I can understand why. When we first moved to our upper midwest state, the district we bought a house in was ranked like #2 in the state overall and has fallen considerably. I have watched with my own two eyes the decline in the past 20 years here. The neighboring district, which was teetering when we first moved here in 2006, fell over completely and remains fallen. That one had a cycle of failed superintendents, all of whom required a buyout to get rid of, which further impoverished that district. Our realtor, who had been a teacher in that district, slyly tried to push us into that one, but we didn't fall for it. Our daughter made it through the more acclaimed district pretty well, our son, however, got tripped up in the decline:

We ended up moving our son to yet a third district after 2nd grade. Why? Because the principal he had in his elementary school mishandled an incident where three boys of another ethnicity shoved and kicked my son to the ground. The principal, in her infinite wisdom, made my son apologize to his attackers, I guess because he is white? We didn't press the matter, why bother? The handwriting was on the wall. We put in the work to open enroll him in another district, instead. Those are the options that many more rural communities lack.

Our current district is a bit further of a drive and that makes him/us feel like he is not really a part of that community. Nonetheless, it has done well for him and I will just come right out and say it's because it is less diverse and more affluent. It is not without its problems--mainly being far too sports-centric than the district my daughter attended, and generally a bit snobby and "affluenza"-ish, but no overt violence to speak of hardly.

One time we were leaving a football game one time and happened upon a family presenting their daughter with a brand new Range Rover, complete with a bow, in the school parking lot. Puke-o-rama! Why would you do that except to show off consumption and appearance of wealth to everyone else? Luckily, not that common, but you get the picture.

The good thing is, we had options and exercised them, but I wish we hadn't needed to, because we like our community and wanted to support it and the local families nearer to us. Every choice we made to get something we also had to give up something else. I think that's the same with homeschooling, too--I don't personally think it's a good idea, but it's not up to me how someone else chooses to educate their kids and I understand about only having certain options. My son is doing very well, now in high school, but he can never make a sports team because the competition is beyond ridiculous. Even tennis he got on some low rung team because there were a couple of superstar 7th graders who filled up JV and Varsity slots! It felt like a sort-of "old boy" situation because my son is pretty decent at tennis and beat one of those younger guys every time he played him. Forget football or basketball, you have to be pretty much college material to be on those teams. Hockey, same. My daughter never cared about sports, so we weren't prepared for that battle at all.

Getting children through school and into adulthood is not for the faint of heart.