SACRAMENTO—School is back in session and California families struggle to make payments on homes near what they have been led to believe are "good" public schools. Some unpleasant surprises await these "house-poor" families, who spend more than 35 percent of their incomes on housing.

Their ranks have quadrupled in just one generation. Home prices for families with school-age children are also growing three times faster than other families. The problem is especially acute in the Golden State, whose cities litter the top-100 list of highest housing foreclosure rates.

Stockton leads the nation, while Riverside/San Bernardino (#4), Sacramento (#5), and Bakersfield (#8) aren’t far behind. Fresno (#14), Oakland (#19), and San Diego (#23), rank among the 25 highest foreclosure rates nationally. Ventura (#27), Los Angeles/Long Beach (#29), Orange (#45), San Jose/Sunnyvale/Santa Clara (#56), and San Francisco (#78) also make the list. With seven high-foreclosure cities each on the list, Florida, New York, and Texas are a distant second to California’s dirty dozen.

What drives many families to stretch their budgets to the breaking point is desperation to get their children into decent schools. Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren and health-care consultant Amelia Warren Tyagi co-authored the influential 2003 book The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents are Going Broke. They find that the major reason why families are willing to shell out so much of their incomes on housing is because “when a family buys a house, it buys much more than shelter from the rain. It also buys a public-school system.”

Warren and Tyagi note that, “For most middle-class parents, ensuring that their children get a decent education means buying a home in a small subset of well-reputed school districts.” “Talk with an average middle-class parent in any major metropolitan area,” they explain, “and she’ll describe the time, money, and effort she devoted to finding a slot in a decent school.”  Debra is one such parent whose travails were recently chronicled by Howard Blume and Carla Rivera of the Los Angeles Times.

Unable to secure a spot for her advanced kindergartener in their North Hollywood-area public schools, Debra devised what Blume and Rivera describe as “a desperate back-up plan: Rent out the family’s North Hollywood house and move to a Malibu trailer park to qualify for schools there.” “But the seller wants $400,000 for the trailer,” Debra explained, “and hookups are at least $2,000 more a month.”

Like many working California families who cannot afford out-of-pocket tuition on top of their other regular expenses, Debra is so desperate to find a decent, “free” public school for her child that she’s willing to mortgage a Malibu mobile home that costs more than 20 times what local private schools charge. But Debra is not alone.

Countless working California families are moving to affluent suburbs so their children can attend public schools touted as outstanding by district superintendents, real-estate agents and parents. But just how good are those schools? As a forthcoming PRI book puts it: Not as Good as You Think: Why the Middle Class Needs School Choice.

Many parents and their elected officials will be shocked to learn that there are hundreds of affluent, failing public schools statewide in areas with median home prices up to $1.6 million.

In fact, at more than one in 10 affluent California public schools – including dozens of California Distinguished Schools – a majority of students in at least one grade score below grade-level proficiency.

For too long California families have been led to believe that poor-quality schools are an inner-city problem plaguing low-income parents who cannot afford to move near supposedly superior suburban schools. Given the current housing market, middle-income families may now find themselves similarly trapped in homes they can barely afford to keep and cannot afford to sell at a loss—all for schools that fail to deliver.

The cost of foreclosures on a single city block to local agencies and nearby property owners who suffer diminished property values and home equity is an estimated $250,000. The cost of a sub-standard education is incalculable. There is a remedy for both.

Legislators should end the current monopoly system of assigned government schooling and put California parents in charge of their children’s education dollars. That would expand their educational opportunities without putting them—and the state—in the poorhouse.