parents who are more involved in the daily affairs of the school, and all kids benefit from that.
We were an average income family. My kids went to their classmates birthday parties – 1 was in a trailer court with no AC and the only entertainment provided was a large outdoor trampoline on a hot day. Kids loved it. Next 1 was in a McMansion style home with an inground pool. Kids had a good time there as well. I liked that they were able to mix with different types of people.
My district wasn’t rich, but we were definitely well off. And some of area covered didn’t quite count as poor(it was still a suburban neihborhood) but it was definitely poor*er* than the rest of the district. And yes, those kids got better opportunities, at least once they hit high school.
if it is in a rich area then poor is relative. Being on the lower end of upper middle class/rich is still poor compared to the super rich families.
I have seen it in one county before-namely pockets of working class people in middle to upper middle class areas. The one I can think of was within 30 minutes of a major city. It was quickly increasing in price to live in the county though.
you dont have much choice its like 1 or 2 schools per disctrict mostly, your ZIP code usually defines your future life. Rich school with GreatSchools 7 and more usually in rich neighborhood that poor people can’t afford unless its urban area with population density.
watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2R3W2uwHtQg
Short answer is yes. Wealthier areas tend to have higher taxes and are more likely to pass tax initiatives that support the schools, this means nicer school buildings, better technology and ability to pay teachers and staff better and have more of them. All of these things give children more opportunity than they would receive in a poorer district.
Depends where you’re at, in a lot of places the districts were very intentionally drawn to group poor with poor and rich with rich.
That way you can keep doing segregation in schools without running afowl of Brown V Board. See also, private schools and religious schools.
I think there are maybe 4 blocks between a poor “minority majority” neighborhood in LA and Beverly Hills’ Rodeo Drive.
In my hometown there were two high schools. The first one was a solidly middle class high school, but the second high school (where I went) had the richest kids in town mingling with the poorest of the poor. It made for an interesting high school experience.
Yes, definitely in districts that try to be equitable. High schools will usually feed larger areas that could overlap poor/ rich areas. At the high school level, you will see mostly the better off kids in honors/college prep classes, and mostly lower socio economic in the “regular” classes.
I would say Rich area is not equal to a good area.
I’m in NY, On Long Island, one of the best school districts in the country is Jericho, the school district is so good that it makes the houses crazy expensive, like it adds $100k+ to the house just because you’re zoned to the school district (Zillow says $1mil for a 3br). Jericho isn’t really the rich people area, not many big houses, but the houses are very expensive for what you get, though the school district is rated a 10.
The Rich people areas have massive houses, but the school districts are not as good (I assume those people send their kids to private school and are not concerned with the school district, still good).
And then you have poor areas, I’ll take Hempstead, NY as an example, the school district is not good and it’s a relatively low income school district. However, because of the number of businesses they have, they actually spend more per student than Jericho, [it’s just horribly mismanaged](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/01/nyregion/hempstead-failed-schools-will-the-state-step-in.html)
Yep AND vice versa. In my area near Dallas there is a town called Irving. Irving has an area of it called Las Colinas which is super rich. Usually inhabited by rich business folks who work in the city. The rest of Irving however is poorer ethnic neighborhoods mostly and is reflected in the public schools. Many folks who live in Las Colinas choose to send their kids to private schools because the schools are overwhelmingly lower income and poorly funded.