Well, where in the valley are you going to be working? Where are you looking at for housing? There are many good school systems in Santa Clara County, but they correspond closely to housing prices in their districts: Saratoga (where I transferred into), Palo Alto, Los Gatos, Sunnyvale isn’t bad…
As you pointed out in “b),” just the fact you’re asking this question means your daughter will probably get more out of most schools than her peers.
Weigh $20k in private school costs per year verses an extra $20k each year on a house. Given 7%, 30 year loan, that’s $250,000 more of a house you could buy, and probably get a good school district on top of it.
Not even close to the worst. Some inner city schools are pretty bad- in CA as well as elsewhere.
Help her read at home- reading is critical. Buy her books, encourage her. That (according to “Freakonomics”) is FAR more important than a “good school district”.
But around Middle-school time, many kids have problems adjusting. Keep an eye on her then, and have private schools scouted.
Be educated and aware. Find out how her school is doing. Attend meetings. Talk to her teachers.
You definitely need to know which school district - school quality varies widely by district, and some of those in the Silicon Valley/San Jose area are among the best in California. For example, I’ve worked with many students from Cupertino schools and I believe the quality there to be excellent.
There are a lot of scare stories and competitive snobbery regarding public v. private in California. But because schools are funded by property tax, with that amount frozen to the last sale. So if you are moving to a decent area full of professionals, your kid will get a well-funded school with good teachers and good facilities. There is a public school up the way here that is indistinguishable from a high-end private school. If you were moving to a poorer area, your kid would go to a crap school. One school may send 98% of their kids to college and the majority of those to Ivy Leagues, with Stanford and UC Berkeley being second tier. The other school sends it’s valedictorians to state colleges (Not having access many honors classes and connections to prestigious internships makes you less competitive no matter how good of a student you are) and mostly tries to keep the kids in school. Kind of cool, huh?
In my experience, home life is a bigger indicator of scholastic success than what kind of school the kid went to. Furthermore, there is nothing in private schools that keeps kids from crashing and burning when they reach college- where they won’t get the kind of private attention and be working in the same controlled environment that they are used to. It may just be coincidence, but all of the kids I know that had trouble dealing with life in college went to private schools.
Furthermore, California public schools are wonderfully diverse (and there is the dark side of the public/private debate). My high school spoke 63 different languages and looked like a UN meeting. That kind of experience is worth it’s weight in gold. Your kid will come out equipped for a globalized economy, probably with some exotic language skills, and able to work well with all kinds of people.
There are extensive results on testing for all California school. Your real estate agent has these scores at hand, and will show them to you. They include raw scores, a ranking of 1 - 10 across all schools in California, and a ranking of 1 - 10 across schools with a similar set of students.
However, the test scores for the schools depend strongly on the people who live in the area served by the school, which depends strongly on the housing prices. In my district, one of the high schools has very high scores, and the one where my kids went was second. But the best high school really didn’t have better teachers than ours, and the condition of the school was much worse, because our school was the oldest, and was the school where all the political leaders went, and thus got the lions share of money. However, low scores can be indicative of problems. You might want to check out how many AP classes are offered in the high schools also.
We did explore private schools. The one secular school was across the Bay, and didn’t have the opening. The others were associated with churches. I have never seen evidence that the education there was better.
You might want to check out the funding per student for each district. They vary widely, having been set around the time of Prop. 13, and are unfair.
Unless you have lots and lots of money, you’re going to have to trade off between school and house price. It was bad 10 years ago, and it is a lot worse now. Once you figure out some possibilities, you can check out the papers for stories about the district. I know what’s going on in Fremont pretty well, Union City less well, but other parts of the Valley very little.