It's not that the schools are shit. They all have issues. Some get much better funding than others - clearly, but they're all leagues better than what you'd get

It's not that the schools are shit. They all have issues. Some get much better funding than others - clearly, but they're all leagues better than what you'd get in many rural parts of America. The issue is that the kids going to the "poor" schools are poor. Their home life is shit because they're frequently sharing a two bedroom apartment with another family. They're dealing with parents who are unable to afford a better housing situation (not just renting a house - but they can't even afford to rent a place without another family being in it - lots of multigenerational housing happening too, which has pro/con) and who frequently have to work much more than some dual income FAANG tech couple - and they have a much worse quality of life. The parents aren't very involved because they just have other priorities. This leads to the kids randomly dropping out middle of the year. Every year, the kids I know who went to Santa Clara schools ended up with their class sizes shrinking throughout the year because kids would just disappear middle of the year. That has the pros of less kids per classroom as the schoolyear goes on but it has downsides like... well, you can't make any long term friendships! On top of that, if you are in a family that is doing well - you're gonna be unrelatable to the other kids. And it goes true with the parents too. One of the reasons my friends have put their kids in private schools is because their kids are around people like themselves, the parents operate under a collective agreement (they are all too involved in their parenting style), and there's just a commonality in background. At the public school, kids of all backgrounds could be interfacing and it just didn't give much social cohesion. Everyone had different goals. Some kids/parents wanted to just get to the next grade along with some babysitting - others wanted much more. Public school mostly is for handling the first people.