When I do tiered price analysis, I define "top tier" as a set of desirable geographical areas with low crime and good schools. But what makes good schools good?
This is a plot of API scores of 450 elementary schools in San Diego County against average education level of all parents of students in these schools. Average parent education level is defined in such a way that it would be 5 if every student in a school had at least one parent who spent any time in a graduate school; it would be 1 if no one in the school had a single parent who managed to graduate from high school.
It seems that parent education is a strong predictor of school ratings. On the other hand, school district itself has almost no say.
All numbers come from here
http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/ac/ap/apidatafiles.asp
