A decent number. But most middle class folks (or those outside upper middle class at least) don't send multiple kids to $44,000/student/year schools, let alone one kid.
In places where housing was affordable, especially ten years ago, no... you wouldn't necessarily have wanted to enroll your kids in the public school where you lived.
I was in SF when my child was young, but as soon as we started digging into the school enrollment processes, I moved to Lafayette and enrolled him there.
Lafayette was more expensive than Union City, but a better place to live and school, but perhaps not a place where a house could be as affordable.
That said, none of it would compare with a 32 acre farm near Vancouver, IMHO...
Some people consider their children their first priority. Why the US education system is failing above average children is a different argument. I send both my kids to private school and consider it a necessity.
You don't know what school your kid is going to end up in, because of the lottery system. You might have your kindergartner going to school across the city.
This is foreign to me, can you explain it a bit more? Where I live, we have school districts, and inside those districts are boundaries for various schools. You know well before you even buy/rent your home what school boundary that home belongs to.
Sf has a lottery system to avoid all the rich kids at one school, and all the poor kids at another. It’s well motivated but totally impractical from get-kids-to-school-before-work perspective.
Different school districts weight the location of a child's home differently when choosing which school the child should go to. In most districts location is the highest factor. In other places it's a moderate or low factor.