Why NYC Private School Kids Drink Frappuccinos

Edudiva and others asked for more analysis on NYC private school attendance (prior posts here and here). Below is a map displaying the proportion of K-12 kids that go to private school by neighborhood. Thanks to my friend "soupa prof," this map makes it easier to see which NYC neighborhoods send high proportions of K-12 kids to private school. (Click on the map below to enlarge.)

NYC K-12 Private School Enrollment by Census Tract, 2000

In the map below, soupa prof also marked every Starbucks location in Manhattan with a green dot. If we adopt education policy's traditional logic - i.e., correlation equals causation - we can conclude that going to private school starts kids down the crooked path of frappuccino consumption.

Manhattan K-12 Private School Enrollment and Starbucks Locations

Or! Maybe Starbucks locate in affluent neighborhoods - as Ms. Frizzle has noted, peppermint mochas and crack are about the same price. Thanks to skoolboy, here's a graph plotting the percentage of students attending private school in a given census tract against median family income. The graph shows a remarkably strong relationship between the two; the correlation is .85.

In short, the Benjamins explain the frap addictions of our well-heeled NYC kids.