Wealthy, Foreign-Born and Happy With Public Schools February 15, 2012, 1:25 pm For relatively affluent, foreign-born New Yorkers, public school is part of the city experience. "There are roughly 15,500 households in the city with school-age children where the total income is at least $150,000 and both parents were born abroad," writes Kirk Semple in The Times today. "Of those, about 10,500, or 68 percent, use only the public schools" - nearly double the number of native-born parents in the same income bracket. The statistic only holds true in major urban areas like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. In the United States overall, there's no difference between both groups in this regard. Foreign-born parents (both immigrant and temporarily in residence) had a variety of explanations for why they'd made the public school choice for their children. Some said they were more open to the public school idea than American parents (and less demanding of amenities); others, that public schools were closer to "real life" with greater ethnic and economic diversity, a quality that they might value more than a native-born family. But no single parent's reasoning can explain the entire anomaly: same income, same opportunity to choose housing with school quality in mind, same access to public magnet schools, same available but expensive alternatives - but very different choices, hundreds of times over.