Its not about the education at the elementary level, its about the prestige of saying" my son/daughter goes to $heitdontstink Elementary"
My wife wanted to send our son to a school like that and my response was:
"Do you have any idea how far I could get on my Targa for that kind of cash". This was undoubtedly the worse response i could have come up with cause it started WWIII for a few hours

. She did how ever see the point when I told her that we would be better off waiting until he gets into high school and see if we should think of sending him to a private school then, or better yet just save the bread for college tuition. He's eight so I can imagine that college will be at least a billion dollars a year by then.