When it comes to schools, bargain towns
If you have money to burn and want your children to go to school in Dover - where the median sale price tops $1 million - well then go for it.
I'd still take a bookworm in a middling school system any day - I think chasing academic brands is foolish.
But that's just me. I must fess up here - I hated (K-12) school and spent as much of my time buried in a book - often at home - as possible.
Still, even here in pricey Greater Boston, most of us can't buy our way into the elite towns - and maybe wouldn't if we could.
Boston magazine's ranking of the area's schools has some big flaws, but at least it provides a rough sketch of what's out there. (The Dover-Sherborn district is No. 1 on the magazine's list.)
In my post yesterday about town/school shopping, I thought woodenhippo offered up a good, no nonsense analysis of how to squeeze some value out of the rankings.
Acton, Natick, Medway, Foxboro and Ashland are all relative bargains, woodenhippo contends. At the least, you can buy a home in these towns and not break $400,000.
Another problem with rankings such as these (especially where test scores are concerned) is that a great many of the top and middle school systems are separated by mere fractions of a percent--effectively a statistical tie in many cases. But a sequential list wrongly implies that there is an equal degree of separation (one whole number) between each entry.
For example, while Lexington is #5 in test scores and Hingham is #39 on the Boston Magazine list, it is not reasonable to conclude that Lexington schools are therefore 25% better than Hingham schools even though they appear far apart on the list of 135 systems. Both are affluent towns providing a similar child rearing environment, as are many others.
So if the goal is to find a school system that will encourage achievement by association with other high-achievers, it is probably worth considering the entire top third or top half. Of course, many other factors affect housing prices, some of which are emotional (brand premium); but there are many relative bargains with decent school systems: Acton, Natick, Medway, Foxboro, Ashland, etc.
Having said that, I send two daughters to public school in JP, which was impugned earlier as a case for hipster flight when the many children of resident lifestyle-seekers reach school age. Interestingly, that is largely not the case any longer among middle-class parents who get involved in the community and set their sights on Boston Latin (for all of the above reasons).
BB38 scored as well, offering up a link to an alternative ranking posted by a local math freak.
Furialog takes the same numbers used by Boston magazine and comes to some surprising conclusions. For one, Cambridge, ranked No. 25 in the Boston magazine list, doesn't even make the top 100.
Imagine that!
