The Home School Conundrum / Parents' real estate decisions often based on kids' education needs: "So, what's the real value of buying in a good school system? My teacher friends assure me that test scores are a poor way of assessing a school's quality, but that doesn't eliminate the influence of such numbers. It is now a real estate reality that houses located near a school with high test scores get a substantial price bump. In the Cupertino Union School District, where one school scored a nearly perfect 993 out of 1,000 and virtually all the elementary schools scored above 900 (by comparison, not a single elementary school in San Francisco scores that high), the price of a generic ranch-style home can be several hundreds of thousands of dollars higher than those in nearby cities.
According to one East Bay real estate agent, a home in Oakland identical to one across the street in Piedmont might cost $150,000 less. Now, with our education system forced to use testing as a measure of success -- fallaciously marking some schools as failures and other as models -- it's not so hard to imagine that such price margins will only swell, making the real estate market a glaring mirror of our social inequities and our individual hopes to escape them. "

so sad.... this is why i went to private school.