https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...burb-snags-richest-spot-in-u-s-for-third-year
-0- in Pennsylvania...
-0- in Pennsylvania...
OT: Wealthiest towns in the US
- Thread starter Frabjous
- Start date
I have to laugh at the statement of them moving there because of the great school systems. Is the school system so great that the rich people want to move there or is the school system great because the rich people live there?
A
anon_1eeb2b426hv3y
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Ding ding ding.
rhetorical question alert!
But what parent (with a choice) doesn’t consider moving to great schools?
According to the article, a minimum of 2,000 households is needed to qualify. Alpine is probably below that amount.
Very good.We live in pretty prosperous place, and it used to drive me nuts when the teachers and adminstrators took credit for the academic quality of the student body. The kids innate intelligence, competitive nature, and parental interest is why they achieve. Yes, some teachers have a positive influence, but in my experience, just as many add nothing other than a pension burden for me. see how home schooled kids do on average.
Conversely, it’s just as stupid to blame teachers when schools are terrible in terrible areas.
Great students + great parents = great schools.
Just like it is stupid to think more money for the teachers in terrible areas will improve the schools. DC has some of the highest funded schools in the country and they have horrible public schools. Masterman, Bartram, Audenreid all have the same funding but different results.
The number one attribute that makes a good school system is the involvement of the parents. If parents are involved their children typically do well. Money certainly helps parents to be involved in their children's education by allowing for more free time, but lack of money is not an excuse for parents to not be involved.
My message; if a school system sucks it's the parents fault, not the school systems. Without the parents involvement, no amount of money will improve conditions.
I don't know, but I have a feeling they're going to gang up on their new elite neighbor.
Ive seen Galdwyne listed in the top 10 wealthiest zip codes before .... maybe its not in here because i believe its technically a borough of Lower Merion..?!
EDIT:
Bloomberg has it listed #6 on the list for zip codes
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...a-s-richest-zip-code-first-you-ll-need-a-boat
EDIT:
Bloomberg has it listed #6 on the list for zip codes
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...a-s-richest-zip-code-first-you-ll-need-a-boat
Peyton did it (without John) in that one great SNL bit. Just tossed the ball around with the neighborhood kids!
Lack of money translates into lack of time.
If the school system sucks, it is because we allow rich kids to have rich public schools and poor kids to have poor public schools. If America wants a meritocracy, you have to give every child the same opportunity. Whether they were born rich or poor.
Giving every child the same opportunity is a nice thought, but realistically, it will never happen.
I get a good laugh from these articles. I live in "no-where-Iowa" and I would not even want to guess what the average income is, however, people live good and comfortable lives on their income. In the recent article on AMAZON (NYC office/plant), the average salary would have been $150.000.00!!! Yet it seems most goes to the high cost of living and taxes (I hear that some people in New Jersey pay 20 - 30,000.00 in property taxes per year compared to my $680.00/ year). I will not even go into the state taxes. Income is relative to where you live. Just my thoughts.
Of course it does, but it's NOT an excuse for parents ignoring/not being involved with their children's education. You must have missed my main point which is: Parents make a school district, NOT money.
You sound like one of those parents that thinks the school should have made your child do their homework and checked that it was complete. Perhaps the school needed to discipline your child better so that the rest of the class could be taught that days lesson? Maybe the school is at fault for not having enough books because your child didn't return their book in usable condition?
It's the parents that make a school. Some parents have enough money to pay others to parent their children. Most people don't have that option so they have to do it themselves.
Happy to see both West U and Bellaire, TX listed. Just confirms that I'll need to wait a few more years to move inside the loop in Houston. Rumson was a bit of a surprise. My wife's on Ocean Township native. Her family should have kept the house.
Funny how people cant seem to grasp the differences in housing, taxes, etc and salary for different areas of the country. When I got out of school I worked for Cutler Hammer at RIDC park West in Moon Twp. Pay was almost 40K to start then and I was living in Washington Co PA where cost of living was low. One of my classmates was from NJ and took a job in NYC, he started off at a little over 50K but the cost of living was so high that his parking fees per month were basically my mortgage payment.
When he would come down this way to hang out with all of us from school he couldnt believe we could afford a mortgage payment, car payment, etc until he saw the bar tabs being about 50% of what he paid in NYC.
Yes and no. If that company picks up and moves what are your alternatives? If his company moves or lays him off he has hundreds of other opportunities. Also analysts at my firm, right out of undergrad, make $110k as their base. Good luck finding that in rural anywhere.
What is the upside assuming the company stays? Or, what does the highest 1/4 or workers in Moon Twp et al make per year? There’s a reason these areas are the wealthiest, and the relative high barrier of entry isn’t really a factor, neither in surveys like this nor in relative demand for the jobs themselves.
I had a great upbringing in rural PA. It can be done though I think it gets harder every year. But health care and cars and vacations and those retirement homes in Florida cost the same whether you worked in San Francisco or California, PA, so many (obviously based on this list) people choose to go to areas where the longer term opportunity is much higher.
Growing up - I attended elementary school in a lower income area. I moved in Jr. high to a better district (mom got remarried). Honestly the work wasn't much different. The biggest difference was in my friends parents involvement (mine were always involved). It went from about 10-20% of parents involved to ~80-90% involved. I stayed in contact with some friends from the old school.
Here is what I found - the kids whose parents were involved did well and went on to good colleges and had varying states of success. The majority have a good job and do well. Those whose parents weren't involved fared far worse. This is across both schools.
Where I live now (my city is on the list in the top 25) is a very good example of this point - that parental involvement is a very important factor.
The local HS includes Ladue and a couple other suburbs of St. Louis. The other suburbs who attend the HS are lower income. 90+% of the graduates attend a 4 year university upon completion. The majority of the students WHO DO NOT are from the lower income suburb.
So you have students who attend essentially the same schools from K-12 (I say essentially because there are multiple elementary). Get the same education (curriculum is the same) from the same quality teachers (teachers salaries are the same across the elementary schools) - yet the outcomes are different.
I realize that each student is different - but when it is consistent that the lower income community doesn't perform as well - it is convincing that it isn't just the schools.
Family is the most important factor for student success. Consider that parents with better incomes can typically spend more time with kids - which helps. Consider that parents with better incomes provide better examples for what hard work can do. Consider that parents with better incomes typically expect their kids to succeed and do well (the old adage is you should earn more than your parents). Consider that parents with better jobs typically hang around other successful parents - and it creates a peer group that further enriches and drives the students.
The problems plaguing schools from lower income areas aren't academic. It is more systematic. Parenting who (in many cases) don't prioritize school. Peer pressure against school. Drugs. Crime.
I have a niece working for a charter school in center city Phila and she would agree with everything you have said.
There is a program in DC which places high performing teachers in low performing schools. These teachers were paid an incentive to go into the poorest areas and worst schools to teach. The program had positive results on the students in the worst schools. It was a scientific study using random assignment, much like a drug trial with a treatment group and a control group to test the results.
It’s reasonable to assume that the best teachers do a better job of educating students than the other teachers, no matter which schools they teach in.
It’s reasonable to assume that the best teachers do a better job of educating students than the other teachers, no matter which schools they teach in.
I agree to a point. At the lower schools where those teachers who made a difference, they probably replaced the teachers who were apathetic to the cause and basically were 9 to 5 ers as they say. Those 'high performing teachers' probably spent much more of their time with the kids, and more time differentiating the lessons.
I've also seen a school in a county near DC where those 'high performing teachers' came in and were put in charge or curriculum and made team leaders and such but the scores remained the same and in a couple classes they went down for the same reason. Those students did not form quality relationships with those new 'highly effective' teachers.
Its more about the relationships than how the instructor goes about teaching the material at many of those lower achieving schools because there is little parental involvement.
It is also reasonable to assume that the best parents do a better job too. Why do liberals ignore all the factors they can control? Parenting,
TWO PARENTS THAT GIVE A CHIT Privilege, work ethic, study habits and so on.
You can't redistribute good parents. Education starts at home. The career poor's main disadvantage is bad parenting. There are plenty of rich people who started out poor. Immigrants are building tech companies and our lower class is building Big Macs.
2 parents > 1 parent > 0 parents. Two parents translates into more money and more time.
I live in a town in the top 10 on this list. Two parents, a stay at home mom, good after school activities, dinner and a warm bed every night. Great education, plenty of kids heading to great universities....like PSU for my kids.
Yet, we have heroin issues and assinine vandalism. It's mind boggling
I hear TheCoolestFish has been training them in the 40 yard dash so they can compete in the new league.
The flaw with your point is many of the bad schools used to be great schools. In the 50s when people marched and protested they did not march for access to bad schools. They were given access to great schools. They destroyed those schools. The middle and upper class then moved to cornfields in the burbs and started from scratch.
I have a suggestion. YOU come up with ANY system in the world you want to copy. We will copy it if you agree to eliminate welfare on the back end. You in or do you expect your system to fail? PS. The USA is already top in funding.
Yes, things were so much better before MLK and all those other complainers when schools were nice and segregated.
And no the US is not "tops in funding". Check your facts clown (and they are not up your rear end where you get them and your opinions from).
You nailed it...the quality of a school is defined by the student body it serves...as my wife (who was a school teacher for 35 years) has always said. That's why throwing money at "failing" school systems doesn't work...see Baltimore, the now-scuttled Kansas City experiment, etc.
What counts most is parental and community example. If parents read and show they value education it sets the tone. But "parental involvement" is a cop-out that bad schools and teachers use as an excuse. A trend in education is to pass off the work that was previously done by teachers to parents. This manifests itself in more homework requiring parental assistance, greater use of computers to stand in for teachers and extra costs charged for educational aids that do not require teachers. When I was a kid parents had almost zero "involvement", less homework and no-cost "extras". I doubt the education was any worse.
The results were better back in the day. In Philly many schools are MORE segregated today than they were in the 50s. I guess those liberal plans did not workout too well. Germantown HS was under 10% black in the 30s. IN the 50s it was probably 20%. IN 2000 it was 100%. They eventually closed the HS which was one of the best high schools in the city back in the day. Progress.
The USA is near the top in funding. It changes every year. Some years we are #1. Other years it is Finland and the USA is #2. Pretty amazing that the USA is up there considering only 53% pay income taxes.
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