They aren't my insights - they're from the book Elizabeth Warren wrote with her daughter back when she was just a researcher at Harvard. Well, that and what I know about real property (I moderate /r/realestate, so even if I knew nothing I'd pick up a little through sheer osmosis). As to the question, a fairer depiction of the problem minus the idiosyncratic framing mechanisms is property values and school performance are positively correlated. In fact, if you google "correlation between schools and property value" you'll turn up a shit-ton of PDFS of scholarly papers on the problem, most of them from the Federal Reserve. For the record, I'm not an expert on this - but the experts seem to be mostly arguing about whether the relationship is linear or not. To answer your question more thoroughly, we'd need a survey of school districts in decline and then compare their property values over time. That's more googling and graphing than I care to engage in at the moment.