I'd ask, because I've spent many hours over the last ~6-7 years trying to find a way to save on housing costs (and, ideally, get closer to any sort of natural environment that's inviting rather than dull and off-putting—I'd actually accept a lateral move, price wise, to gain that) without school quality suffering and without one of us having to home-school, but I doubt you want to publicize it :-)

I fear we're already at about the optimal cost/school-quality point. We're already in a boring-ass place way away from the coasts, but even here housing prices are inflating faster than younger folks can save the money to buy them. It's crazy. For them the only way to buy a house will be to move somewhere with really bad schools, which was what I meant in my original post—I've got an OK situation, but younger folks won't have even this option.

> move somewhere with really bad schools

I alluded to this in my other post, but unconsciously what people mean when they talk about school quality is "how many of the families are at least as educated/rich as we are?" Kids with educated parents fare better in school, so if you have a lot of educated families in a place, magically the schools improve.

The corollary to this is that when educated people move somewhere, the schools get better. have seen this happen in a number of city neighborhoods in my area and others. And NYC is going through this now, as millionaires move to Brooklyn.

There definitely is a correlation between constituent family income and school "quality", sure, but the actual experience is still overall better (will tend to be, anyway—please take any of these generalities as statistical in nature, not absolute) if you can get into those better-due-to-selection-bias schools. A lot of the same things that make kids in poorer schools harder to teach also mean more classroom disruption and worse peer models, which do harm the experience and outcomes for kids in those schools, even if they are from a stable household without money trouble and the effort & expertise that goes into instruction is identical.

That selection bias thing is part of why it's so damn hard to crack the problem of evening out (while, ideally, improving the average of) school performance—but when I'm wearing my parent-hat and not my speculating-about-public-policy-I'd-like-to-see hat, it's hard to conclude other than that paying attention to which schools are "best" is still a good idea, even if the reasons are a bit bullshitty.