Sigh

I just spent the afternoon cross-referencing school reports with MLS listings on Realtor.com that match our criteria for a home. We are so spoiled here in Cache Valley. For all its failings, Cache District is actually a very good district, especially in contrast with Granite district and, even worse, Salt Lake district. I'm looking at some of these UPASS results and I'm just shocked. Some of these schools have fewer than half of their students in every subject demonstrating mastery. One has to wonder what they do there all day long, because they're obviously not educating the majority of their students. Even at my mom's elementary school (which is being run into the ground from mismanagement), they can break the 50% mark on the UPASS! I realize that there are many factors that play into UPASS scores (some of which I commented on below in the post about the charter school's UPASS scores) but even the charter school wasn't that low. If a bunch of inexperienced people with low morale who don't know what they're doing can do that much better than an established school district, something is rotten in Denmark.

I'm compiling a list of halfway-decent schools in areas with cheap houses. It's a rather short list, I'm afraid. I did find one house that I'd really like to take a look at; it has a workshop, garage, covered parking, and pretty much everything else we'd like in a home. But with my luck, it'll be really crappy and out of our price range (it's at the high end of our estimated price range; we don't have financing yet), or it'll be really nice but someone will have bought it by the time we can get down there.

If we can't find a home we can afford near a school that we like, I guess we could always homeschool. It's not an option I'd look forward to, but I'd sure like it better than sending my kids to a school whose idea of education is making sure a whopping 30% of their students master their math and language arts.