Everyday at lunchtime I walk from my office in Gowanus (Brooklyn) to an adjacent neighborhood—Cobble Hill—to get a salad from my favorite bodega, Food U Desire. On the way there, I pass the Samuel Mills Sprole Elementary School.

On a typical day, the school’s yard is a utopian scene of small children of various shapes and colors playing amicably amid luxurious facilities: shiny teeter-totters, several different kinds of swings, and brightly colored climbers (not pictured in the photo above, sorry). The children are watched over by smiling, kind-looking teachers.

For a short time I ran a campaign to convince my wife that we should move to Cobble Hill. I love that neighborhood, and I thought I could use the school to my advantage, all while scoring points for thinking about the future of our family.

“Our [unborn] kids could go to Samuel Mills! Sweetie, you have to see this school. It’s incredible!” I told her. After a dramatic pause: “…and it’s a public school. It’s free!"

She was not convinced.

The next time I walked by the school, I decided to collect evidence to show her. I pulled out my phone and, starting a video recording, panned across the scene. “See,” I narrated, “Black kids, Brown kids, Chinese kids, White kids…all playing in harmony. This is Cobble Hill, baby!”

But, it turns out, you’re not allowed to film small children at school.

The Principal made this abundantly clear as she ran toward me screaming, “Are you taking a video?! Aww hell no—you CANNOT do that here!”

Don’t worry, reader, I am not writing to you from jail.

I told the Principal the truth (“I just love your school! The kids look so happy!”). She believed me, and she also gave me some useful information: if you live in the local area—the school’s “zone”—your children are guaranteed admission.

And that got me thinking: Cobble Hill is a fancy neighborhood, and we probably can’t afford to live there. But, are there other Samuel Mills-esque schools, in more affordable neighborhoods? What’s the relationship between home prices and school quality?

After about 60 hours of research and data analysis, I have the answer. (And don’t worry, I deleted the video.)

Schools and real estate

I don’t know how it works in other cities, but in New York City, most public elementary schools are “zoned.” That means that they primarily serve kids living in the local area.

Some schools admit students from across the district (each district encompasses several zones), or the wider borough. Some even take in students from other boroughs. These are called unzoned schools. Admission to these unzoned schools is highly competitive.

But 4 out of 5 elementary schools are zoned schools, and most of these guarantee spots to students living in the local school zone.

That’s why, at least for elementary school, living within the zone of a great school is a massive plus. You don’t have to try your chances getting your kid into a school in another area, where they are deprioritized for not living close-by. And you don’t have to shell out $50-100k per child for private school.

It’s also just nice, presumably, to send your kids to school with other local children. That way they have friends nearby, and you probably do, too (most of my parent friends seem to have an active social life with the parents of their children’s friends).

What makes a good school?

There a probably a million different things, and many of them are unquantifiable (how can you measure the warmth of the kindergarten teacher’s smile?). But, many things that differentiate good from not-so-good schools are quantifiable. The city does a pretty robust job of collecting all kinds of information, from attendance, to safety, to quality of facilities. They survey students, parents, and teachers. You can see all of this data here.

But all of these metrics are highly correlated, and you can take the measure of a school pretty simply but gauging two things: how well its students do in reading and writing (“English language arts”, or ELA), and how they do on math tests.

In the analysis that follows, I rank schools based on how well their students do on English and math tests (each is graded on a 5 point scale, and I average the two), to derive a simple score. My score correlates well with measures of school performance according to other sources, and has some beneficial features over those other measures, too¹.

The distribution of school quality is uneven

It would be nice if all schools were uniformly good. Unfortunately, they are not. There are lots of bad schools, and—maybe unsurprisingly—they are disproportionately located in poorer neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the top 10% of schools—those with an average ELA/math score above 3.5—are disproportionately located in (more expensive) Manhattan and Brooklyn.

It’s not just about the characteristics of the students

One might imagine that wealthier neighborhoods have students with a leg up in many ways—private tutoring, highly educated parents, etc—and that this is the main explanation for school performance. But school and class sizes (which are of course not influenced by these factors) are also larger in poorer areas.

Although The Bronx and Queens have many schools, they also have many students. The number of students per school in those boroughs is far higher than in wealthy Manhattan and Brooklyn, and the number of students per classroom is also higher.

Establishing the prices of homes in each school zone

In order to link school quality to home prices, I juxtaposed each school’s zone with Zillow prices at the neighborhood level. Of course, the two don’t line up—many school zones stretch across several different Zillow neighborhoods. How can we then measure home prices for each school zone?

It was kind of an onerous task: I calculated the overlap of each school zone with the various Zillow neighborhoods, and then weighed each Zillow neighborhood by its representation within the school zone.

So, for example (shown below), the school zone for PS 59 Beekman Hill International, which sits just southeast of Central Park, is a weighted average of three different Zillow neighborhoods. Because the school’s zone overlaps most heavily with the Zillow neighborhood of Turtle Bay, it’s that neighborhood that most directly affects the price I calculate for homes in PS 59’s school zone.

A weak link between school quality and home prices

The histogram above showed that the best schools are disproportionately located in Manhattan and Brooklyn—the two most expensive boroughs. One might therefore imagine a clean linear relationship between home prices and school quality. In fact, there is only a weak one.

That’s because, for all the great schools in Manhattan and Brooklyn, there are many school zones where prices are high and schools are not particularly good. And part of the problem is that New York is famously “block by block”—there are a number of poor neighborhoods, with low-performing schools, located within expensive neighborhoods. PS 307 is a good example:

Located in Vinegar Hill, a gentrifying neighborhood between the Brooklyn Navy Yard and DUMBO, PS 307 has long served children who live in the Farragut public housing development across the street.  In 2016, to ease overcrowding at nearby PS 8, the Department of Education expanded the zone for PS 307 to include DUMBO, including some luxury apartments. The school serves mostly Black and Latinx children, with a small but growing number of white children. (Inside Schools)

Which neighborhoods with top schools have home prices below $1m?

What level of performance makes a school great? Top 1%? Top 25%?

Most elite US schools—the Ivys (like Princeton), the “little Ivys” or “public Ivys” (like Stanford), and the top-notch liberal arts colleges (like Williams) are all in the top 1-3% of all US colleges. But there are highly reputable colleges in the top 10%—University of Rochester and Brandeis, to name just two. It seems, at least going by colleges, we might call the top 10% “great schools.”

So, why $1m for our New York home price threshold? This is somewhat arbitrary, but it’s what many New York real estate insiders consider the approximate level of starter home prices in Manhattan and Brooklyn. It also makes for a catchy title.

My analysis only considers home purchases. Rentals are an option, and there may be areas where this is economical. But rents—especially in relatively efficient markets like New York City—tend to track prices. I would be surprised if the conclusions I reach here don’t apply equally to renters.

What does my analysis show? Sadly for parents who aren’t filthy rich, there is a discontinuity in the data: once you’re talking about “great schools” (ie, the top 10%), there is a drop off in the number of neighborhoods priced below $1m.

Mapping the top 10% of schools and their zones

The map below shows New York’s top 10% public zoned elementary schools. Grey markers denote great schools in expensive neighborhoods, while the solid black markers denote top schools in more affordable areas. These are labeled with a number corresponding to further information about each school, available in a table on the Home Economics website and accessible only to paying subscribers, here.

Queens

Most of the great schools in more affordable areas are located in Queens—especially at the far east end of the borough (Bayside Hills, Oakland Gardens). Two of the best schools in Queens are in Forest Hills (PS 196, PS 101)—a relatively upscale area but one that slides under our $1m cutoff. This and all quotes about school specifics are taken from Inside Schools:

PS 196 is a destination school. Middle class parents move into the area to secure a seat in this consistently high-performing school. The school has a cohesive community with involved parents and a good relationship between teachers and administrators.

For those seeking to be closer to Manhattan, Steinway has the well regarded PS 122, while Old Astoria has PS 234. For surfers, Far Rockaway has PS 253.

Staten Island

Staten Island has a slew of high performing schools. The top one is PS 35 The Clove Valley School, which apparently lives up to its idyllic name:

PS 35 The Clove Valley School is one of the highest performing schools on Staten Island even though there is little homework and few tests. It is nestled in leafy, upscale Grymes Hill, on a street with neat brick homes and tidy front lawns, at the edge of Wagner College Campus.

Brooklyn

Brooklyn has a lot of terrific schools, but many of them are located in pricey areas. As you know, I’m partial to the Samuel Mills Sprole School in Cobble Hill (median home price $1.2m).

Park Slope also has some of the city’s best schools—including The Maurice Sendak Community School, PS 39 Henry Bristow, and PS 321 William Penn—but homes in the area average around $1.4m.

Those priced out of Cobble Hill and Park Slope should look at Bushwick, which has 4 top 10% schools. Local prices are rising but are still around $800k—a relative bargain. The standout school here is PS 376:

Walk into just about any class at PS 376, and you'll see kids who are happily engaged in their work. Children studying Japan make pretend sushi from clay, and chopsticks from pipe-cleaners while their classmates program a doll-like "robot" to teach the alphabet to younger children.

Sounds fun.

The Bronx

Aside from having the most enjoyable name amongst the various stops on the Metro North, Spuyten Duyvil also has a great school: PS 24. But highlighting the importance of school zoning, the school has recently seen conflict over whether students are genuinely local residents:

The community has grappled with a dispute over whether some children, many of them Hispanic or low-income, were attending PS 24 even though they did not live in the zone.

Manhattan

Imagine going to this school:

Spruce Street School opened in 2009 to serve East Tribeca’s growing family community. Housed in the first five floors of a dazzling skyscraper designed by architect Frank Gehry, it has a cafeteria that could be mistaken for a trendy Tribeca eatery, a padded roof-top playground and a state-of-the-art auditorium.

In Tribeca, the median home price is around $2.5m.

Even if most neighborhoods in Manhattan are substantially cheaper than Tribeca, few fall under our $1m threshold. There are two areas that make the cut, though: Chinatown and East Harlem. Consider PS 42 Benjamin Altman in Chinatown:

PS 42 is a large, happy elementary school with a strong sense of community that spans generations. The school sits on the border of Chinatown and the Lower East Side, surrounded by tenements, bodegas, art galleries and high-end boutiques and restaurants.

The standout school in East Harlem is PS 171 Patrick Henry:

PS 171 is a calm and orderly school where children are expected to read the minute they walk in the door: they read while eating breakfast in the cafeteria, in the hallways waiting for their teachers and as a class heading to the bathroom, carrying books that they look at quietly while they wait their turn.

Conclusions

I wish I had better news for you. It really does seem that in New York, if you want to live in an area zoned for a great public elementary school, you’ll need to spend more than $1m on your home, or move to the outer reaches of the city (or Chinatown, East Harlem, or Bushwick). You could rent, of course, but rents are generally proportional to home prices, and good luck finding an affordable multi-bedroom rental in, say, Park Slope.

But zoned schools are not the end of the line. There are charter schools (free, public institutions) that admit students based on lottery. There are also unzoned schools. In fact, the very best schools—like The Anderson School, “one of the most demanding and selective schools in New York”—are unzoned schools exclusively for gifted and talented students who test-in.

Maybe most importantly: even I—a dumb economist whose only teaching pedigree comes from running tennis lessons for inner city youth in Toronto—know that every kid is different. The metrics I used here don’t capture every facet of every school. Test scores aren’t everything, and many kids will thrive in schools that aren’t strictly in the top 10%.

I hope this analysis helps someone find their own Samuel Mills Sprole school, whether in Tribeca or the eastern reaches of Queens.

If you’ve read this far you are likely a parent of an elementary school aged child in New York City—drop me an email to let me know if you found this analysis useful.