School Score Map Confirms RBA Boundaries
Here’s what happens when you head over to a site called apiscores.com: you get a map with little pins representing how well each school scores on the California API. It’s all sunshine and rainbows! At least the pin legend uses a rainbow, where 1, the lowest ranking, is really bad apple red, and 10, the highest, is the purest purple.
I don’t know what they’re doing with that light blue for rank 6 (they should have used something more like teal or at least aqua), and the dark purple they used is more suggestive of blue (and a lower score) than the light purple. So given that whoever made the map didn’t spend enough time playing with the Color Wheel during Art Class (which has been cut to raise API scores), let’s have a look and see who’s in the Real Bay Area (RBA) and who isn’t. Remember, the deeper the purple, the larger the college fund balances! And the redder, the deader (at least in real estate terms).
Whoa, check out that swath that runs northwest through southeast alongside I-280. Does that area look familiar? It should.
Obviously there’s more to being in the RBA than just having top school scores (you also need to be score top sushi and get to the GooglePlex in a reasonable amount of time), but it’s nice to have confirmation that this map was onto something. Admittedly this RBA map used purple the way the school score map used green, as a mixdown. But the core RBA comes through on both:
Anyway, zoom in on your neighborhood and check out what color your neighborhood schools are. The more you embiggen the map, the more pins pop up, so if you can’t find a particular school, you may have to zoom in some more or not show as many school types.
This is a Weekend Open Thread.
October 8th, 2011 at 8:17 am
Yes, as a “School District Shopper” I am very familiar with the colorful API score map, but I hadn’t compared the two side by side before. I am once again glad I don’t live in SF where it’s all decided by lottery…
October 8th, 2011 at 8:51 am
Do school district boundaries really even matter that much anymore? Since my children are in the Future Farmers of America program we can live in a substandard school district that doesn’t offer FFA curriculum and send the kids to awesome schools offering the FFA program. Totally a cheap way to skirt the system that most plebs don’t know about.
October 8th, 2011 at 9:02 am
Yes, boundaries matter a LOT in terms of pricing in the RBA. Just look at the difference in price between homes that fall within the boundaries of Redwood City’s Roy Cloud elementary (Great Schools rating of 9) and those outside the boundaries, as all the other schools in Redwood City are much lower in API scores.
October 8th, 2011 at 9:39 am
I really would like to do a comparison article showing prices for essentially identical homes on different sides of a school district boundary. The line through Saratoga separating Cupertino from Moreland runs right through some houses, and I heard of a family that remodeled their house in order to move the front door to the CUSD side (and thus switch districts to the more expensive one). That would be an awesome story if it were demonstrably true.
October 8th, 2011 at 9:51 am
Remember we need both the base and growth API in order to make valid comparisons.
http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/ac/ap/documents/infoguide11.pdf
October 8th, 2011 at 10:33 am
Love that you used ‘embiggen’. It’s a perfectly cromulent word. My spellchecker hates them both, though.
To update my calculator for this RBA view… it would have to come down the peninsula and ring around the mountains – while avoiding Santa Clara and San Jose. Maybe we can petition the Census Bureau to do it for us? Maybe we can call half of Berryessa, Milpitas, and Fremont the RBA Consolation zone?
October 8th, 2011 at 11:09 am
They left off my “9″ ranked middle school. Weird; it shows up on Redfin.
October 8th, 2011 at 11:25 am
nomadic, it can’t display all the schools at once, so try both zooming in and turning off some school types to see if you can find it that way. I had noticed a sea of red schools in Oakland and was wondering why the higher-scoring ones in the hills weren’t popping up. The only way to find them was to either reload the page (if you moved the map around) and/or zoom in and/or turn off particular types (elementary, middle, high).
October 8th, 2011 at 11:44 am
Nope. Turned off all but middle schools and zoomed to show about 2 miles x 1 mile and nada. No pins at all. Oh well.
October 8th, 2011 at 11:59 am
Did you reload the page? That made more schools appear for me.
October 8th, 2011 at 1:01 pm
way OT but just wondering — why do so many people go cheap on their dishwashers? We’ve been looking at a bunch of places and it’s really amazing to me that an appliance which gets SO much use is so often crappy.
October 8th, 2011 at 1:39 pm
Neat, burbed found my webapp. That RBA map cracks me up every time.
nomadic, which school is missing? Some schools don’t participate in the testing used for the API. Or maybe my data is incomplete.
October 8th, 2011 at 4:46 pm
I was in the RBA today, had sushi (chirashi bowl) at a place in that same complex with 99 Ranch Market at el camino and 237, was not too impressed. Should have gone to Kuro Ramen on Castro, man that stuff is good.
Sam Adu you’re a genius. The Future Farmers of America program. What a great idea.
October 8th, 2011 at 4:56 pm
[...] From Burbed. [...]
October 8th, 2011 at 10:22 pm
I went to a crappy school and still did well and went on to graduate from a UC level university and make 200k a year so this whole drama over the right school is pure BS. Asians are the ones who are suckers to fall for this crap as well as to overpay for real estate.
October 8th, 2011 at 10:37 pm
good for you, Scott! and great demonstration of the Sweeping Power of the Anecdotal.
October 8th, 2011 at 10:38 pm
Oh, no, Scott, there are people of all races and ethnicities who will overpay for real estate.
October 9th, 2011 at 1:25 pm
…or overpay for private education, madhaus. Of course, here on burbed, we prefer the ones who pay a premium (it can’t be overpaying!) for a school district.
#12, steve, Union Middle School is missing. It’s on LG-Almaden Road, west of Union Ave.
October 9th, 2011 at 5:35 pm
Money cannot buy happiness, but it can buy a good education on the peninsula.
October 10th, 2011 at 7:09 am
nomadic, here is some more info on Union Middle: http://api.cde.ca.gov/Acnt2011/Flag11Growth.aspx?allcds=43697086049449&Flag=5&p=2
October 10th, 2011 at 10:11 am
Thanks, steve. Nice app too! So, is it correct to assume your app relies on the Growth API?
October 11th, 2011 at 1:49 pm
Doesn’t that mean Tri-Valley is RBA? Look at Danville, Alamo, Blackhawk, Dublin, Pleasanton, and Livermore.
October 11th, 2011 at 2:05 pm
I suspect the mapping is neither injective nor surjective.
October 11th, 2011 at 2:20 pm
Doesn’t that mean Tri-Valley is RBA? Look at Danville, Alamo, Blackhawk, Dublin, Pleasanton, and Livermore.
Of course not, corntrolio. There’s neither Google nor Sushi out there. Just a bunch of radioactive grapes and Mello-Roos fees.