February 19, 2007

We are making schools a top priorty in our search.

For reasons such as price (we’ve got money but are by no means rich!), proximity to my work, and intangibles like ‘having a good feeling about the neighborhood’, we’ve narrowed our search down to just a few towns, and Arlington came in at the top of the list. Since they have only one middle school and high school (both of which have very respectable reviews) we don’t have to worry about them.

So - the only variable is grade school.

It probably has minimal impact on my son’s future.

I think the biggest impact of grade school ranking is on resale value. We don’t need the absolute best. The guiding criteria here will be similar to how we elect our politicians - don’t pick the bad one.

I’ve been using a couple of sites to help filter through the standardized test scores. I think that these numbers are publically available, but I have been unable to find an easy place to download them.

The free sites I’ve found so far are:

School Digger

Great Schools

If anyone out there knows of a site that has more insight on Arlington schools, please let me know (leave a comment!). Like I said - primary motivation here is to avoid a really bad school. It is easy to find schools that look really good. For instance, Brackett school appears superb when only viewing test scores - it was ranked 5th out of 900 schools based on their 3rd grade results. Does that translate into a stepping stone to a great academic career? I doubt it, and so does “rogue” economist Steven Levitt. Levitt wrote an entire section in his book regarding the falsehood of taking standardized test results as a sole indicator of a school’s quality. The quick summary of what he wrote is that just because we can measure them, it doesn’t mean that they are right!

The standard Gaussian or “bell” curve applies to school testing results - what happens to those kids at Brackett who are riding in the -2 and -3 sigma zone? Do they get extra special attention? It would seem to me that added pressure to perform on standardized tests is a little more than what the average 8 year old kid really needs in his life.

I loooove Google Earth. We used it when we first moved to Boston to check out rental places that our Real Estate agent chose to show us. We had always planned on renting for about a year when we moved here - that would allow us to figure out the best place to buy (and give the current drop in housing prices a chance to continue in our favor).

One of our priorities in finding a place is to pick a great school for our 4 year old. He won’t be starting grade school for another two years because he was born in September, so we have time to wait and seize the best opportunity we can to ensure a great kick-off for his formal education.

One of the things that is difficult when looking through listings for houses is that they won’t always list school districts. People without children probably don’t care (unless they are worried about resale values), but everyone I know with kids has this high on their list of priorities as well.

So - I took Google Earth’s editing function and drew out the Arlington school districts from the somewhat scattered Arlington school website. They do have the school districts there, but the information is presented as separate scans from a paper map outlining the different districts. It is annoying, because it is very difficult to check on whether a house is within a particular district or not.

Now with my new Google Earth tool, I simply type in the house address and it zooms me into some satellite imagery (showing parks, neighborhood, busy roads, etc) that is overlaid with the school district. I even traced out the MinuteMan bike path which I am planning on using to get me to the Alewife T-stop for my daily commute.

The interface looks like this:

There are 7 different school districts (schools indicated by yellow pushpins) shown here. The MinuteMan bikepath starts from the red pushpin in the lower right (Alewife Station) and runs through the middle of most of them.

The white circle near the rightmost pushpin is the graffitied area that I mentioned near one of the houses we looked at last weekend. I’ve already been able to use it to rule out a suggestion that a real estate agent sent to me - I was able to see that although the house she suggested was in a good school district, it was located next to a fairly busy road as well as a rather large graveyard.

We checked out three open houses this weekend:

10 Lennon Rd

-the house was in need of some serious overhaul. Knock $100K off the price and I would consider it more closely

5 Ernest Rd

-nice house, close to a decent school, but terrible neighborhood. Here is the ratty looking aparment complex directly across the street

And the graffitti covered corner store about two streets away.

Houses in this area are blacklisted from future trips!

And finally, a house that restored my confidence that we will be able to find a nice place -

36 Valentine

Nice layout, great neighborhood and a clean, modern interior. There was a great playroom area near the kitchen that led out to a very cool balcony. Yard space was small, but the balcony space definitely compensated. The basement was adequate, although the furnace looked like it didn’t have many years left. A door led directly from the basement into the garage. After chipping ice off of our currently ungaraged Volvo, we’ve decided that having a place to protect our car from the elements is high priority here in New England.