“Palo Alto Parents Lie For Kids To Attend Better Schools”
Some Palo Alto Parents Lie For Kids To Attend Better Schools – News Story – KNTV | San Francisco
Some Palo Alto parents are lying and cheating to get their children into the best schools possible.Palo Alto Unified School District administrators said they carry out more than 200 investigations a year about parents possibly lying about their residence to qualify to attend a school.
“They do all sorts of different things,” said Steve Lawrence of the Palo Alto Unified School District. “We have people saying they are living with relatives that are really living someplace else.”
Margie Mitchell of the Palo Alto Unified School District said, “We have parents that come in and try and give us falsified lease agreements and property tax statements. We are on an overflow basis right now, especially in the elementary grades.”
[snip]
One Palo Alto parent, who did not want to identify herself, said she does not feel bad lying about where she lived.
“Why should my daughter come home after the first day at school and be so depressed and sad?” she asked. “If my choice was to send my daughter to that school or and try and cheat the system I chose to try and cheat the system.”
The mother sends her children to a high performing school in the town where her relatives live. She uses their address.
“Why we don’t live there is economic reasons at this point in our life that’s where we want to live,” she said. “Under our circumstances we can’t.”
Palo Alto is not the only school district facing the residency-cheating problem. The Fremont Union High School District said it investigated about 200 fraud cases last year. Of those cases the district said it found about 10 percent of the parents cheated their way into the district.
This is the kind of stuff that makes the Real Bay Area special.
This is the kind of stuff that gives kids going to Real Bay Area schools the advantage.
Think about it… if kids weren’t exposed to these sorts of things, how would they ever become successful C-level executives? Would they even be able to fathom something as obvious as backdating options? Or getting their company to buy them a corporate jet, and pay them for using it?
Even worse – how would the kid learn that one should do things like that, and not feel bad about it?
Silicon Valley has always been about being an entrepreneur, about “asking for forgiveness is easier than asking for permission”, about can-do spirit. And this is how it all begins – by going to the right school.
No wonder Palo Alto real estate is so expensive. Actually… given the life lessons… it’s a deal.
February 12th, 2008 at 8:16 am
Bzzt. They do this on the east coast too. This doesn’t make the Bay Area special.
Heck, you have to lie to get access to the libraries in the nice towns, too.
Now if someone would only create a website where folks trying to buy into good school districts and folks willing to sell their addresses could get together. Anyone want to register their kids in my local elementary school? Cash or pre-IPO shares only, please.
Robert
February 12th, 2008 at 9:55 am
This is why home prices in the real Bay Area will not drop. Buying into the real Bay Area is like getting admitted to an Ivy League School. Admission to these schools doesn’t get easier just because there are shifts in the eocnomic environment. Real Bay Area is one of the few islands in the state that still offers an excellent, free public education. Can you put a price on your childern’s future?
February 12th, 2008 at 10:08 am
You pony up with either the house or the school. And if you can afford it, both.
February 12th, 2008 at 10:55 am
A “good school” is a reflection of its high quality students, not the other way around. Schools in PA and Cupertino are good because most of it’s students come from well-educated families that put great emphasis on education from an early age. These kids would excel in most schools. Putting Joe Voc Tech into Harvard doesn’t change a thing.
February 12th, 2008 at 11:21 am
Bring back segregation and these problems go away.
February 12th, 2008 at 11:21 am
A “good school” is a reflection of its high quality students, not the other way around. Schools in PA and Cupertino are good because most of it’s students come from well-educated families that put great emphasis on education from an early age. These kids would excel in most schools. Putting Joe Voc Tech into Harvard doesn’t change a thing.
Well said. This concept was actually verified in the book “Freakanomics”. Good read by the way. Very interesting and insightful.
February 12th, 2008 at 11:24 am
It all comes down to the place being “special”. Otherwise why would all the high quality people go there?
February 12th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Why should parents/kids be discriminated by the place they live by the public school? Public schools get funding from state government. Gaming the system is totally legal. Everyone should lie/cheat to send their kids to the best school they desired. A recent survey showed that most MBA students thought that it was necessary to cheat/lie to succeed. Most CEOs are liars. Our president is also a liar. What a big deal!
February 12th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
A recent survey showed that most MBA students thought that it was necessary to cheat/lie to succeed. Most CEOs are liars. Our president is also a liar. What a big deal!
You forgot realtors. Big time liars.
February 12th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
“Heck, you have to lie to get access to the libraries in the nice towns, too.”
That’s only if you look rich, healthy, and successful. If you look like a drugged-out piss-your-pants bum you can spend all day long in the library and they won’t lay a finger on you.
February 12th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Burbed – just saw this on Craigslist, had to post it – you can now buy your own personal garden in Palo Alto:
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/rfs/571595647.html
February 12th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Yeah get ‘em kids some good practical education on the realities of life so they can become execs like um, the CEO of a lending institution and write shareholder letters such as this priceless jewel from the CEO of Indymac:
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/indymac-issues-2007-annual-shareholder/story.aspx?guid=%7B3305AB7F%2DB724%2D4DB9%2DA9AD%2D8764EC7DC6C8%7D&dist=TQP_Mod_pressN
“Indymac and most home lenders were not “greedy and stupid”. Most of us believed that innovative home lending served a legitimate economic and social purpose, allowing many US consumers to be able to achieve the American dream of homeownership [...]
However, in retrospect, like many innovations (e.g., the Internet, railroads, etc.), innovative home lending went too far.
Lenders didn’t see that things were going too far, partly because we were too close to it.
It is also important to understand that the rapid rise in housing prices is one of the key culprits in this current housing and mortgage crisis.
I can assure you that we at Indymac are very determined to not only preserve shareholder value but rebuild it.
And with the anticipated closing of the BofA/Countrywide transaction later this year, Indymac will likely become the largest independent home lender in the nation … a business that is huge and at the core of our American culture and economy. “
February 12th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
The cheating obviously isn’t good, but I feel for the people who want their kids to have the chance at a better education. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think schools are largely funded by local property tax revenue. So poorer areas get less funding and kids with poor parents have to go to poorly funded schools.
I agree with the commenters who argue, for example, that Palo Alto kids tend to be “higher quality students” than East Palo Alto kids, but I think the funding disparity exacerbates the problem. I mean, if everyone thought that funding didn’t matter, then rich school districts wouldn’t object to distributing funding evenly (per student) to all school districts in the state. And I think they do object.
February 12th, 2008 at 11:37 pm
Here is what Wiki said about Prop 13, which is related to school funding:
Proposition 13 drew its impetus from 1971 and 1976 California Supreme Court rulings in Serrano v. Priest, 5 Cal.3d 584 (1971) (Serrano I); Serrano v. Priest, 18 Cal.3d 728 (1976) (Serrano II); Serrano v. Priest, 20 Cal.3d 25 (1977) (Serrano III) that a property-tax based finance system for schools was unconstitutional. The California Constitution required the legislature to provide a free public school system for each district, and the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution (which includes the Equal Protection Clause) required all states provide to all citizens equal protection of the law. The court ruled that the amount of funding going to different districts was disproportionately favoring the wealthy. Previously, local property taxes went directly to the local school system, which minimized state government’s involvement in the distribution of revenue. This system also allowed a wealthier district to fund its schools with a lower tax rate than the rate a less affluent district would have to set in order to yield the same funding per pupil. The Court ruled that the state had to make the distribution of revenue more equitable. The state legislature responded by capping the rate of local revenue that a school district could receive and distributing excess amounts among the poorer districts. Although this was more equitable, property owners in affluent districts perceived that the benefits of the taxes they paid were no longer enjoyed exclusively by the local schools.
February 12th, 2008 at 11:46 pm
> Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think schools are
> largely funded by local property tax revenue. So poorer areas get
> less funding and kids with poor parents have to go to poorly funded schools.
Uh… not in California. The Serrano vs Priest case in the 1960′s and 1970′s said it violated equal protection if different school districts got different amounts of money based on property taxes. As far as I can tell, the original solution was that rich districts had the contribution from property taxes capped, with the extra going to poorer districts. The whole story’s much messier; check out the below site for the gory detail.
http://www.evergreentimes.com/072904/pub_edu.htm
Palo Alto’s schools are described as “basic aid” districts; property tax money over some specified cap doesn’t go to the state for equal division, but gets to be kept in the school district. Saratoga Union Elementary, Palo Alto Unified, Los Altos Elementary, Los Gatos Union Elementary and Santa Clara Unified are basic aid districts and get more money as a result.
It also explains why Palo Alto might be much more sensitive to out-of-district students. If you’ve got students from the Pacifica schools going to San Bruno schools (which used to happen because of school district boundaries), then San Bruno gets more students, but still gets paid per student. (Ever wonder why teachers were so careful with attendance and unexcused absences?) As long as the school district doesn’t have to hire extra teachers or build extra schools because of the guests, then there probably isn’t much reason to try to chase them out. Palo Alto schools get that extra money from property taxes, so the extra students take that money away from the residents above-average children. Palo Alto probably also has the problem that they’re way too attractive a school district, and attract tons more cheaters.
Don’t you wish you didn’t ask?
February 13th, 2008 at 12:11 am
And just to torture the original questioner even more:
Don’t forget proposition 98 which mandated that the state had to pay a certain percentage of state tax revenues to K-12 education. The proposition originally set that percentage at 39% of state tax revenue (property taxes, income taxes, etc). Currently, around 45% of the state budget has to go to K-12.
So schools are funded by all taxes, not just property taxes.
February 13th, 2008 at 5:07 am
Speaking of Calif Public schools, don’t forget about the ” parent clubs” ( nudge, nudge, wink, wink). This allows the wealthier families to ” privatize” the schools where their children attend school. When my family and I lived in California I remember we lived in a district of ” by choice” schools where it was normal for parents to camp out for days at a time to get their kids in the ” right schools”. There were significant disparities between individual schools and the school district tried to level the playing field by creating ” magnet” schools in poorer neighborhoods. The district would create a ” math and science” magnet with increased lab/computer resources, hoping to attract students to that particular school. The wealthier areas would simply fund the purchase of additional lab/computer supplies for their neighborhood school from the parent club, as well as solicit parent volunteers ( engineers/scientists, etc.) to increase the math/science resources of their school. This effectively negated the efforts of school administrators to equalize resources in the district. Of course the wealthiest parents usually sent their kids to private schools. No matter how hard you try you just can’t equalize resources ( or money for that matter) in a capitalistic society.
February 13th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
>>Palo Alto schools get that extra money from property taxes
Wrong. Property taxes get paid to the County of Santa Clara. No matter how much property tax comes from the city, the city doesn’t get this money.
February 13th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
I don’t get it… why “Parents Club”? How is that different than a PTA?
February 13th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Burbed,
With respect to Parent’s Club vs PTA I’m not really sure except the Parent’s Club I was familiar with dealt with more than just ” student/teacher” issues. For example, one wealthy parent actually donated landscaping ( who owned a landscaping business)to the school as the amount budgeted by the school district was insufficient to provide sod to the front of the school. I suspect the parent club has a wider discretion for funding projects than a PTA but I am not really certain of the difference.
February 14th, 2008 at 10:13 am
Something that calls itself a “PTA” is subject to state oversight and review, because it gets official recognition and approval for its actions. A “parents’ club” can do whatever they want, and they don’t have to answer to anyone or provide budget details. A parents’ club could, e.g., look at the racial demographics of a school and decide not to give it money because there are too many Asians there or something. Or, say, they could give a school fifty thousand dollars to buy computers but put in a contingency that the school has to change the bathroom signs from “BOYS/GIRLS” to “MALE-IDENTIFIERS/FEMALE-IDENTIFIERS”.
February 14th, 2008 at 10:28 am
Whoa… that’s pretty wacky. Sounds like a pretty good idea actually.
February 14th, 2008 at 10:54 pm
Ummmmm….this is news?? No offense, but Palo Alto residents have been doing this for years. Back in the the 1980′s 90′s, I knew lots of folks who lied to get their kids into Palo Alto High over sending them to Gunn HS and Menlo Atherton HS. This is nothing new.
February 15th, 2008 at 3:12 am
@@ Renter & Robert — Thanks for the corrections!
I read up a little bit and it looks like the state guarantees a base level of funding by augmenting local tax revenue if necessary. But it doesn’t look like the state siphons property tax revenue away from wealthier districts, at least based on the explanation at:
http://californiaschoolfinance.org/FinanceSystem/DollarstoDistricts/RevenueLimits/tabid/64/Default.aspx
Also, I was curious to see how much of a funding difference there is between basic aid districts and poorer districts. Based on info at http://www.ed-data.k12.ca.us/, the 2005-2006 per-student government funding in Palo Alto was $12,238 whereas the statewide average was $8,032.
February 15th, 2008 at 10:32 am
This is some complicated stuff!
February 16th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
WHAT? And this is news? 20 years ago, when I rented w/roomies in Palo Alto, an Indian lady rented a room in our house and never stayed there. It was so her daughter could go to PA schools for free. A rep from the scool district came by to see if she was really living there. He asked me a few questions and I told him what I saw. The lady was an unfriendly beawwwtch anyway so I felt no guilt turning her in. This has been going on for decades…..