“Dear Abby” recently received a letter from a woman who was deciding whether or not to move to a better school district for the sake of her daughter. She knew her district was substandard, but loved her neighbors. Those neighbors were best friends, vacation and carpool buddies who shared their lives. The parents were friends, the kids were friends, and even the dogs got along well. Reading between the lines, the woman wanted Abby to respond with something like, “Good friends are precious. Stay where you are at.” But Abby stepped up to the plate. She unequivocally responded to “Heavy Decision” that her daughter’s education needed to come first. I’d add that maybe “Heavy Decision” should consider a plan that moves both families to better schools if possible.

I have given this advice to students’ parents in the past and I want to blog my view:

Parents should move into the best school district they can afford. A two-bedroom apartment in a great school district most likely will be a better move than that house with a picket fence in the wrong zip code. I taught bilingual classes in a middle class district that performed up to par for the state and in a district that consistently underperformed state schools by a wide margin. Here’s the piece that does not receive enough attention: I got almost all my homework back at that middle-class district. The kids in my bilingual classes absorbed the culture of the school around them. That culture included working at home at night. The kids in that middle-class school took college seriously. Because my bilingual students listened to their classmates, they knew they were supposed to go to college, even if their immigrant parents had no experience with education beyond high school or sometimes middle school. In contrast, in the 89% poverty, lower-scoring school where I taught, student efforts never matched up to those from my middle-class school. Homework completion was spotty, even after mandatory Friday after-school sessions were added for students who had not done the homework. The homework that came in did not demonstrate the same commitment and effort. Blow-off efforts were regrettably common. So were drop-outs, and babies born to mothers in high school or even middle school.

Adolescents mimic the “cool” crowd around them, but “cool” differs from school to school. In some schools, academics become part of being cool. You may not need “A” grades to be cool, but you are expected to keep up with fellow students, to be part of the crowd. Where I live, failing classes will get you an enormous amount of academic support, as well as contempt by fellow students. In the financially- and academically-disadvantaged district where I last worked, academics never carried close to the same weight. You could be an academic disaster and still be “cool.”

In addition, because the school itself had fallen so far behind, classes necessarily did not offer the same opportunities. Despite my view that we are drowning in testing, our test data tells us a great deal. If the average academic level of a middle school math class falls in the fourth grade range, even a strong teacher will be held back by the need to present remedial instruction regularly. In a stronger school, less time will be required for remediation so more grade-level work will be presented and expected. I can teach more math and teach that math faster if my class enters at grade level at the start of the year. Remediation takes time away from grade-level instruction. The studies tend to show that students who enter school behind often fall further behind with time. I suspect necessary remedial instruction forms part of that picture. The opportunity cost from regular remediation will be all the material that cannot be taught while school minutes are being employed to fill in the gaps from earlier years.

Other intangibles should also be considered in choosing a school district. A district that sends a large percentage of graduates on to college will be a district that provides helpful guidance on college opportunities. The college fairs in stronger districts are often larger and more informative. Colleges and universities cannot afford to attend college fairs at every high school across the nation. These institutions of higher learning will pick schools that have previously provided them with students. That poor district’s high school college fair provided access to information about state schools, as well as local for-profits, trade schools and the military, but the Ivy League was conspicuously absent. Ivy League schools do recruit where I live, however.

Eduhonesty: Looking to move? I’d go to your state’s school report cards before I went anywhere else. I’d find the best schools in my area and then see what I could afford. If the best I could do was an apartment, I might still make that choice. My local high school was chosen as one of the top 100 schools in the nation by U.S. News and World Report a few years ago, in part because almost every student in the high school goes on to college. That’s an educational advantage that may be worth a tiny kitchen and lack of a garage.