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Families in California and across the country are struggling to pay for homes near what they think are “good” public schools. Many of these “house-poor” families, who spend more than 35 percent of their incomes on housing, are getting a lot less than they bargained for.

Their ranks have quadrupled in just one generation, and 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. With seven high-foreclosure cities each on the list, Florida, New York, and Texas are a distant second to California’s dirty dozen, which includes top-ranked Stockton, Sacramento (#5), San Diego (#23), Los Angeles/Long Beach (#29), Orange (#45), and San Francisco (#78).

What drives many families to stretch their budgets to the breaking point is desperation to get their children into decent schools. Authors of The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents are Going Broke Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi explain that “when a family buys a house, it buys much more than shelter from the rain. It also buys a public-school system.”

Countless California families are moving to affluent suburbs so their children can attend public schools touted as outstanding by district superintendents, real-estate agents, local and state departments of education. But just how good are those schools? As a new 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, underperforming public schools throughout the Golden State in areas with median home prices exceeding $1 million.

In fact, at more than one in 10 affluent California public schools, a majority of students in at least one grade score below proficiency in English or math. These are schools where less than one third of students are poor, socioeconomically disadvantaged, and few students are English language learners or have disabilities. Most parents have an advanced education, and the overwhelming majority of teachers are certified.

Editorializing on the book, The Wall Street Journal explains, “Many of these schools were located in the Golden State’s toniest zip codes, places like Orange County, Silicon Valley and the beach communities of Los Angeles. In areas such as Newport Beach, Capistrano and Huntington Beach, where million-dollar houses are commonplace, researchers found more than a dozen schools where 50 to 80 percent of students weren’t proficient in math at their grade level. In one Silicon Valley community where the median home goes for $1.6 million, less than half of 10th and 11th graders scored at or above proficiency on the state English exam.”

But California isn’t alone. Nationwide, six out of 10 public school fourth and eighth graders who are not poor score below proficiency in math and reading.

For too long families in California and across the country 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 public schooling and put all parents – regardless of income or address -in charge of their children’s education dollars. “In reality,” says the Wall Street Journal, “[middle-income] families would benefit from vouchers, tuition tax credits, charter schools and other educational options as surely as the inner-city single mom.”

Such programs would expand educational opportunities without putting parents – and states – in the poorhouse.

Vicki E. Murray, Ph.D., is Education Studies Senior Policy Fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in Sacramento, and co-author with Lance T. Izumi and Rachel S. Chaney of Not as Good as You Think: Why the Middle Class Needs School Choice.