According to most predictions, the recent downturn in the housing market is only going to get worse before it gets better. In July, housing starts — the number of privately owned homes on which construction has begun — fell to the lowest levels in a decade. The subprime mortgage crisis continues to worsen, making credit harder to come by for many people. Mortgage defaults are rising while house prices are falling.

For many families, this just adds pressure to an already delicate economic situation. Amelia Tyagi and Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren exposed the precarious economics of many middle class families in their 2003 book, The Two Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke. They demonstrate that families with children are almost three times more likely to go bankrupt than those without kids. They also show that though the average two-income family today earns 75 percent more income (adjusted for inflation) than a one-income family of earlier generations, these same families enjoy less discretionary income. They predict that by 2010 one in seven middle-class families will go bankrupt.

Rather than pointing to extravagant expenditures on luxury items like TV or restaurants, Tyagi and Warren blame a decline in public education. As fewer and fewer public schools offer good education options, housing prices in “good” school districts skyrocket. Middle-class parents overextend themselves financially to buy houses in these districts. These families go into debt to provide their children with a good education.

In an interview with Tyagi, Warren explained, “So much of the housing trap has to do with families struggling to buy a home in one of those few school districts that has held on to a strong reputation. Zip codes have become the invisible fence around the educational haves and have nots."

While The Two Income Trap reveals a distressing problem with convincing research, the picture for these middle class families is actually even worse than the one they depict. For the fact is, the very school districts in these high priced areas that are causing families to go into debt may not be as good as everyone thinks.

In a forthcoming book issued by the Pacific Research Institute, Lance Izumi, Vicki Murray, and I examine middle class public schools in California. The findings are shocking. For example, we identified 284 schools that have both relatively affluent student populations as well as horrendous tests scores. These schools had less than one third of their students on a free or reduced school lunch program and less than one third with socio-economically disadvantaged students. Yet fewer than fifty percent of the students in these 284 schools scored proficient on the California Standards Test in one or more subject areas and grades.

In other words, these middle-class students are not proficient in basic math and English according to state standards. In some cases, these schools fall in districts with median home values of between 700 thousand and one million dollars — the very expensive districts Warren and Tyagi write about in their book. If families are going into debt for their children’s education, they should at least be comforted to know that their local public schools in these expensive areas are good. The unfortunate truth is that no such comfort can be had. The forthcoming book will show, unequivocally, just how bad many public schools are.

The book, coupled with the earlier study by Warren and Tyagi, call for middle-class support of school choice. Only when parents, middle-class or otherwise, can vote with their feet and pull their children out of underperforming schools will the public education system really be accountable to the people it claims to serve — the students. Parents, lawmakers, and concerned citizens should take the message to heart. It’s time for parents to have a choice about their children’s futures.