I went to an elementary school in Michigan that was 60% free and reduced lunch, no art class (music starting in 3rd grade), half an hour of recess per day, rooms that felt cramped when I went back to visit them as a teenager. I went to a middle school that had slit-like windows, indicating that it had been built (or, for some parts, renovated) in the 1970s. Some of these things may not matter to your child, as they more or less didn’t matter for me.
What made my public school district work for me was that I could find ~4 friends in it, that they made liberal use of tracking and partial-day advanced programs to help meet my needs, and that they fed me and kept me from dying of exposure while I read books. More or less full stop. My point is that things that seem important (particularly facilities) might not be, and that looking at my schools in terms of averages would have been misleading when I ended up in a rather specialized pocket of it.
Oh, and (more unsolicited opinion) going to social justice school probably won’t hurt your kid. How much propaganda do you remember from 2nd grade?
I went to an elementary school in Michigan that was 60% free and reduced lunch, no art class (music starting in 3rd grade), half an hour of recess per day, rooms that felt cramped when I went back to visit them as a teenager. I went to a middle school that had slit-like windows, indicating that it had been built (or, for some parts, renovated) in the 1970s. Some of these things may not matter to your child, as they more or less didn’t matter for me.
What made my public school district work for me was that I could find ~4 friends in it, that they made liberal use of tracking and partial-day advanced programs to help meet my needs, and that they fed me and kept me from dying of exposure while I read books. More or less full stop. My point is that things that seem important (particularly facilities) might not be, and that looking at my schools in terms of averages would have been misleading when I ended up in a rather specialized pocket of it.
Oh, and (more unsolicited opinion) going to social justice school probably won’t hurt your kid. How much propaganda do you remember from 2nd grade?