<p>And if the kids are imbued with the right attitude, the kids can learn anywhere, as the education truly is there if you want it. Parents wanted to send me to private HS but I wanted to go to public inner city one with my firends. I won. My education was terrific! I told them that I would learn no matter where I went, and that they should set a side the money for college, and they did. In fact, a lot of my freshman year in college was review! I took advantage of everything my teachers and the school offered and was actually better prepared than many of the kids in my college. The teachers were thrilled to have a student who cared and wanted to learn and bent over backwards for me. BTW, we were apartment dwellers, parents immigrants, and didn't buy a house until I was a jr. in HS, so the affluence of my parents didn't play into it at all, other than their pushing me to do well in school to do better than they did. And BTW, there are districts in the south that have placed tons of kids into the ivies and elites, because they have as good a rep as the northern and northeastern schools. As an aside, I have been in a district where schools (both HS and jr. H have won Blue Ribbon ratings.) We privately state that it is the deathknell for the school. A lot of people move in once they find the winning school, into apartments, and the schools' test scores, etc., go down, and discipline problems go up. A couple years later, when the new designations come out, they move again. Obviously, these people think that the schools will take care of it all. They need to realize that it is the attitude at home that reflects how their children will succeed moreso than the school. This study confirms that.</p>