NEWS
- Here’s the Outrageous Dollar Amount You’ll Need to Spend on a Home in DC to Guarantee Your Child Attends a Good School
- It's more expensive to live in a good school district, with a few exceptions
- The declining D.C. school system hired political strategists. It seems to have worked
Here’s the Outrageous Dollar Amount You’ll Need to Spend on a Home in DC to Guarantee Your Child Attends a Good School
Washingtonian
By Hillary Kelly
July 20, 2015
The District of Columbia’s Office of Revenue Analysis (DCORA) released new findings today that show how the median cost of a three-bedroom home in Washington correlates to median test scores at the new elementary school attendance zones for District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), which go into effect in fall 2015. The findings are daunting for anyone in Washington who has small children or is considering starting a family. To buy a home in a zone that guarentees your child will attend a top-performing school, you’ll need a budget far beyond the means of many.
DCORA wrote:
We found that a typical three-bedroom home in the attendance zone of a DCPS elementary school with the very top test scores - places where 80 percent or more students are proficient or advanced in reading - will cost over $800,000, and that is just the median price and does not incorporate post-purchase improvements to homes. Going down one tier does not help much either: in DCPS elementary school zones where 60 to 80 percent of students are proficient or advanced in reading, the median sale price of a three-bedroom home ranges from the high $600,000’s to over $1 million. Not until you look at schools where 45 to 60 percent of students are proficient or advanced in reading will you find a wide range of median home prices, including several below $650,000.
In other words, if you want to send your child to the very best schools in the District, as determined by standardized testing—Ross Elementary in Dupont Circle, for example, or Thomson School, which covers Chinatown, Metro Center, and Mount Vernon Square—it may be possible to buy a home for less than $800,000, but many home prices will hover around or above that number. Even if you move to a district that is ranked a “2” on this scale (with “1” marking the highest-performing schools schools and “5” marking the worst) you can still expect to pay well over $600,000 for a home.
Residence in a particular school district is not the only method for gaining entry to that district—DCORA notes that, in 2012, 40 percent* of students attended a school outside their district after winning a slot via a lottery system (or due to the fact that students could then attend schools outside their own districts). And Washington’s vast charter school system educates about 44 percent of its students. However, to guarantee admission to a top-performing school, one must reside in that school’s district.
Also worth noting is the fact that DCORA’s ratings for a particular school are, of course, based on a measure which many may find problematic. After all, the standardized testing debate still rages on in editorials, PTA meetings, and kitchens across the country. But while standardized tests may not be the ultimate determining factor of a school’s performance, there is no doubt that schools with high performace records are more likely to produce students who excel in other arenas.
But at the same time, a quick look at two maps that DCORA provided confirms that Washington’s top-performing schools are located in precisely the places most Washingtonians would imagine: they are concentrated almost entirely in the Northwest (with the exception of Ludlow-Taylor School near H Street), with a streak of Tier 1 schools following the path of the Metro’s Red Line up through Woodley Park (where average home cost is over $795,000) and Cleveland Park (where average home cost is over $1 million), and then pooling out along the Maryland border.
The worst-performing school districts, on the other hand, are located in the deepest corners of the Northeast and Southeast, and the sole school district in the Southwest also received a “5.”
DCORA’s post noted:
If you filter the map to show places where median home prices are below $500,000, you’ll see that only elementary school zones on the eastern edge of the city fit this criterion. These schools mostly fall into the three lowest performance tiers of five, though a handful schools (Leckie, Nalle, Burroughs, Barnard, Truesdell) fall into tier two, the second highest performance tier.
Put bluntly, it’s further proof that a solid public education in DC is a perk few can afford.
Correction: Since this piece was published, DCORA has informed us that some of its data was incorrect. In 2012, 40 percent of DCPS students attended an out-of-boundary DCPS school, not 71 percent as they initially posted. Some of these students didn’t enter these schools through a lottery since, at the time, they had the right to attend more than one school. We apologize for the error.
It's more expensive to live in a good school district, with a few exceptions
Greater Greater Education
By Natalie Wexler
July 21, 2015
Generally speaking, higher test scores at a DC Public School elementary school correlate with higher housing costs. But there are a few "bargain" neighborhoods, and one outlier school that's surrounded by pricey housing despite low scores.
The median price of a typical three-bedroom home within the attendance zone of a top-scoring DCPS elementary school is over $800,000, according to District Measured, a blog produced by DC's Office of Revenue Analysis. At those schools, largely in Northwest DC, 80% or more students score proficient or advanced in reading.
At the next tier down, schools where 60 to 80% of students are proficient or advanced, housing prices aren't much lower: median sale prices vary from the high $600,000s to over $1 million.
If you want to pay less than that, you may have to go to a neighborhood where the zoned school has reading proficiency rates below 60%.
In addition to a graph that correlates reading test scores and median sale prices, the ORA has created two maps. The first one shows school zones according to school rankings, and you can filter it by median home prices. The second map shows home sale prices. You can filter it by school rankings.
ORA used the school boundaries that will go into effect this coming fall. Those new boundaries only apply to students entering the DCPS system. Students who are currently enrolled at a school can stay there even if the boundaries change.
In creating the interactive maps, ORA divided schools into five tiers based on the federal government's system of tracking school performance. The federal categories are primarily based on students' scores on DC's standardized tests, factoring in the number of students who score proficient or advanced and the growth of students from one year to the next.
The maps show that there's a range of housing prices attached to schools within a given category, outside of the highest tier. Both Nalle and School Without Walls at Francis-Stevens are in tier two, for example. But the median home price in Nalle's zone in Ward 7 is $150,500, while in Francis-Stevens' zone, in Ward 2, it's $1,375,000.
Garrison Elementary, in Logan Circle, is the biggest outlier on the graph and maps. The school is in the next-to-last tier, four, with a reading proficiency rate in the mid-20s. But the median home price in its zone is over a million dollars. That's above the median price in the zone for John Eaton, a tier one school located in well-to-do Cleveland Park.
Of course, median home prices don't just reflect the desirability of a neighborhood school. Some residents either no longer have school-age kids or don't plan to. And in DC, even those who are concerned about school quality know they're not necessarily limited to the school they're zoned for.
Almost half the public school students in DC attend charter schools, and admission to them is determined by lottery rather than location. Even within the DCPS system, many students attend a school other than the one they're zoned for—40% did so in 2012, according to ORA. Overall, only about 25% of DC students attend their assigned school.
Still, there's value to having a guaranteed seat at a high-performing elementary school. That's reflected in home prices in DC as in Montgomery County and elsewhere. If you filter ORA's school performance map for increasingly lower-priced housing, you can see the available area shrink and the high-performing zones decrease.
By the time you get to a median price of under $500,000, the map is a ribbon along the eastern edge of the District, where most of the schools fall into the lowest three tiers.
The declining D.C. school system hired political strategists. It seems to have worked
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
July 21, 2015
Location, academics and reputation are the strongest factors motivating parents to choose a D.C. public school, according to a survey of 1,400 parents with newly enrolled children during the 2014-2015 school year.
Most of the parents reported that they were pleased with their choice, with 68 percent rating their school “above average” or “exceptional” and 73 percent rating the teachers at their school “above average” or “exceptional.” Nearly nine out of 10 respondents — 87 percent — said they would recommend the school district to other parents.
“There is a bandwagon effect here. People are seeing schools succeed. They want schools to succeed, and they want to be a part of it,” said Ben Finkenbinder, a senior communications manager for 270 Strategies, a political consulting company founded by veterans of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns that conducted the analysis.
The research offers an unusual look at what motivates parents’ decisions as they shop for schools in one of the nation’s most competitive academic markets.
In the District, families can apply to enroll in traditional public schools and more than 100 charter schools through a citywide enrollment lottery.
After decades of declines, enrollment has increased in D.C. public schools for the past three years, a turnaround that school officials are hoping to continue. Many schools still struggle with low enrollment amid steep competition. Charter schools enroll 44 percent of the city’s students, and many employ sophisticated marketing strategies.
Last year, consultants trained principals of traditional schools to knock on doors in a direct appeal to families, an effort that continues this summer. Now they are refining their pitch with messages based on the new market research, which included the parent survey, focus groups and polling data, a package that cost the school system $95,000.
According to the parents’ survey, satisfaction levels varied by ward — with Ward 3 families in Upper Northwest showing the highest. They also varied by grade level, with parents of children in elementary schools far more likely to give their schools and teachers high ratings than parents who have children in middle and high schools. (Less than half of the elementary school parents surveyed said they plan for their child to graduate with a diploma from a D.C. public school.)
Parents who said they chose their school primarily for its location or because it was their assigned school — the fourth most commonly cited motivation — were less likely to rate their school or teachers favorably.
Nearly three-quarters of the parents surveyed said that a school should play a “very important” role in their local community. And about half of the respondents said they value having consistent local or neighborhood schools to attend more than having multiple school options. Black parents expressed a slight preference — 49 percent, compared with 47 percent — in favor of multiple school options, while white and Hispanic parents were much more likely to say they preferred local neighborhood schools.
Nearly 70 percent of families said extracurricular activities were “very important” to them.
The consultants developed a series of messages for the schools, including an elevator pitch and a new slogan: “D.C. on the Rise: Stronger Schools. Stronger Neighborhoods.”
The school system is sharing the research with administrators this week in a series of training sessions. On Monday, a group of administrators role-played conversations at open houses with hypothetical skeptical parents in which they tried to emphasize particular academic improvements or after-school programs. The consultants handed out sample tweets and letters to the editor.
Jadyn Bradshaw, an after-school coordinator at Orr Elementary, attended the meeting because he hoped to get some new ideas for recruiting families. He’s part of an “enrollment team” at the Southeast school. The team has tried a variety of new tactics this year: It sent out an “Enroll with Us” robo-call and offered incentives for families who enrolled, such as a “Fun Night,” when staff offered child care on a Friday night so that parents could go out.
Projected enrollment at Orr for the fall is up to 399, about 15 students more than last year. But, Bradshaw said, it’s not easy to get families in the door. “We’re not marketing experts.”
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