I don’t think that’s right. It’s kinda counter-intuitive, but your eldest child is as likely to be in elementary school as your youngest, assuming you count children with no siblings as the eldest.
As to the OP, I agree with what others said, media reporting on the nations schools is overwhelmingly negative while a parent with a student actually in a given school will know hear both positive and negative information about that school.
This is my experience as well. I teach in a large urban school district. My particular school is in a very affluent neighborhood, but most of those kids go to private school–our actual school population is about 65% economically disadvantaged (the district is 87% economically disadvantaged, so we are affluent, comparatively). I could tell you plenty of horror stories about my school–had a kid last year disappear from my class because he was arrested for bank robbery, we’ve had knife fights (though no serious injuries), we’ve had teachers sent to the hospital after a student attacked them (though that was a severely autistic kid–I think that could happen anywhere. But that gets in the way of the story, right?). We also have AP pass rates that put us in the top 10-15% of all public schools in the state, we send kids to Ivy League/Tier I schools on a regular basis, we have a solid drama department, we have a bunch of interesting clubs and extracurriculars and put on a pretty good homecoming. But those stories aren’t nearly as interesting as the bank robber in my class.
Anyway, with the recession we’ve had an influx of kids whose parents suddenly could not afford private school or moving to a suburb. Over and over again, they’ve been shocked at how we are not a hell-hole–one parent in particular kept coming to visit teachers/administrators over the summer and would sit there are cry at the thought of her precious flower adrift in that horror of horrors, public school. Well, precious flower has flourished–4s on her junior AP exams (which is good–they don’t all make the highest score, 5, at private schools by any means) and has made a whole host of friends. So now that mom thinks we are a weird exception but all the other public schools are hell holes packed with rapists and remedial courses.
Underline mine. Are you sure? My brother and SiL took a long, hard look at the schools in the area before choosing one: for a while, SiL was hell-bent on a school which offered full English-language immersion. I derailed that one by pointing out that there is no advantage to being able to do math in English if your math skills aren’t any good, or if that means you can’t understand your college professor when he does math in Spanish. That school is across the street from the one The Nephew attends; kids from both schools play together after school, the parents and grandparents get together and bond over their children’s play. Several of their neighbors take their children to a third school: the children play together in the parks near their house, and again the grown-ups talk.
SiL is happy with the current school because the teacher The Nephew has is absolutely great, and because it turns out that a lot of the parents she’s met through school have interests similar to hers, so they have other activities in common (in many of those, you won’t see a single parent from the all-English school). This school The Nephew attends produces the immense majority of the college graduates from our town: this doesn’t necessarily point out a better academic program, but I do think it shows parents who value college. You don’t need to be familiar with the exact day trips taken by every single school in town to know these things.
If we had a middle school student, based on where we lived now he/she would be enrolled at Washington. 'Nuff said.
And avoid Harvard Park at all costs. It was ranked as the school’s worst elementary school (and where I went to school, FWIW :smack:).