"We have never had the numbers that we have," said Elizabeth Phillips, the principal at Public School 321 in Park Slope for 13 years. "But we've never had so many affluent foreign families in the neighborhood, either."
A similar divergence exists in other major cities, the census data show. For example, in Los Angeles and Chicago, roughly 60 percent of foreign-born couples with at least $150,000 in household income send their children only to public schools, a rate far higher than that of native-born parents.
In the United States over all, there is almost no difference between the two groups, apparently because wealthy people outside of urban areas are much more likely to show allegiance to the public schools. Nationally, 73 percent of native-born couples and 76 percent of foreign-born couples send their children only to public school, according to the data, which was analyzed by Andrew A. Beveridge and Susan Weber-Stoger, demographers at Queens College.
I thought this was an useful factoid to put somewhere in the public school reframing project.
CG